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The End Is the Beginning Is the End

1997 single by The Smashing Pumpkins

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionAug 2, 2026
Entity authorityQ2673179 ↗
Source-derived summary

"The End Is the Beginning Is the End" is a song by the American alternative rock band the Smashing Pumpkins. Originally released as a single from the soundtrack to the film Batman & Robin (1997), it was their first release with drummer Matt Walker, who would go on to contribute percussion to several tracks of Adore and all of James Iha's Let It Come Down. The song reached the top 10 in eight countries and won the Grammy Award for Best Hard Rock Performance.

Song

Frontman Billy Corgan said of the song:

At one point I found myself going, "I can't write a song about Batman, I'm in an alternative band". And I thought this is stupid, if I can write a song about Batman and it serves the purpose, which is to make it happen and connect with the movie, and connect with something that is unique and original, then, why not? For me, it was a great kind of artistic thing to do because it was very freeing. I wasn't talking about myself or trying to represent the Smashing Pumpkins. I was trying to represent Batman.

He further commented that the song's lyrics were meant to represent the Batman of the 1940s, when he was a "darker character".

Many fans saw the new sound of "The End Is the Beginning Is the End", featuring an electronic-acoustic hybrid style for the drumming and added emphasis on the distorted guitars, as a taste of the sound of the next Smashing Pumpkins album, with Corgan himself saying the sound is "probably like what you would expect from us in the future".

Editorial summary

This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “The End Is the Beginning Is the End” as 1997 single by The Smashing Pumpkins. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.

Editorial reviewA concise reference frame for defining the subject, testing terminology and identifying the institution closest to the evidence. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1997—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1997-04-04. The account is most persuasive where Beginning, single and Smashing can be independently traced.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as 1997 single by The Smashing Pumpkins. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.

Evidence profile

The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2673179. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1997.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “The End Is the Beginning Is the End” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.