Billy Corgan

my no pumpkins bashing policy in full effect. but aero on the money.

bashing by proxy is excused in your policy scott?

Attention SXSW showcasing artists: Billy Corgan has some fighting words. "I'm shocked by the lack of evolution in alternative rock music," he told me backstage after his Interactive panel with author Brian Solis on Monday. "Let me put it this way: I should not be here to the level that I still I am. If the music out there was that fucking great, where is someone crushing me on the numbers? They're not. Our generation crushed a lot of bands right out the fucking door. And they had to sit on the sidelines for 20 fucking years until people got nostalgic and brought that stuff back." His Smashing Pumpkins are readying the release of a new album, which Corgan says will be more of a multimedia experience. "I'm standing exactly where every artist should hope to stand," said Corgan, who remained in town to see the Yahowa 13 documentary The Source, which screens one last time Friday, 6:45pm, at the Alamo Lamar B. "And my interviews are hotter...Holla."

"And my interviews are hotter...Holla."

just please fucking stop

Corgan, who remained in town to see the Yahowa 13 documentary The Source

never forget
http://i53.tinypic.com/30il5z4.jpg

i can't tell if jon is telling corgan to stop or if he's telling me to stop putting fake quotes in corgan's mouth

telling corgan but, tbh, i had no idea you added that fake one, he's said some really cringeworthy shit lately and i would not put that one past him in the least, given his attempts to be "funny"

today is the greatest day, holla

Corgan, Kanye, Albini...is there something about Chicago musicians who can never stop saying horrible bullshit in interviews?

In the spirit of ILE crediting Poltergeist to Steven Spielberg, BC gets no props for writing a couple Hole albums?

I think he really only mostly had a hand in Celebrity Skin, right?

The difference is that Corgan actually got credit on CS, Morbs.

Don't think he was even credited, was he?

Wait, I guess he was. So what was Courtney Love doing at the time claiming he didn't do anything if he's credited all over it?

iirc, she was just claiming that he didn't "write" the songs, but the general understanding was p much that he did, she was just trying to downplay his contributions

I thought the actual issue was that everyone assumed Billy wrote everything by himself and Courtney just sang them and her assertion was that they wrote them together as a collaborative effort; she definitely gave him a ton of credit in her most recent Behind the Music special.

oh boy, this thread is gonna be fun when the c-love stans descend on it

the golden age of alternative...stone temple pilots, smashing pumpkins, hum...billy's right...bring back them golden days when bands were awesome

collective soul you guys

literally impossible to dislike any of these bands without some hidden motive other than "they're horrible"

it's true, though, who is corgan referring to when he talks about this golden age? smashing pumpkins, nirvana ... pearl jam? who does he see as the really great bands of the alternative era?

him, himself and he

Zwan, too, I guess.

all those excellent bands who you don't remember because all the good music of the era was actually rap & metal & dance music

i listened to a Hum record on spotify, that band was fuckin' tight man, honestly

i saw spacehog live but i got a free ticket from this guy at work.

he ended up being a xian weirdo. another guy went to his "fun" church with him and this other dude was with the spacehog christian and his gf, and all of a sudden the spacehog christian and his gf started rolling on the floor and speaking in tongues and shit and the regular dude was like "holllly shiiit this is fucked up" and then told me about it at work on monday. but i did go to see spacehog with him and he didn't do anything weird at the show, but the guy from spacehog mooned the crowd and took a beer bottle and shook it up and then popped the top and pretended to jack off on the audience with beer foam. don't know if it was the one that married liv tyler or not.

sorry i just want to get some 90s stuff that happened to me out there in the world.

"The only thing left to do is be great."

It's actually pretty humble of Billy to admit he hasn't gotten around to this yet.

i did go to see spacehog with him and he didn't do anything weird at the show, but the guy from spacehog mooned the crowd and took a beer bottle and shook it up and then popped the top and pretended to jack off on the audience with beer foam. don't know if it was the one that married liv tyler or not.

I love you forever.

I need a brainwash now

the guy from spacehog mooned the crowd and took a beer bottle and shook it up and then popped the top and pretended to jack off on the audience with beer foam

a fair description of the 90s, also

corgan just sounds cranky to me with his whole 'we sold WAY more albums than they did and you ppl think THEY'RE famous? pssht.'

Well, to be fair, he did sell a fuck load of records, and he did it pretty much without compromising, for better or for worse. I mean, the sprawling double album sold something like 10 million copies. I'm not sure what Corgan's point is, and he is a sour grapes sort of why am I not invited to the party boo hoo dude, but if ever there was affirmation for ego, Corgan got it in droves.

Personally, I never bought an album beyond "Gish," so I blame all of you for enabling him.

I met a guy who said he was a "fan" of Save Ferris the other day!

Its kinda hard for me to believe that Smashing Pumpkins existed in the same universe as Emperor in the 90's. or Eyehategod!

as far as sprawling uncompromising major label alternadork double rock records i'll take the downward spiral every time. that album was cool!

Eyehategod!

this looks like a Pumpkins song tbh

http://i305.photobucket.com/albums/nn222/gumballrimpoche/billy_corgi.jpg

imagine if we'd seen the Corgandog in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Imagine the horror!

Ha, Billy Corgi.

idgi

jeez I forgot they headlined the only Lollapalooza I went to as well

(also Nick Cave & Geo Clinton)

I just saw a Solis-Corgan interview clip that I can't find now, and Corgan was sort of incoherent for part of it but also made some pretty valid and lucid points. He was basically arguing that social media is a losing game for most musicians but one they have to play anyway. He said that today's landscape means non-stop competition just to hold someone's attention, which is not conducive to a musician building himself as an "Artist" (in the most admittedly cynical, commodified sense), and that the need to constantly beg fans to do stuff and look at stuff and share stuff on social media is pretty much antithetical to the traditional image of grandiose, mysterious capital A Artists, which is ultimately the kind of image you need to hold fans interest for longer periods of time.

That's not a bad point, but it's an interesting one to see coming from someone who sprays so much verbal diarrhea in interviews and who has often engaged in projects like a series of EPs every few months that seem to be partially engineered to constantly hold fans' attention.

i was actually just wondering whether any artist whose appearance on the scene came anytime in the recent past could ever really become a "legend" on the level of a Keith Richards or John Lennon (or even a Billy Corgan), just because of the changes in the dynamics of the industry and the music-consuming public.

no. A contemporary legend is that teenager who was singing "Friday" last year.

The number of artists fully formed in the internet era that have lasted more than a couple of years does seem pretty small in my mind, but maybe I'm not thinking of some people. I guess Kanye and Lady Gaga are the first things that spring to mind as purely 21st century "legends." Pretty sure they don't do the kinds of record sales that equivalent stars would have done 20 years ago.

The other thing Corgan said that I thought was maybe obvious but needs to be said more is that consumers' willingness to pay anything at all for recorded music has been kind of irreversibly eroded, and that the result is kind of a net loss of revenue.

It's probably going to have to keep eroding to the point where a lot of artists either hang it up altogether or switch to some sort of diffuse patronage model. I think the message being sent is less that music has literally no monetary value to people than it is that a business model largely favoring the music labels is no longer sustainable.

I mean, a-doy. But still. Needs to be said more and all that.

well, also recorded music literally has no monetary value to people

I think the message being sent is less that music has literally no monetary value to people than it is that a business model largely favoring the music labels is no longer sustainable.

― You Don't Throw Oranges On An Escalator (Deric W. Haircare), Friday, May 4, 2012 3:31 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

IDK this just sounds like the same pat line we keep hearing and it doesn't seem to have proven true. Big labels are sustainable, artists are not.