It's combative Billy Corgan interview time! Right now, Corgan's band the Smashing Pumpkins — the the in the name seems to be important to Corgan — are experiencing a bit of a resurgence. Their '90s hits are all over TikTok. They're touring arenas to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness. They reunited with their Siamese Dream/Gish producer Butch Vig to record "Black Stars," a soundtrack song for the upcoming Hunger Games movie. Olivia Rodrigo performed with them at Lollapalooza. And now, Corgan is the latest guest on the New York Times Popcast. He's got some things that he'd like to say.
Corgan seems to relish the chance to go toe-to-toe with a coastal music critic like my friend Jon Caramanica and to ask him whether, in his own words, "Has my work been fairly assessed by your critical class?" Along the way, he veers into digressions about other divisive stars, including his '90s alt-rock peer Marilyn Manson. Corgan remains close to Manson years after many women accused Manson of sexual assault. Last year, Manson appeared at Corgan's birthday party, and the two of them posed for photos together. When Caramanica asked Corgan about that, Corgan said:
I think it's a valid question, and I thnk that ultimately, as a Christian person, you have to — how can I put it? You have to stand by your friends, but that doesn't mean you can't have an opinion, and it doesn't mean you're not critical. In his case, and I'm not here to adjudicate it, but the DA looked at the case for five years. In some cases, I knew personal things behind the scenes that are not in the public sphere.
I personally didn't feel that he was guilty with the things he was being charged with, and ultimately the fact that the DA didn't pursue — so basically, the person that I knew, and the way it all kinda went down, even though it was an elongated process, was commensurate with the person that I knew. You know what I mean? It all kinda lined up. But I wasn't there. I can't be there for everything. But I guess it's one of those things where I don't want the world to tell me who my friends are and who I should associate with. That's politically, socially.
And in Brian [Warner]'s case, we have a relationship that goes back close to 30 years. The other thing that people should know, and it gets lost in the gloss here, is Manson's wife Lindsay [Usich] is a twin, and her twin Ashley is married to James Iha of the Pumpkins. So Manson's basically a part of our family. There's a deeper set of relationships there. Plus, I knew Manson's parents. So I think anybody in that situation struggles with the accusations, the seriousness of the accusations. But again, I also knew the inside baseball of the case. I knew certain people who were involved.
So you make those evaluations. At the end of the day, I feel I've made the right determination, but if things had come out — Like, people have asked me privately, "Well, what happens if...?" And I'd say, "If he's guilty, or if anyone in that situation is guilty, they should go to jail.
Elsewhere in the interview, Caramanica brings up Corgan's fellow self-aggrandizing Chicago star Kanye West, someone with whom Caramanica has a long history. Caramanica says, "I hear a lot of Kanye in you," and Corgan asks, "Isn't it the other way around? I did come first. And by the way, when we were making Mellon Collie, Kanye was literally working one block down the street at the Gap." Corgan then talks about watching West's rise: "When I first saw his game, I thought, 'Was he influenced by the way I did this shit?' Because it was the same game — pick fights, do crazy shit. Because that game, the way I call it, is cognitive dissonance game."
At this point, Times reporter and Popcast co-host Joe Coscarelli mentions that Corgan went on Alex Jones' InfoWars before West did, and Corgan says, "Sure." Then, he goes right back to the point he was making:
But by creating the cognitive dissonance conversation, you have to choose, you understand? So when I ask you a question like, "Has my work been fairly assessed by your critical class?," it forces you to make a decision of my value. So as an artist, that's what I saw Kanye doing. It was like, "I'm gonna pick the fight and make you decide whether I'm a genius or not, whether I'm an idiot or not." That's what that game is. I wonder if he got that game from me, but maybe it was just in the water.
These are conversational jags. The main thing that Corgan seems interested in discussing, at least in this interview, is the "critical class" thing. He brings up Pitchfork many times. Here he is, for instance, talking about the revival of interest in the Pumpkins' music:
I’ve been very critical of, let’s call it the Pitchfork generation. When they sold out alternative ethos for pop domination — in essence, celebrating Rihanna as an alternative star and wiping Siouxsie [Sioux] off the map — that to me was the great betrayal of the alternative ethos. So suddenly, all the things that make alternative music so beautiful — the messiness, the uncomfortability, the dissonance, the out-of-tune guitars — it was like, "Nah, that’s just too messy. We don’t have time for that anymore. We want this perfect works where it all adds up to a perfect synth line." And a lot of good music came out. I like the music. But I was like, "How do we not fit into this anymore?"
Later on, Corgan gets into the engineered commercialism of pop music, and he brings up Pitchfork again:
You're old enough to remember when Pitchfork suddenly decided that it was OK to sell your song to a commercial... Before that, you would've been hung up on a cross as a sellout. The #1 word of the '90s was "authenticity." My favorite word, because who was defining it? Usually upper middle class white people from the East Coast telling me, who grew up in a fucking basement, what authenticity was.
When Caramanica mentions that Corgan keeps bringing up Pitchfork, Corgan says, "Don't do that." He continues:
It's a stand-in for the hipster writer class, which by the way I fought all through the '90s. The evolution of that class in the early 2000s was suddenly like, "OK, alternative music isn't shiny or bright enough, and we're gonna get a lot more clicks with Rihanna, and now we're gonna hold Rihanna up as an alternative star, and we're gonna get her all the glow of alternative and street culture without the same criticism."
In the YouTube version of the conversation, Popcast editors then put a bunch of mediocre Rihanna Pitchfork scores onscreen, a nice touch. Both hosts push back on that point in the moment, but Corgan continues, "Who did they hold up as a vision of mockery, OK? The guy sitting right here, OK? In the cultural turnover, which is to be expected, they turned everything that I stood for into a negative." He goes on to talk about the "horrible reviews" that the Pumpkins got in the '90s and refers to critics, not unfairly, as "a bunch of schlubby fucking guys."
And there's more! Here's the part where, I think, Corgan gets to the meat of his argument:
Generally speaking, your classes are fucking hypocrites. Again, I'm not trying to personalize it. This is a nice conversation. But I'm saying: You, the general lot of you, don't really believe what you pretend to believe. And the street-level value of a truly authentic and organic musician who came up from the ground is a lot more valuable than people who live in ivory towers truly understand.
That's what leads directly into the Kanye thing. On paper, the conversation probably reads a lot more contentious than it seems if you listen to the podcast or watch the video. As a card-carrying member of the hipster critic class (who has said nice things about the Pumpkins' music), I found the whole thing pretty fascinating. You can watch the full extended interview below or read the Times' selective transcript here. In the video, the Marilyn Manson stuff is around the 53:30 mark, and the Kanye talk comes in around 45:30.