Is it just me, or does this highly entertaining interview with the head Smashing Pumpkin say something about The Limits of Winner Rock?
Energy we can do something with. Apathy we can’t work with. Who’s above us? Who’s lighting the culture on fire? Nobody. We don’t have to live in that world. We have the biggest manager [Irving Azoff] in the world. He tells us we can get there, we will get there. We will crack the egg like we did in ‘92, without doing something embarrassing like working with Timbaland. We will find how to do our thing and make it work. I can write songs. We’re big boys. We’ll do it.
Is this what happens when you treat every single musical endeavor like you’re entering the ring? Is Corgan emulating post-game press conference-speak to an almost ridiculous level here?
Let me be blunt. When Bruce Springsteen puts out a new album I pay attention. Same with Neil Young. Because they’re major artists who have something to say. I consider us in that category. When we do something it should be taken seriously, even when we’re off. If we’re marginalized by the culture, we’re not going to play dead and say thank you for our B-plus status.
Admirable chutzpah, to the say the least, but I want to tell Bill: Saying so doesn’t make it so!
Mmmm.
Maybe he’s a fan of “The Secret”.
I like the bit about being a singles band. I’d like to hear stuff from Corgan that had the impact of the early nineties Pumpkins.
All power to him. Let’s see if he can come up with the goods. I doubt it, but still I’d like to see it.
Love the sentiment and the Azoff reference. He’s a big player in Felder’s Eagles book. Corgan’s a tool, and the rock world is a bigger tool for tolerating him so long. Isn’t the fact that he’s about the most difficult man to look at in the world enough to rule him out of the rock roost?
Billy, it’s your defense man. Defense wins championships!
On Fresh Air with Terry Gross tonight she interviewed Philip Seymour Hoffman. In the second half of the interview she asked him about his high school days as a star in baseball, football, and wrestling. I was shocked. I hadn’t pegged him as a sports guy. He then went on to talk about how much he finds in common between sports and acting, and he reminded me of people like myself, who find similarities between sports and music, and people like some of you, who see no relationship. Corgan obviously sees the connection, but with big talk like this, the rock ‘n roll gods are going to make him pay.
I think this interview might be the best thing he’s ever done. He even calls them “Pumpkins Inc.” in there, throwing himself into Gene Simmons territory. He should make whoever the new guitarist is wear Space Ace make-up.
Can someone here who knows more about pro sports than me tell me if Corgan’s language in this interview echoes that of a particular athlete or coach?
Maybe he was inspired by former Chicago Bears great and now San Francisco 49ers’ coach Mike Singletary’s recent rant:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EB5-yJM3vJc
Oats, are you asking if he might be intentionally referencing something, or just looking for a comparison?
Herm Edwards (coach of the Kansas City Chiefs, though he was with the Jets at the time) also comes to mind, with this rant:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMk5sMHj58I
You have no idea how legendary Herm’s speech is here in KC. But it’s mostly used to mock him. When your team is 2 – 11, the idea that you’re playing to win the game is pretty ludicrous.
Corgan’s problem is a) he still thinks a rock band can “light the culture on fire” and b) there’s no one to tell him he’s no longer a contender. That kind of talk in the interview is one thing when you’re on the way up, but when you’re past your sell-by date it’s just embarrassing.
Corgan’s a big self-important blowhard. Always has been. Also, the pumins were never really a band. Iha and D’arcy only played on their last record
As I have said here before, Corgan was a huge presence in the 90’s Chicago sports scene. He was the Bulls’ Spike Lee. He was also a regular on the sportswriter’s roundtable show on the old Chicago Sports channel.
Seriously, when was a new album from Bruce Springsteen or Neil Young a major event in music? (And I like Springsteen.)
Still, it’s funny to see what goes on inside the head of rockstars now and then.
I was just looking for a comparison. The rants of both Edwards and Singletary fit the bill. Thanks, guys.
“Corgan’s problem is a) he still thinks a rock band can “light the culture on fire” and b) there’s no one to tell him he’s no longer a contender. That kind of talk in the interview is one thing when you’re on the way up, but when you’re past your sell-by date it’s just embarrassing.”
You seem to find no vitality or life in Corgan’s sentiments. You look at Corgan and the pumpkins, who back in 2001 released an internet only free album, as aging dinosaurs from the nineties. Corgan’s sell by date was 1994 and he should’ve gone the way of the dodo and left us with flannel?
He sounds like a boxer in his forties, and I don’t mean George Foreman. More like someone who is about to get seriously hurt in the ring.
The short answer, cap, is yes, though I wouldn’t say leaving us “with flannel” is what he did or should have done. I actually liked early Pumps music; I just think, like most musicians he lost the key.
It’s not that I find “no vitality or life in Corgan’s sentiments.” The sentiments are not the problem. The problem is that he hasn’t backed them up for a long time. To connect this to another thread, Reggie Jackson may have acted callously to our buddy sammy, but for a good stretch there he totally backed up the attitude with action, and when it counted too.
But Corgan is now 41 (checking his age I discovered he and I share a birthday), an age at which athletes generally have accepted the decline in their powers. Rock stars have traditionally been less adept at retirement.
Apropos of the connection between music and sports (one of our moderator’s favorite topics), I was doing some reading on Ubuweb yesterday and came across this quote by avant garde composer Robert Ashley:
“Sports, obviously, doesn¹t need much of a defence from me. It has produced almost without exception the most humane-seeming, the most articulate, humorous and professionally generous celebrities of our time. No wonder we like sports. I observe with just a little envy that persons who only a few decades ago worked virtually as slaves (and who didn¹t make any better a living than the avant-garde does now) have collectively made a place for what they love as a way of life and have come out of that struggle with a respect for each other that is continually expressed in the most glowing and touching terms. “
“It’s not that I find “no vitality or life in Corgan’s sentiments.” The sentiments are not the problem. The problem is that he hasn’t backed them up for a long time. To connect this to another thread, Reggie Jackson may have acted callously to our buddy sammy, but for a good stretch there he totally backed up the attitude with action, and when it counted too.”
Your saying Corgan’s music hasn’t been good or good enough since the mid ninties, Yes? Your saying his talk is not backed up by the music he’s released since the hey day of grunge?
Certainly we could discuss the merits of all the albums Corgan has released since 1996, but, I guess the point I would want to make is that its easy to love dead rock stars or bands that broke up.
That doesn’t mean we owe him any favors as listeners, but, it colors the way we hear his music. His point is that he’s not asking for favors, that he’s creating for the moment he’s in, for right now. If I listen to In Utero and Superunknown and compare it to Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness that one kind of comparison (and a very “Winner Rock” oriented one) If I listen to either of those albums and compare it to a new Corgan album it can be a different kind of comparison. We may as well compare every album to Revolver if that’s the case.
Corgan has backed up his hubris by refusing to go the route the pixies went by just playing songs the audience knows it likes. He deserves at least a brownie point for that.
Cap, you don’t know this, but I’m usually the one around here advocating that we not cast aside musicians once they are no longer on fire with youthful creativity.
The problem in this case is not that I want to move on to someone else newer and more exciting. It’s that it’s been 10 years now since Corgan has done anything that didn’t seem either kind of lost or totally misguided. I understand you may think otherwise, but this is my take on his work.
And a bigger problem is that Corgan isn’t saying he’s going to work hard to find his way back to the source of his creativity, or that he’s on the track of a new approach that has revitalized him. He’s claiming that he’s going to scale the heights, produce work as good as the best there is, and have an effect on the culture at large. The evidence for this? Not his recent music, but blind assertion and the fact that he’s hired the biggest (and shortest?)manager there is. It seems pretty dubious to me.
A healthy ego can be helpful to an artist, but a huge ego can be just an illness.
Corgan’s words are quite revealing aren’t they? He’s making it rather clear that for him art is only meaningful if it shifts units.
Smashing Pumpkins, apart from their carefully built and maintained alt-rock image, were really a throwback to 70s AOR. Songs that are catchy but have no real identity.
cap7707 and anyone else, what did you think of Corgan’s version of Tin Machine, from maybe 7 years ago, some band named with a couple of Z’s or X’s at the beginning, right? It included himself, Chamberlain, and a person or two from Squirrel Bait, or one of their offshoots. For me, if that wasn’t a cry for a Rock Wedgie I don’t know what is.
I think it’s great that Corgan shoots for the mountaintop, but beside a couple of his songs since day 1, I personally don’t have great interest in what he does. His approach to singing kills all but his best, concise tunes, like that single with the date (“1994”?). Jeez, Robert Smith thinks he’s laying it on heavy.
The one thing I thought was good about his latest plan for world domination was his notion of concentrating on singles. In this age of the iEmpire, comebacking artists should be able to get back in the game through singles. Corgan’s not the sort who’s going to make a “deep” album with T Bone Burnett or Rick Rubin, is he? Maybe Azoff can help him – and all of the music biz – construct a model that takes full advantage of the one-download-at-a-time mentality among consumers. If Billy can shake culture through those means, more power to him!
The Corgan supergroup you’re referring to is Zwan, Mr. Mod. My only exposure to them was their appearance on SNL, but I thought they were good.
i thought Smashing Pumpkins stank in the early 90’s. I haven’t thought about them again until now. Billy Corgan was like a creepy little kid till he lost his hair. Now he’s like a creepy old man.