Billy Corgan's opinion of himself and Smashing Pumpkins has rarely been anything less than stellar, and during his appearance on The Howard Stern Show this morning (Dec. 9), he made it very obvious how much better he thinks the Pumpkins are than their '90s alt-rock peers. Expanding upon his recent statements that he and Kurt Cobain were their generation's "top two scribes," Corgan dissed the songwriting of two rock titans: Pearl Jam and Foo Fighters.
"I don't think [Pearl Jam] have the songs," Corgan tells Stern when comparing the Pumpkins to other bands from the '90s alt-rock boom. "If you stack my songs up Cobain's songs up and that band's songs up, they don't have the songs. They're a great band, still an arena act, they've gotten it done for a long time and I have to bow to that."
When Stern, who agrees with Corgan about Pearl Jam, asks how they've remained such a successful arena act without quality songwriting, Corgan admits that it's "a mystery" to him.
Later on in the interview, Corgan moves on to criticizing the Foo Fighters, and though he thinks that Dave Grohl is "a great songwriter" who has "done the work," he doesn't believe that the band has evolved enough over the past 20 years. "My criticism of the Foo Fighters, if I'm being a music critic, is that they just haven't evolved," Corgan says, "that's sort of the recent wrap on them...making the same music." However, Corgan does own up to the fact that the Foo Fighters have become more successful than the Smashing Pumpkins, and that his mentality of "making different music" and "evolving" is "not for everybody."
You can listen to Howard Stern's entire interview with Billy Corgan right here:
The latest Smashing Pumpkins album Monuments to an Elegy was released today, Dec. 9.
Do you think Billy Corgan is right about Pearl Jam and Foo Fighters? Let us know down in the comments section!
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