Billy Corgan Quotes

As far as the grunge thing, there are three bands from Seattle that I would call true grunge.

When we came out, the kind of music that was popular was Nirvana, Soundgarden and Alice In Chains, all that stuff. That was when we released our second album, 'Images And Words', and it was something people werent used to hearing maybe, and it sort of rose above all that somehow, being progressive, or whatever.

People misinterpret my emotions towards Nirvana because I've said things about how something happened with grunge that took a little bit of fun out of things. It's no offense to Nirvana; they were one of the greats, obviously. But something died there, too, and we haven't quite gotten the groove back.

When 5150 came out rock was king. Post Nirvana and Pearl Jam 1996 is a different story.

I never understood bands saying Nirvana had anything to do with derailing their career. Maybe those bands didn't have the goods.

This is my own little rock theory: In my mind, Nirvana slayed the hair bands. They shot the top off the poodles.

The Seattle explosion was what saved rock from becoming too pompous! A great moment in music!

It was shocking to see Nirvana play, because it was like, "Here's this little guy with a monster-guitar sound." And it was heavier than Black Sabbath. That was shocking.

There hasn't been anything real since grunge. That was the last movement led by music or an art form.

I saw Frances Bean at a Blink 182 show. And she was with a guy who looked just like Kurt Cobain.

I'm too young to have experienced firsthand the '70s rock, but when I was in high school, me and my friends were super into Neil Young. That was the grunge era, and he was considered cool again.

When Soundgarden formed, we were post-punk - pretty quirky.

Of all the grunge bands to come out of Seattle, Alice in Chains were the greatest.

I thought the grunge scene was cool. This is going to sound weird, but I remember doing a concert at a tavern in the mid-'80s with Nirvana.

I didn't hate Nirvana. That was more of a media-constructed this-versus-that thing.

The grunge thing was a little bit atrocious. 'Let's all put on plaid shirts and be as dirty as possible!'

I used to think of 'alternative rock' as a radio format, kind of the way 'indie rock' used to have more meaning. But it means different things depending on where you are or what country you're in.

Thanks to the arrival of such spirited and purposeful groups as X, the Blasters, R.E.M., and the Replacements, American rock has made a spectacular comeback.

I was born in '76, but I didn't get into rock until the early '90s when the grunge stuff started coming out.

Nirvana was a band that led you somewhere, as opposed to all the grunge bands that began and ended with themselves.

Unlike a lot of my cohorts from the '80s and '90s who totally blamed the shortness of their careers on bands like Nirvana and Alice in Chains and Soundgarden and whatever, I was very into a lot of those bands.

I love all the '90s kind of grunge, and I love classic rock: That's where the spectrum lies.

I wouldn't say rock & roll is dead but the current music made by young people isn't really rock & roll.

The most important part of any rock song is the guitar solo.

I'm pretty optimistic about the future of rock... it will be back to composition as in classical music or jazz.