Billy Corgan.
Or Chuckles as we know and love him.
I remember being stuck in the subway a couple of years agao with a new Smashing Pumkins song on repeat, over and over and over it went. In a subway can they hear you scream? His nasal whine, his heavy guitar shreds, his faux poetry… awful…
Certainly, of all the major rock stars of the past 20 years, Corgan is in his own world of irritation. He is such a sniveling heartless shit, such a bland weak gruel of pop maneuvers. He was Freddie and the Dreamers to Nirvana’s Beatles.
So since we last heard from Billy he, apparently, opened a coffee shop in Chicago, where he is playing an eight hour ambient recital: “On 2//28 I’ll be doing a show at Madame ZuZu’s Teahouse; start time noon, and due to nature of performance it’ll last 8-9 hours. So see http://MadameZuzus.com in coming days for details on seating and admissions. As with all our events there is no charge. Performance will be centered around an ambient/musical interpretation of Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha; built by modular synthesis, on the fly. Readings of the text to go hand in hand with whatever is created; + the first @Hexistential poster, and event t-shirts too. Hope to see you there.”
Wow, that is pretty painful stuff. As my friend Philip Poyner put it: “You know, when you manage to make Tales From Topographic Oceans look both unpretentious and brief, you may want to ask yourself “At what moment in my life did I first go SO FAR off the rails?” Without wishing to be a dick I must insist upon them putting metal detectors up because you don’t want armed people sitting around for hours on end they could go ballistic. I speak from experience. You want more chuckles, here he is discussing the enterprise in the Chicago Tribune