Billy Corgan Breaks-down the Music Industry - Joe Rogan

Hello freak bitches. So you're working with Rick Rubin now. Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah, Rick's fantastic. What is that like though for you being like a guy who's kind of like you kind of controlled everything before, right? Yeah, totally. So what is it like for you to have Rubin in the mix and yeah, well Rick's a friend So for me it was like I was sort of at a low point and he kind of picked me up when I was down So it was like I didn't mind sort of trusting him with like the head part of it all. Mm-hmm Kind of like you deal with that part I'm just gonna sort of be up the performer and the weird guy in the corner and it give you relief. Oh, yeah Yeah, I felt like it allowed me to focus on the music and the performance and sort of just freed me to just You know let whatever because sometimes you can psych yourself out. I don't have to make any sense Like yeah, you can have a really good song You know, it's a good song and then you start second-guessing yourself and they start thinking well Maybe this song is not good enough or anything and then that'll that'll infiltrate into your performance as opposed to being free like hey I've just got a good song and if that one doesn't work I've got another good song So letting Rick kind of do the picking and choosing and that's a good take and that's a good song It was just like okay I'm just gonna kind of just go down this road it took me back to sort of a more innocent way of approaching the work And I'm very grateful to him for that. That's awesome. Yeah, it's gonna be quite a mindfuck to create something and then Practice it and rehearse it over and over again and tweak it and mess with it and not know Really like not not almost not be able to be objective anymore Yeah well, the weird thing is is I hope people can appreciate how I mean it is like At one point when I my ear was really to the ground. I was able to do that I was both bailey objective and subjective be the writer and be the producer right and I hit a lot of home runs So then you get kind of like I know what I'm doing right so then when it stops working You Have two choices you can blame yourself, which is the natural thing you should do or you can blame others And once you start blaming others now you're in this Hall of Mirrors. Yeah Yeah, you know instead of Rachel raising your hand saying okay I've had a good run now I need lights like getting a coach or something like maybe a guy goes on a losing streak He needs to bring in a new coach to say I think you need to work on your offense You know what? I mean just somebody to tweak you Yeah, but when you're flying a thousand miles an hour and you're selling gazillions of records and making all this money and you're surrounded By a bunch of sycophants They're not gonna tell you hey, man You need you need you know, you need the doctor to come in and kind of search your head out Yeah, so then you start going this way and then that's when it gets like Hall of Mirrors So that's where that's where my own hubris sort of got in my own way I couldn't accept that I got on a losing streak and then you know go to somebody like Rick and say I Need some help. I need some objective help. I'm did you feel yourself like when you were listening to the music that you were creating? Did you feel like you were on a losing streak? No No, it's I couldn't I couldn't I couldn't Intellectually understand why I was failing. It didn't make any sense to me and sometimes it's just generational It's the market changes whatever it's not personal right it feels incredibly personal, which is why it's easier to blame Somebody else right you don't understand the depth of my yeah my work here I'm so deep and you know, you're not following my my metapath or say I mean and look it's most most entertainment is popular Right. I mean you're a comedian. I mean, it's like yeah, you got to tell a bunch of jokes and the audience doesn't laugh Whose fault is it? Well, the mindfuck of music to me has always been very fascinating because you guys create it in Like a vacuum totally and then you bring it to the people like when you release an album they get it and it's done It's like holy shit here It is and you know a big fan plays it for the first time and they're listening to it They're like, oh it like it's it's all whereas we have ideas and I need an audience to create Like I need to be around them. I can't I can only create so much on a laptop Most of it has to be like fine-tuned and refined. So by the time I record something I already know Yeah, it's already been Tested right. So that's go back to my point if you get on a winning streak and you're you're creating things in a bubble And then they work well, then you're you want to take all the credit Yeah, you forget all the thousand hours in the bedroom that you listen to Jimi Hendrix or yeah You know bow house or merciful fate or whatever, you know, like that gave you all these ideas You know, you don't want to give them credit. You want to be the author of your own success and when starts patting you on the back and Yeah, I'm sorry to interrupt. No, you're very Introspective in that regard like you you have a very Failure with failure would do that too. So but you say failure though, but you still have massive amounts of fans. You're still deep Yeah, I'm weird in that. I've always been willing to talk about the process which again is anti-gimmick but also I I've always approached it more like a performance artist in that I'm after the bigger message of how Work intersects with fame intersects with personal Feeling intersects with personality and and and how people perceive things like I like all that weird Andy Kaufman Uncomfortable. Mmm, that's part of my attraction. So I've been willing to use myself as the battering ram, which is how I end up becoming a meme Because people people latch on to these personalities I've created which of course are Ancillary to my real personality, right? But they don't they don't necessarily want to give me credit that I'm a sort of controller of the forces at play So if I say something dumb people assume that I'm dumb It's hard for them to assume that I'm saying something dumb on purpose because I want a reaction, right? Yeah when you become a hugely successful musician and Your life becomes touring big arenas doing radio shows getting on the bus getting on the plane all this does it make it difficult to have like The Time or the the actual experiences to continue to create. Yes because you get so Deoxygenated in the bubble that you start writing songs about being on tour. Yeah, like comedians will tell jokes about airline food Yeah, exactly You got to becoming sort of like you're trying to take people in the insularity of your experience, but it's not that interesting Right it and at some point it becomes unrelatable Well, I always said that about like I mean there's there's a lot of bands but some of the great Almond brothers are Leonard Skinner Like they had a bunch of songs about leaving About getting away from women, you know Lord. I was born a rambling man, right? So yeah, there was so many songs about just getting away from women. Yeah, the other day I heard that Crosby stills National Science like just a song before I go. It's all about he's going on tour and the airport It's uncomfortable. It's like it's such a going on tour song Yeah, but it's like it's really not that relatable to most people. No to a lot of people. It's not yeah I mean Skinner had a shitload of those they really did have quite a few songs about like getting the fuck out of Dodge They were good Such a great band giant fan. I mean they're probably the greatest thing to ever come out of Florida It's arguable, you know, I'm trying to think who else came out of Florida Jim Brewer I Thought we're talking about you There we just talking about music. Yeah, I don't have anything else when it comes to music who out pitbull Yeah, yeah, yeah It's the the so do you did you feel it while it was happening? Like when you're you're doing these mega tours and everything. Do you feel like the staleness and the creation? Um, I did yeah I think what I tried to do is change personalities change musical directions to kind of reinfuse Things and it worked up until a point until my mother died like in 96 in In a weird three-month period the drummer left the band my mother died and I got a divorce in like a six-month period and so I Try to use that as fuel to Sort of pivot where I wanted to go musically But I wrote this very introspective dark record which a lot of people really like now But at the time it was like so antithetical to this big rock machine Yeah, I was like castigated for being an idiot and I went from golden child to idiot, you know and one fell swoop and yeah Well, so many great artists are a prisoner of their early success And rightly so, you know, I mean I have a much greater appreciation for the zeitgeist effect of the public I Don't know if that makes any sense. It's like it's like How many zeitgeist at Elvis have three you two's had two or three Frank Sinatra had two or three or four? I mean, there's something about when it all seems to make sense like the public's fascination the artists place in time the work That's being created there's a sense of like Annullarity, but also something is happening and everybody wants to take part in it. And so I have a much greater appreciation for that moment The ego of the artist wants to convince yourself that you're always in that moment and that's just impossible That's just impossible. There's just no way. It's just the cyclical nature of creation That's such an important thing to say for people listening for people that like struggle with this themselves and hear someone like you say that Yeah, it's actually kind of makes sense it's like it's like it's like Typical example, it's like falling in love and expecting to feel that feeling forever, right? It's just not gonna happen You're not gonna feel the same. No, I would argue if you are there's something wrong, right? You haven't matured Into a deeper relationship so in the same thing an artist needs to mature into a deeper relationship with their work or the Relationship with the public or the relationship with themselves and if you can do that and you and you look at great examples Johnny Cash Neil Young Tom Petty when they get there Everybody comes back Bob Dylan because they think okay now you're giving me some new information Yeah, this isn't just a riff on the thing that you gave me before and And I think the public has shown over time The willingness and the ability to follow artists if they're willing if they're if they're able to go to that place where they mine out Something new that actually is like a cultural contribution and not just sort of more of what they already know I think that's so important for you to talk about I'm so glad you do because for upcoming artists and in all sorts of Genres just people who are involved in creating You hear someone as successful as yourself talk about the various struggles of the mind and and of momentum and the you know The different stages and various points of your career. Yeah, so important Yeah, the music business plays this Jedi mind trick on you Where the whole thing set up to be rapacious and take advantage of your weakness how so? well It's like I can you I'll use the music business as an example I'm sure there's plenty of parallels across the entertainment spectrum You you you you struggled to get the contract and then the contract is sort of you know The indentured servitude type of thing we our first contract was seven albums Essentially 14 years, so I signed that contract when I was 23. That's crazy Okay, so I'm signing a 23 years old. I'm signing a contract that's supposed to take me into 37 You'd signing a contract for more than half your life And and if you look at the shelf life of most artists, it's four to so they're basically anticipating Your entire arc. That's so crazy. You don't have any leverage You know other than that they want to sign you you sign the deal and then it becomes this weird dance of like Can I sustain success? Yeah, if you get success and you have leverage They'll get out of your way because you're making them a lot of money But the minute you're not making them as much money then they step in and they start playing these Jedi mind tricks on you We know what to do. You know the public's gonna forget about you I mean I've heard all these things like you know this kind of weird like yeah You're in the room, but you know we're the arbiter of whether you can stay in the room That's the weird position that record companies had for a long time that they don't seem to have anymore I wouldn't I would argue against that because they'll do well they've moved to a different set of circumstances and I'm not as conversant as I once was but One thing they do with certain younger artists But I think particularly more in the pop realm is they do these 360 deals where it's like right if you get a perfume deal Like your whole world we own a piece of your whole world and Fame is such a great quotient in American life now that you can see where kids would trade Fame and give and be willing to give away like the the profit part Well, they'll take a risk at the long-term Ownership, right? So let me jump in there. So if you actually survive the cut, let's say let's call it phase one You're successful you're a name and now you're in a place to either Re-negotiate or your deal is up or whatever. I once had a conversation with a very powerful music executive And I said and I was friends with the guy so I was like give me the insider psychology here Now that I know the game that you run What do you tell people like me when they get here? And he says oh, it's just there's always a price So they know that even if you get through the matrix of the whole thing and get out the other side that there's just a Dollar amount that will buy you back in Whoa, they're not worried that you'll go independent And in fact if you look at a lot of the machinations of the music business over the last 20 years Especially with the rise of the internet, it's to keep people in the system. Yeah, they don't want true independence Right, but it's look look look I'll give you look no further than the deals that the record labels cut with the streaming services They got into ownership equity deals with the streaming services in an in an arrangement for them to have an equity position They agreed to very low rates for the artists music So when you when you listen to? Bob Dylan song on Spotify Bob Dylan's not getting a lot of money for that But as Spotify and the other streaming services raise up in their equity position the labels benefit so the labels pimped out their own artists To take a greater equity position in a rising business. It's like you see I'm saying yeah They weaken the artist position to take a better position at the table themselves That is fascinating and they weaken the monetary position of compensation in order to get equity in the company right and now you see it where Metallica's management for example has come out and and especially a YouTube's former manager Paul McGinnis come out They're trying to take on YouTube now Because YouTube's got this weird funky position where they'll pay on licensed music, but they won't pay for covers and You know I mean Yeah, YouTube's like one of the big targets of the business because whatever deal they agreed to with YouTube ten years ago was super weak And but again these are all machinations that go on above the artists spot right and you quick thing into your into your world When McGregor left out and did the fight with Mayweather he creates this whole different set of dynamics because He's he can he can run his own game. Yes, UFC can't pay him that kind of money and Last I heard is like maybe he's gonna do another fight So I'm not I don't want to get totally into that but my point is is You see where those dynamics where people step outside the system it changes the game Yeah, so it's actually kind of you could you know now and I don't want to you know I've never met dana white, but if dana white could go back in a time machine Maybe he'd pay Mayweather more money to keep him in his world because now that he's out I Don't think Connor would have accepted that okay, but yeah I think he recognized the unique opportunity that he's in so he probably Talk about stuff as a fan Yeah You're on the other side fence But my point is is when you see when somebody breaks out of the sort of the matrix of how it's the game is Set up right it creates this weird Thing yeah, and there are a few today though that have kind of figured it out through YouTube and all these different I think Chance the Rapper I don't know much about his business, but I know he's sort of worked out this other model for himself Yeah, Jamie knows a lot about him He I know he's getting money from a way other places than just the traditional Record conscious. Yeah big deals from major companies like Sprite another and he's still independent right technically We were they would use to mark like he's an independent artist, but he's got a machine behind him So I don't know if he's independent, you know Yeah I'm good friends with Sturgill Simpson and Sturgill's tried to educate me as to how the the record business keeps people in in the fold with the Owning your merchandise and your likeness forever and all these different things it seems It seems crazy like we actually say we actually signed a clause It said it said And this contract pertains to this universe and any universe not yet discovered What? It's we signed that clause who wrote that the record company Jesus fucking what are they Scientology? That is crazy like we literally had a sign of thing and it was like This contract pertains to this known universe and any universe not yet discovered that is fucking insane That is insane like if someone found a parallel universe somewhere and they figured out they could sell music to them It's a parallel. They haven't heard the smashing pumpkins get over there quick Shoot a rocket ship filled with cash over there. Well that you know why they put that in is because the when when they transitioned to CDs The contracts didn't account for CDs And what they did it was very it's a very classic thing is so they had to go back and renegotiate all the deals Because of the CD technology this would have been like whatever 80s. Oh, so they went to every artist and they said look It's this new technology. We're not sure it's gonna work. So you got to take a price cut We're only gonna pay you 75 cents on the dollar so we could advance the new technology. Oh Jesus Christ. They're dirty I