Although these days Smashing Pumpkins music is regarded as a genre unto itself, Billy Corgan recalled a time when the music world struggled to figure out where his songs fit. During an online chat with Rick Beato, Corgan remembered, “At the time when (Gish) came out in 1991, all the reviews were (saying we sounded) like throwback psych, hippie crap, jam band, Grateful Dead. I think it was so not what people thought music would be that they just grasped at comparisons. I mean, there’s reviews that were like, ‘They sound like a cross between R.E.M., the Black Crowes, and Jimi Hendrix’ — it didn’t even make sense. Like, the DNA splices they would put together to try to describe our music was so off.”
He went on to say, “There was also the whole thing of playing solos, which was verboten in alternative circles at the time, you weren’t supposed to play solos. And if you even think of Kurt (Cobain) on Nirvana (songs), he would play ironic solos, but they weren’t real guitar solos. . . (Soundgarden’s) Kim Thayil would play solos, but they weren’t solos played by people who were necessarily trying to play like Richie Blackmore. I was trying to play Ritchie Blackmore. My father was a guitar player, so I came from that route of, like, if you’re gonna play a solo, you better play a good solo.”
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