Billy Corgan Making A Fool Of Himself, Loosing His FanBase, Dissing Others
Billy Corgan
I highly despise Billy Corgan except when he makes some ‘Fuck You Anderson Cooper’ shirts, but the narcissistic egomania of the guy has no limits. Lately, he has in the news because of the Smashing Pumpkins’ new release, ‘Monuments to en Elegy’, and in an interview to the Wall Street Journal, Billy declared:
‘Honestly I think the fanbase is gone’, while talking about the Smashing Pumpkins’ fans.
‘I know it’s a prickly way to put it, but I don’t think there are fans anymore’, he continued. ‘I would define a fan as someone who explores the depth of the artist’s work, and allows the artist to show you something. It’s not up to the artist to walk you by the hand. I don’t think there are that many of those people who exist. I’d say they’re in the low thousands.’
And how can he say this when the Pumpkins are still touring and selling out places? But for him it’s all based on ‘Feedback, web traffic, whatever you want to look at.’
And then Billy’s monstrous ego starts to show up:
‘This is where I start to complain, but I think the depth of my work and the depth of my catalogue is just now beginning to be explored in the way it was intended to. For whatever reason–cultural shifts or my own need to shift my public personalities–I have not gotten the cultural review worthy of my position.’
How pompous does this sound? Oh but it’s not over:
‘With the tenure I have, and the work and the reissues piling up, there’s going to have to be some kind of reckoning with me in the culture, because I just won’t fucking go away. You know what I mean? When you look at my generation, I come out on the leaner side of the conversation about people who actually survived, and prospered and continued on. My position as an artist has basically not changed in a world where even Pavement started doing reunion tours. All the people who walked around puffing out their chests about the word integrity? A lot of those people are long fucking gone.’
And his train of thought is totally contradictory, my fans are gone but ‘My position as an artist has basically not changed in a world’? Well, if you don’t have fans anymore… But that wasn’t it, Billy visited the Howard Stern show and basically dissed a few of his peers:
‘I know [Pearl Jam] have a tremendous fan base, and they should. They’re a great band, but I’m a Beatles guy, I’m a Stones guy, I’m a Kinks guy. To me a lot of other bands don’t have the work. […] I think if you stack my songs up, Cobain’s songs up, and that band’s songs, they just don’t have the songs. They’re a great band. They’re still an arena act. They’ve gotten it done for a long time; I have to bow to that. That’s a mystery to me, because I don’t get it.’
Of course, he had to talk about the omnipresent Dave Grohl:
‘Dave is a great musician, a great songwriter and has done the work, but to me, my criticism of the Foo Fighters, if I’m being a music critic, is that they just haven’t evolved and that’s sort of the recent rap on them is, you know, making the same music.’
Although I agree with Corgan on this one, this was totally unnecessary, but he continues:
‘Obviously, I’ve put my whole life on the line for making different types music as I’ve gone along. We’ve talked last time I was here about playing old songs, evolving and it’s just my mentality. I know it’s not for everybody. Listen, [Dave’s] getting it done, so it’s like, if you want to be competitive, my philosophy against his, he’s the one winning.’
Dave Grohl winning? At least he got that right, especially now that Grohl has been described as the ‘Ken Burns of Rock Documentaries’ by Kiss’ Paul Stanley.
