Success Quote by Billy Corgan

Billy Corgan is doing that very Corgan thing: complaining with a straight face while smuggling in a victory lap. The line reads like modesty, but it’s really a provocation aimed at the machinery that decides who gets taken seriously. He’s not saying critics ignored him; he’s saying they didn’t know what to do with him. Massive sales, arena tours, an era-defining band - and yet, in his telling, not the kind of sustained, serious engagement that gets reserved for artists stamped as “important” rather than merely popular.

The “pretty fascinating” tag is the tell. It’s faux-detached, a shrug that dares you to argue. Underneath is a grievance about cultural gatekeeping: alternative rock’s 90s boom minted stars quickly, and criticism often treated their work as youth culture product, not as art worthy of ongoing interpretation. Corgan also knows his own reputation complicates the record. His ambition, melodrama, and public combative streak have long made him an easy punchline, and punchlines don’t get footnotes.

Context matters: rock criticism has its orthodoxies. Certain bands get canonized as tastemakers; others get framed as bloated, corny, or “too much.” Corgan is pointing at that split, insisting that success should have forced closer reading and wondering why it didn’t. It’s less a request for praise than a demand for confrontation: if the work mattered enough to move millions, why hasn’t anyone argued with it at full volume?