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Billy Corgan is falling out of love with guitar solos and social media is to blame – or, at least, the Smashing Pumpkins frontman believes that the ubiquitous spectacle of virtuoso playing on social media platforms has devalued the traditional guitar solo.
In a recent interview with Guitar World, Corgan argues that no one is impressed by technicality anymore, and it has made him rethink his entire approach to lead guitar. Catch the Smashing Pumpkins in concert and you might only see him play a couple of solos – and he is going to keep them brief.
“If you’re going to play a lead in an alternative rock band in 2025, what are you trying to say? No-one’s going to care that you can play good, because there’s 50 10-year-olds playing Eruption on YouTube,” he says. “There’s nothing actually that impressive about somebody being able to play the guitar at a decently high level anymore, so I think it’s the expressive quality that makes it interesting. So I’m more interested in creating a feeling than showing off.”
No matter how you slice it, “showing off” is incentivised by social media, and the phenomenon is hardly restricted to playing guitar – even making a sandwich has become a spectator sport for hungry algorithms craving our attention.
The effect it has had on guitar playing is remarkable. And, of course, it cannot just be social media’s incentives that are behind this rising tide of virtuosity. The great efflorescence of online learning resources means that it has never been easier to pick up an electric guitar learn how to shred, or to specialise in classical guitar. The answers to our every question lie just a lick away.
I don’t see a lot of that great playing converting into popular music, whether it’s in popular metal bands or popular alternative rock bands
Add this to the incentives baked into the social media platform and you have an eco-system in which the gamification of guitar playing can thrive. Corgan gets it. He sees today’s cohort of players can play. But what he wants to see is more of them in bands, making music, because that is the point of playing guitar in the first place.
“I don’t see a lot of that great playing converting into popular music, whether it’s in popular metal bands or popular alternative rock bands,” Corgan says. “I want to see them making the Metallica songs of tomorrow or Megadeth or Slayer or something. I want to see that convert into music. I would wish for that crew of guitar players to convert those incredible abilities into the popular culture.”
In other words, Corgan wants the social media guitarists to step out into the real world, make some music, and reach a wider audience.
“It’s like if Clapton had just been a guitar influencer and hadn’t been in John Mayall and Cream and Derek and the Dominos,” he explains. “The reason everybody knows Eric Clapton’s name is not because he’s a great guitar player. It’s because he made some of the most popular music of the 20th century.”
And the great guitar playing was just part of the package. There are other dynamics at play. A counterfactual that sees Clapton born in 2003 and become an early adopter of TikTok and Instagram, playing for the edification of an online audience only goes so far.
Under such conditions it would have been unlikely that he would have immersed himself in blues guitar and become one of the architects of what we might call classic rock. But we see his point.
As for Corgan’s solos, he says it is the “kineticism of a lead” is what gets him excited, not the notes he’s playing. But maybe it was forever thus. Corgan can rip with the best of them but some of his best leads – on record at least – came from the manipulation of sound, like on Siamese Dream, when he made his Clapton signature Stratocaster sound like sounded like time and space had been ruptured during Cherub Rock.
Speaking to MusicRadar about recording the Smashing Pumpkins, Butch Vig revealed how they nailed the tone.
“We found a secret weapon on that record,” he said. “A little preamp in a pedal steel guitar. It wasn’t built for a loud guitar. It was built for a low output on a pedal steel, so it had this super high-end white noise gain that gave the guitar this sonic jet sound.”
Some old-school tape flanging applied the coupe de grâce. Maybe what Corgan told us back then rings true today with what he is saying about guitar solos. He said he never wanted to repeat himself, to be comfortable. It would be easier to cut loose onstage, to solo as he has done.
“I’m a person who tends not to repeat technique, which I guess is kind of suicidal in a way,” Corgan told MusicRadar. “Most people look at a recording career as a series of conclusions. I’ve always treated my recording career more like a journey. I think when an artist gets into a comfortable set of choices, that’s where the death of creativity lies.”
But maybe what Billy Corgan is saying with all of this is that the guitar solo, as traditionally composed, as it is now rehearsed and perfected then performed on social media – always on, always available in our pockets, with engagement metrics the currency of a solo’s ‘success’ – is taking us away from more musical moments, moments such as this…
…Moments that move popular culture at large, and not just guitar culture.
