BILLY CORGAN To Potential Rock Stars: Forget It

According to The Pulse Of Radio, SMASHING PUMPKINS founder and frontman Billy Corgan has a message for young musicians who want to be the next Trent Reznor or Kurt Cobain: forget about it. Corgan told the Daily Beast that most alternative acts will never escape that scene because influential sites like Pitchfork.com set the rules. He explained, "If you're 20 years old and you aspire to be like me or Kurt Cobain or Courtney Love or Trent Reznor, you're not going to make it that way. You won't succeed. Let's say you're the next Kurt Cobain. You will be appropriated on your first album by the Pitchfork community. Your record company will rally round that idea because that's your marketing platform. But the minute you're in that world you're frozen."

Corgan continued, "Those Pitchfork people are very much about social codes, about whether you're wearing the right t-shirt. That orthodoxy is no different than the rigidity of the football team at school. You can't break the social order if you're preaching to the choir — and the choir already has cool haircuts!"

The PUMPKINS mainman added, "You've got to want to subvert the social order of the high school. That's why NIRVANA was so fucking dangerous. They had the jocks listening to them. Kurt Cobain used to talk about how weird it was to be performing, and see the people who used to beat him up cheering along."

Corgan concluded by asking, "Where's the rebellion right now? There's almost no music about what's going on politically, which is crazy because this is the craziest political time I've ever lived in . . . Where are the bands of dissent?"

Corgan and the PUMPKINS released their seventh studio album, "Oceania", in June. It debuted at No. 4 on the Billboard album chart, selling 54,000 copies in its first week of release.

The PUMPKINS have yet to announce tour plans behind the new disc, although they are expected to tour the U.S. this fall.