Smashing Pumpkins' Billy Corgan
By Scott A. GrayIt's been a long road to Oceania, the seventh LP (eighth, if you count the first free internet release by a major artist, 2000's Machina II/The Friends & Enemies of Modern Music) by the Smashing Pumpkins. After reviving the alternative rock juggernaut for 2007's Zeitgeist with only drum deity Jimmy Chamberlin remaining from the classic line-up, mastermind Billy Corgan was met with a lot of scepticism for heading the only group among his '90s contemporaries to reform with the express purpose of creating new music. "If we don't lead with new music, we don't lead with anything," Corgan says. "We've had to go out of our way, and in many ways have suffered to paint that picture. Then you deal with this blog crowd that think you haven't written a good song since 1995." Corgan laments. "That's a strange position to be in, but I think we've persevered and Oceania is the beneficiary of our collective will to continue to push forward no matter what." With a revamped group of tremendous players comprising a new incarnation of the Pumpkins since the launch of the wildly ambitious 44-song Teargarden by Kaleidyscope (of which Oceania is a part), Corgan has reached another period of peak song creation within the framework of epic, progressive space-rock, or what used to be simply referred to as "alternative music."
What are your current fixations?
Don't really have any. I think that's the point of my life at this point. I'm getting rid of all the fixations. If there's any left I'd say it's just music.
Why do you live where you do?
[Laughs] I live in Chicago and I've tried to get out of here a bunch of times and I always seem to come back home. I don't know what it is about the combination of bad weather and the working class that seems to work for me artistically, but it seems to do well work. Music work. I guess home is home.
Name something you consider a mind-altering work of art.
That's interesting. I would say the original version of Solaris by the Russian filmmaker [Andrei] Tarkovsky. That's definitely one of those movies that when you come out the other end of it, you certainly feel different. I thought Steven Soderbergh's version was the good Hollywood version of it, but part of what attracted me to the original was the sort of meditative power of it. It's still a fascinating concept.
What has been your most memorable or inspirational gig?
I remember seeing U2 play probably only about six months after 9/11, and I was in New York during 9/11, I was living about ten blocks away from where the towers were. So, the wounds were still pretty fresh for everybody, and you know Bono, as only he can, seemed to sum up the moment on that tour. I can't remember what they were playing but they did this thing where they scrolled all the names behind them as they played and it was just one of those moments where it was like: "Okay, this is why rock and roll still means something to me." It's not about the politics, it's not about the B.S. and who's on top, it really is about when a band can seize a moment and take you somewhere. I've had a lot of those moments, but that one really jumps out.
What have been your career highs and lows?
I think I'd have a slightly different perspective than people would imagine. I think the highs have been when I've had a highly functioning band that could very quickly and readily turn new songs around into music that we could play. I would say the lows have been when alternative music was sort of swamped in by the changes in the music business combined with the shift into what I would call a precocious niche culture. Alternative music has always been niche culture and will continue to be in its truest definition but now we've broken down into ten thousand sub-genres with everybody competing for who's cooler or who's dumber and that's really sapped a lot of the power, the collective power, of an alternative band or artist to marshal forces around them ― which maybe are more in support of their ideology than their music ― that can push them and their ideas and the expansiveness of what they're bringing into the mainstream culture.
What I see is that you have this very fractionalized thing, that now those bands can't get enough steam behind them to launch into the mainstream. I think that's really sapped alternative music of its true effective power, which is to mess things up. It's basically messing things up for people who like things messed up so it's giving rise to this very safe rock and roll. I was reading an article by Chuck Klosterman about how he'd gone to see Creed and Nickleback on the same night in New York, asking "Why do people hate these bands and yet there are audiences fist pumping and singing along to every word?" It's the dichotomy of the mainstream's music and the alternative music and yet now, never the twain shall meet. We've had a few of those moments, with the Byrds singing "Eight Miles High" and having a hit with it, and Sly and the Family Stone doing this very sublime soul music. There's something that happened. There are still dangerous elements in straight-up pop. There are very radical producers doing stuff like Nicki Minaj. But it doesn't seem to be crossing over from the alternative ranks like it used to and like it had done for 50 or 60 years, and that, to me, is very suspicious, because now it's like everyone's just going to exist in their own bubble and a self-justifying bubble ― see isn't our bubble better than your bubble? And that's something I've always been against, no matter what era I lived in. It's shocking to me as someone who came of age in the '90s with the barriers we were able to break down collectively, that it's just turned into some other weird thing. Part of what we took pride in was introducing fans to stuff like Electric Light Orchestra and Mudhoney. That's what you're supposed to do. You're not supposed to just glorify your own subculture. That, to me, is very, very strange, but that's what we live in now.
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