Let’s face it. Rock is dead. Billy Corgan once said it. Marilyn Manson once sang it, but Dennis Flemion, drummer for the Frogs, lives by it. “They killed it because the mainstream owns it now,” Flemion says from his Milwaukee home. “They bastardize it, and no one will do anything to take it back. Maybe it’s too late. It’s a dead art form. It needs better songwriters. That’s where we come in.” Enter the Frogs, a virtually unknown underground rock band to the common person, but a household name to fans of bands such as Pearl Jam, the Smashing Pumpkins or the late Nirvana. Formed 20 years ago by brothers Dennis and Jimmy Flemion (guitar), the Frogs had aspirations of playing great music like their rock `n’ roll heroes. Unfortunately, not everything fell into place in the so-called “calculated” way, and the band’s debut self-titled album wasn’t released until 1988. It was later followed by the jokingly homoerotic “It’s Only Right and Natural,” a pseudo-gay album that earned them a larger cult following. During the early years, the Frogs honed their live show, which included fog and flashpots to make fun of the typical rock show gimmicks of their youth. This was also when Jimmy debuted his own stage gimmick – a six foot pair of bat wings – the joke being that all their songs were about death at the time. The irony is Flemion disagrees that all rock music should be joyous and fun. “What about the sadness? It’s virtually been blotted out of the airwaves. Try to find a sad song, a good one that makes you cry. I haven’t heard one,” Flemion says, before reminding himself of his longtime musician friend and former Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan. “Billy writes cool sad songs. I can’t say there’s any other guy that writes sadder songs than Billy in the business other than me, which nobody’s heard my sad shit,” Flemion adds. “His stuff. It just cries, it’s just beautiful sadness.” Flemion also shares his thoughts on Corgan’s decision to end the Smashing Pumpkins earlier this year. “His time had come. They’re very close. They’re very family-like, but unless it’s actual family, things eventually break,” Flemion says. “D’arcy just didn’t want to be under his thumb anymore,” he adds, referring to her departure before the band began touring in support of “Machina/ the Machines of God.” While touring with the Smashing Pumpkins during the “Siamese Dream” tour, Flemion, who claims to have written over 2,000 songs with his brother, gave Corgan a tape of 333 songs to sift through. After only 45 songs, Fleming says Corgan had to quit listening because the music was “beginning to get in his head and started showing up in his work.” Eventually, working under the pseudonym “Johnny Goat,” Corgan produced the Frogs’ EP “Starjob.” Having more mainstream connections didn’t gain the Frogs the audience they were looking for, but the songs did not stop flowing. The band also released the compilation “My Daughter the Broad,” 1999’s “Bananimals,” and more recently “Racially Yours,” an album containing material from 1993 and earlier that is very different from the band’s previous material. The album confronts bigotry and racism from an artistically inspired viewpoint. After putting a lot of serious time into it, it’s no wonder Flemion decided it was time to release it rather than let it sit on the shelf. “I always wanted it out,” says Flemion. “It just kind of fell through the cracks in 1993 because people backed away from it for one reason or another either fear, backlash, or because I’m white, and I can’t speak about racial topics.” Yet Flemion isn’t going to let the music industry’s fear of reality silence him. Nothing angers him more than the capitalistic, bought and paid for factory-like output that the music has become. “It’s like a career now, not self-expression,” Flemion says. “Anybody can make up a song, but that doesn’t make them a songwriter.” He also hates how everything comes down to an artist’s persona, whether they are a sex symbol such as Janet Jackson or Britney Spears, or a supposed bad ass female rocker like Fiona Apple. “I don’t buy her act. Not to get down on the vertically challenged, but shit, it’s hard to come across as a hard ass rocker when you’re not even five feet tall. How tough is this bitch?” Flemion questions. “She looks like a munchkin up there jumping around. That’s the best your generation can do? That is weak.” Flemion says the problem stems not only from mainstream bands, but modern song form as well. “That’s the pop formula they want to shove down your throat, and most people don’t understand the difference,” Flemion says. Will rock music ever return to the entrancing, cathartic medium it once was when the Beatles first washed ashore in the `60s? “I think it’ll turn around,” Flemion says. “It might take five or ten years. It’s just so damn slow. Nobody wants to take a chance,” he said. As for the current state of music, Flemion can sum up the past 40 years of rock and roll evolution in only four words. “Modern rock bites it.”