things Billy Corgan said to Kim Thayil in Australia in 1994 poll

ghosts that don't exist

And again–you haven't said this here so it's not again–the lack of tolerance of ideas and other points of view is the great Achilles heel of the social justice warrior movement.

so champion of free speech billy corgan isn't down with tolerating people talking about injustice huh

hypothetical Star Wars holodeck type of way

GODDAMMIT BILLY THE HOLODECK IS STAR TREK

the last time he was on he said "I think it's very astute of you to call it an Infowar."

― flappy bird, Tuesday, April 19, 2016 4:36 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

haha

from the new interview: "Like I've said before, I think it was very prescient of you to call it an Infowar."

I came in the door I said it before
I think it was very prescient of you to call it an Infowar

the fluoride in me is the fluoride in you

lot of facepalming and easy jokes here, not a whole lot of arguing with what he, you know, actually said

i thought it was a great interview. i thought he had a lot of interesting and insightful things to say. i take issue with his use of "social justice warrior," incredibly stupid phrase, but other than that, it was surprisingly good, much better than his previous two appearances on Infowars. I watched the interview live, and I didn't expect it to make any headlines. But of course, Pitchfork and Stereogum completely misrepresented what he said in their headlines and write ups. Sort of makes you lean toward Corgan and Jones' media complicity theory.

does it now

just a little

As someone who has actually tried arguing with people on the internet who believe there is a worldwide conspiracy of "SJWs", can I be the first to offer my disinterest in continuing it here?

idk, if you let go your preconceived notions and really think for yourself, it is very suspicious how no one itt has engaged with the substance of someone decrying a "SJW" conspiracy by comparing campus activists to mao, hitler, and jim crow justice, on an internet talk show hosted by chris farley as bennett brauer.

he's very stupid indeed, is the takeaway here

But of course, Pitchfork and Stereogum completely misrepresented what he said in their headlines and write ups

they did not. he was making false equivalencies. it's v typical faux liberal bullshit to be like "if you do anything that resembles what a fascist once did you too must be a fascist, free speech blah blah blah" without any actual recognition or consciousness of the imbalance of power in these relationships. it's horseshit and offensively stupid

it's horseshit and offensively stupid

Just like his music!

I really fell down a hole listening to Alex Jones, weird trip today. It's like they have perfectly intelligent, rational discussions as long as your willing to proceed with a mutually accepted batshit worldview. He also is really hawking this line of nutritional supplements hardcore

jones is good fun

it's horseshit and offensively stupid

Maybe the problem is the older generation thinks the youth of today get offended too easily.

like getting hurt in their hearts

hearing people talk about how offended they are that other people are being offended getting pretty old at this point

Are you offended by it?

Billy does talk some garbage, doesn't he. I miss the days when you'd only hear from him in an MTV interview or a magazine.

saw this on twitter, billy has always been really good at relating to women
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1qIhtKkrnuM

oh my god, all the interviews from that day are amazing. they all make me wince. like when he makes the "I'm Ono-Corgan" joke and then does the "went over your head" gesture - christ, fuck you billy.

even better: Billy mistakenly refers to Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds as a British band, and Cave just obliterates him:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQ6SuW7RDKI

never really got into his music, but i don't think my friends who did were under any illusion that he is not a huge turd

thing is if he and not cobain had died just after their followup to the breakthrough album i think his rep would be a very very different thing. sweeping genius, ambition, the sensitive shy perfectionist aiming for the stars etc. etc. gish, SD and MCIS is a hell of a run (as the current albums poll thread suggests), not even getting into the b-sides and such. he had something really really special. then, very suddenly, it seemed to dissipate.

what's particularly sad about the spaceboy becoming lindbergh, or howard hughes, or whatever, is that so much of what was brilliant in his music was how it spoke to being a picked-on weirdo without just wallowing in self-pity or anger, though those were unmistakably part of the mix. despite all the rage, he actually spoke up for fey romance and dreams and being, well, different. to use an appropriately high-school reference, he was piggy, but also simon, and when he was angry it was only due to the wounds inflicted by the jacks of the world. siding with the bullies against those who speak up for difference is a real woodstock-attendees-voting-for-reagan kind of sad if predictable disappointment.

thing is if he and not cobain had died just after their followup to the breakthrough album i think his rep would be a very very different thing - hahhahaah NO. this dude was marked as a clown from day fucking one. that he's gone alt-right is something but hardly surprising considering how much the anti-liberal resentment that fuels it resembles his anti-cool resentment since whenever some skater punk laughed at him for loving boston in middle school. dude's always been a superior fuck w/ an inferiority complex. for a minute there he figured out how to update boston for the 90s. then the 90s ended.

xp otm.

he's often said that Lollapalooza 1994 was a turning point for him. when he saw the same jocks and football players that used to beat him up for having a funny haircut out in the crowd, he realized then that the dream of the "alternative nation" was basically bust. the urgency in MCIS and in making this gigantic, grand, final statement as Smashing Pumpkins Mach I was because he saw himself and all the other original Gen X bands on a sinking ship. he burned brighter faster.

he was marked as a clown by indie elitists for being openly careerist and embracing all the wrong things in his music - guitar solos, studio perfectionism, candor, Boston and ELO worship. "Cherub Rock" is his rebuke toward Albini and Cosloy and a world that never accepted him.

guitar solos, studio perfectionism, candor, Boston and ELO worship

lol yeah none of this in Nirvana, nope

xxxpost i think you're right on about the inverted resentment projected back as right-wing persecution complex stuff. not so surprising in that sense.

xxpost and yeah that's right - he was marked as uncool not only by the jocks or whatever, but by the cool kids. he's a goth basically and for my money those pumpkins are the best (and basically the only) goth rocks i need.

he came off as a clown in a lot of lights but maybe more often as a control freak crazy person that everyone hated. which i think if he'd died would have at least some body of people praising him as a misunderstood perfectionist genius who squeezed everybody dry trying to create a crystalline magical music the likes of which we didn't deserve and could never be achieved or something. i mean rock's pantheon is full of raging assholes and pretentious little shits. but maybe this is another post derived from recently viewing the doors, i mean at least in that movie jim morrison was just transparently awful at everything he did and in particular a pathetic and self-important 'poet' but it sure didn't stop him from being worshiped for a very long time.

i mean look at the kim thayil story around which this thread has based. i've always lolled but the lols have also always made me just a little uncomfortable. corgan sounds exhausting but is it worse than the reporter who clearly is trying to piggyback on some OTM remarks of thayil's (which i imagine delivered in a kind of chilled-out 'look man, you just need to chill out' kinda way) in the only way that second bananas know how, by joining the beating-up on the guy marked as the loser of this little social encounter and clearly the less 'cool' musician. ha ha, that guy's feelings were hurt, what a wuss, and did i mention that i am drinking with the rock stars and he ordered a girl drink?

xxp yeah, none of it is. Cobain played anti-solos. Corgan was a shredder, a recovering metalhead. Sure, Cobain was very serious about his craft, but he didn't spend twelve hours doing four bars of vocals or three seconds of guitar. He also didn't layer his guitars 40 times over. Cobain and the rest of Gen X had a measured sort of candor, Corgan said whatever he was thinking at the moment, often at his own expense. And no, Cobain never openly worshipped Boston or ELO, even if they vamped on "More Than a Feeling" once or twice at a show.

morrison could sing, was cool, was new, and was sexy so he's up four on corgan. add in the doors wrote better songs, were better musicians and the mystery is even closer to being solved. morrison gave us patti smith and iggy pop, corgan gave us the dude from our lady peace.

none of that's unique to Corgan, sorry. even if you can drill down into specific differences in approach between Corgan + Cobain there were loads of recovering shredder metalheads about at the time (lol Thayil's a great example), tons of studio rats over-emoting, grunge was rife with it.

xps

Corgan's string-laden ballads just put him closer to Axl Rose than Cobain is all

yeah i can remember peter buck circa monster talking in an interview about this disconnect he felt w/ the altrockers that were coming up at the time cuz they were all recovering (or nonrecovering) metal nerds which the closest any of the rem guys got to that was a love for aerosmith (hardly surprising since buck and stipe formed a friendship over mutual ny dolls love).

90s alt rock bands pretending to be "too cool" to sit through interviews on MTV that they were still doing anyway was the most annoying fucking thing ever

tbh i think the road toward redemption in the eyes of the ghost of altrock authenticity past and a change in reputation for corgan would've been more thru a long term journey then him dying after that stupid batman song or whatever. pearl jam were regarded much more suspiciously than smashing pumpkins (who for whatever 'this guy's an obv clown' aspects had had some success pre-nevermind and filled a recognizable college rock slot, had played the club circuit), ppl might have rolled their eyes at smashing pumpkins but pearl jam were regarded (esp among ppl for whom altrock authenticity was an actual thing) as this obv corporate attempt at buying the altrock revolution, cobain compared them to night ranger and though he apparently maybe later kinda took it back (or so i've heard, idk) the tag stuck. over time though pearl jam made more interesting records, fought several good fights, used their success to help other (cooler) acts be it sleater-kinney opening slot or an appearance on a mike watt record that paid watt's bills for god knows how long. they kept working and kept making solid records and generally, as much as could be expected from a rock band w/ a high degree of earnestness, didn't act like huge douchebags or pompous clowns. at a point if you still really had a problem w/ pearl jam it probably meant you were an asshole. corgan took a different route, retreating from taking chances the minute one slight risk (let's be honest - adore isn't exactly fucking dazzle ships) didn't pay off to his satisfaction, broke up the band that he treated like a solo project, blamed the world for his failures, lamely reunited the band only this time made it even more of a solo project and turned it into the most boring version of smashing pumpkins imaginable (who would've guessed that an alice in chains reunion w/ new singer would yield much greater dividends), watched relatively fail as well, blamed the unworthy world for that, and throughout this treated the musicians he worked w/ horribly. then he found out about chemtrails.

i've read comparisons to poster children, but i'm not really hearing a particular sonic similarity. if smashing pumpkins were nirvana, would they be the pixies?

good points on pearl jam, i remember there were a couple Nirvana stans i knew in high school who despised eddie vedder and when cobain died one of them wrote "it should have been ed!" on a wall in the school hallway. i always liked them maybe a bit more than nirvana, and definitely more than SP, because i liked the sort of watery sound of 'ten' and the occasional folkiness of 'vs' and the weird shit on 'vitalogy' not to mention the guitar jams on that album. SP always sounded a little strained to me and their rock sound felt a little thin, and i never really liked corgan's vocals. but '1979' is really a great tune and video.

tbf it should have been ed

vedder always seems like a pretty genuinely nice dude

ayeeayayeeeeeaaaaahh he does

the cast of friends were into pearl jam

i mean the characters

Pearl Jam is plain oatmeal, Smashing Pumpkins are Capn Crunch

cereal sucks