Billy Corgan

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.

xpost

Yeah, at this juncture that's true, but I'm positing a point in the not-too-distant future where music largely stops being recorded and subsequently sold because the market can no longer sustain it. At that point, recorded music may find a niche where it does have monetary value to a (probably much smaller but likely also more fanatical) number of people.

basically, the volume of musical choices available to us as any given time has come to a point where there's far, far more supply than demand, creating a buyer's market whose magnitude has previously never existed. music is a commodity at this point.

xpost

I.e. welcome to the world enjoyed by much of the rest of the arts, Music.

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

^^^^^

hate how this gets elided all the time

I think a better way to put it is not that it has no value, but rather that something has to prove its value to a consumer first, and it's really hard for anything to do that given the glut of alternatives people have just one click away not only in the realm of music, but any kind of entertainment.

how does a product "prove its value"

by being good, making a positive impression, creating a sense that someone may want to revisit it, etc

I don't think even that happens. I have albums that I've gotten for free that are great and I have not gone back and paid for them after the fact.

Because you actually got the tracks in your possession, instead of just getting a taste of them. It might be different if you heard them on the radio, or in a video game, or in a commercial. For example, I bet that Fun song that was shoved down our throats for the past few months racked up a ton of sales.

In the future, recorded music will be subsidized by wealthy patrons and you will only be able to listen to it while in some sort of museum.

I don't think there's any reason to think that "recorded music" will become less available, just that it will be less monetizable.

not looking forward to the 'fourth wave of ska' wing at the moma

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.

maybe that's Corgan's partial answer to why he is so bad and hated these days

ha true

he actually even made some reference to his being bad and hated in the interview, a kind of awkward metaphor about how he's the nba player who everyone hates but grabs a lot of rebounds

I don't think there's any reason to think that "recorded music" will become less available, just that it will be less monetizable.

That 'music museums' idea kinda glosses over some of the steps in my logical leap. To clarify my argument, I'm talking about recorded popular music (i.e. not stuff like classical which already has a form of patronage in place). Major labels will, at a point, tire of pouring money down the recorded music drain, and once they realize that suing potential customers only nets them a fraction of the revenue they've historically made, they'll cut way back on something. Whether that 'something' is marketing or artists' pay or the number of artists on their roster, the amount and influence of recorded output from major labels will probably diminish significantly (if not disappear altogether) in our lifetimes. To the extent that the majors cease to be much of a viable option (i.e. the extent to which musicians can basically forget about livin' like a pimp), you'll see a lot of people who don't really give a shit pulling out of the game altogether, while the people who do give a shit and/or who have a solid fanbase that does value their recorded output monetarily to some extent will continue on via other routes (e.g. Kickstarter, Bandcamp, etc.). This will basically be the 'folk/outsider' branch of tomorrow's recorded music, with the majors' increasingly-meager output forming a second branch. The likely third branch (to the extent that musicians secure forward-thinking managers and arts patrons see a dying creative industry that will need financial assistance to become more) will be the 'fine arts' branch. If incessant touring becomes the only other option for musicians to make a buck, I can see a lot of musical acts going in a sort of 'more accessible Laurie Anderson' direction (multimedia, performance-based work that caters to a gallery or pseudo-museum setting), even if only to appeal to an audience with deeper pockets who will keep them fed. I mean, I don't know how accurate my predicting will be, but sustaining a music career in the future is definitely gonna be all about sussing out alternative business models.

On the flipside, sort of, I've often wondered what it takes to knock a band down a few notches after they've hit it big. Like, will Gotye ever play a small venue again? Phoenix? MGMT? Interpol? Whomever? How many crappy albums would it take to do so? Because I can't think of any band in recent memory that has been demoted, though I can think of several whose ascent has been pretty fast.

in the future? it's already like that

xp