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Billy-Corgan1.jpg

Billy Corgan Is Still a Smug, Sniveling Prick

By Dustin Rowles | Celebrity | December 5, 2014 |

By Dustin Rowles | Celebrity | December 5, 2014 |


Three quick things: 1) Growing up, I adored Smashing Pumpkins. I listened to Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness at least 4,800 times (in fact, I am listening to it as I write this); 2) Smashing Pumpkins may have also been the worst live band I have ever heard in my life. Outside of a studio, Billy Corgan’s voice sounds like a mewling cat being fisted by the Jolly Green Giant. The only thing that compares — and it’s a distant second — is hearing Adam Duritz’s sonorous whine live, which sounds like a coyote yowl making love to paper shredder.

Third: Corgan is a sniveling, peevish prick, and he always has been. He’s rock-star Gargamel. He’s got no respect for anyone’s ideas for his own, and he always seemed to have a special kind of disdain for his audience.

I bring this up because Smashing Pumpkins are back (or at least, a version of them, featuring Billy Corgan as frontman), so Corgan is giving interviews, and those are always fun if you’re into blistering arrogance. For instance, here’s Corgan on his relationship with Kurt Cobain back in the 90s:

“In the purest sense of the word, we were competitors. He and I were the top two scribes, and everybody else was a distant third.”

Really? “Despite all my rage, I am still just a rat in a cage.” Real poetry there, Billy. But what about Eddie Vedder, who says that Kurt Cobain’s death left him with survivor’s guilt.

“That would be Eddie Vedder,” Corgan snorts. “Somehow he makes it about him even when it’s about somebody else!”

I would take Vedder’s narcissism over Corgan’s arrogance anyday. But don’t blame Billy for his arrogance! Blame his upbringing.

“But as I like to tell my daddy, if I’d been loved right, with the gifts that I had, I might have been a classical composer, having a very quiet life and a glass of wine, and not have been in this dirty pop business.”

Welcome back, Billy. You’re a prick, but I will concede that “1979” is one of the best songs of the 90s.

Source: The Independent