In a recent interview with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, the Smashing Pumpkins frontman opened up about a variety of topics that spanned his entire career, notably Kurt Cobain’s death and the impact that it had on Cobain’s death.

““I want the Pumpkins standing on the top of the heap of our generation,” Corgan said in the interview. “If that means I got to write 800 songs to do it, I’ll do it. I ain’t shy about that. I will go down always as saying, Kurt was the most talented guy of our generation. Kurt had so much talent. It’s like frightening. It was like a John Lennon level of talent, where you’re like, ‘how can you have all this talent?’ Or Prince, right? But Kurt’s not here, sadly. So I looked around, I was like, ‘All right, well, I could beat the rest of them for sure.’

He continued, “When Kurt died, I cried because I lost my greatest opponent. I want to beat the best. I don’t want to win the championship because it’s just me and a bunch of jabronis, to use a wrestling term. It’s like, Michael Jordan, arguably the greatest sports competitor I’ll ever see in my lifetime — I mean, you want to talk about an alpha. That guy wanted to win the valet tip. You know what I mean?”