“Bright, oh so bright”: Billy Corgan March 54 – Music

Recorded in just four months, Siamese Dream (1993) is one of the great fruits of the grunge of the 90’s. The Smashing Pumpkins had already won the critics with Gish, his debut album, and now Billy Corgan was taking full control, recording the guitars and basses himself and composing everything. Thus, and with the help of Butch Vig (producer of Nevermind, by Nirvana), a classic was born with hits like Today, Cherub Rock The Disarm.

Interviewed much later, on the occasion of the launch of Monuments to an Elegy (2014), Corgan predicted before the press a regression of the music industry to the era of the single, the 1950s, because, he said, “people no longer have the patience to even listen to ten songs.” Subordinate to the commercial benefit of technology, he pointed out then, in our culture music has been degraded to a mere marketing tool. A couple of years before, in full promotion of his album Oceania (2012), the frontman of the Smashing Pumpkins, speaking of the Radioheads in an interview with Antiquiet, declared that he “peed in such pomposity” (on the other hand, he would recognize Radiohead in 2015 as “the last band to do something new with the guitar”, adding that alternative music “has not evolved in twenty years”).

William Patrick Corgan – how he signed, with the formality of his full name, the album Ogilala (2017), which was followed Shiny and Oh So Bright (2018), an album by Smashing that, together with Corgan and guitarist Jeff Schroeder, rejoins the members of the original line-up James Iha and Jimmy Chamberlin, and in which that prodigy called Silvery Sometimes (Ghosts)– He also fired back at the legendary gangs returning “just to pay another visit to the cash register.”

We randomly mention some of his many controversial statements because, paradoxically, many tend to accuse Billy Corgan – one of the most lucid voices on the music scene of our era, and one of the few who really understand it (although he does not seem willing to be subdued due to their demands, which is very different from not knowing them and even more different from not understanding them) – from having “stayed in time”, from “not knowing how the business works today” (when “it is not enough to launch a good album and hope that it sells by itself, since today you have to promote the records », etcetera, etcetera). On more than one occasion they have asked him why he does not go on tour or why he does not release all the new materials with his name; Corgan is adamant: The Smashing Pumpkins, he says, is for him a “concept” with his own strength, a force independent of the industry and even of Corgan himself, even though he, Corgan, is the only original member and the one who currently does all the work. job. Paraphrasing Pascal, art has its reasons, which influencers ignore.

The bad press that always surrounds Billy Corgan painting him as “critical” and “negative” is an unavoidable simplistic reaction in our impoverished cultural and intellectual context. In fact, Corgan is often generous in his comments. After the death of rapper Lil Peep (1996-2017) at the age of 21, he was one of those who knew how to interpret what he had unleashed: «this set of emotions in the suburban underworld, this kind of anguish from, what? Where are we going? What is the suburban dream that all of our parents were promised? It was empty, ”as he said in 2018 in an interview with BUILD. On the other hand, having unpleasant opinions does not necessarily make you a hateful character for all sectors of the public (although it does for the majority); To some, far from generating rejection, this open exposition of one’s ideas may seem honest and human and inspire sympathy – how can we forget, at this point, the chapter Homerpalooza of The Simpson, where Homer meets the clever musician. In addition to being a great artist, Billy Corgan may be right or wrong in his ideas, but he always thinks and problematizes fundamental points of today’s society in its relations with culture, creation and industry.

Corgan reported earlier this month that the Smashing Pumpkins have begun recording all 33 songs for their upcoming album, billed in October as “a kind of rock opera.” For some of us, this is great news, whether or not it is on the front pages of the specialized press, whether or not it goes viral on social media. Billy Corgan was born in the town of Elk Grove, Illinois, on March 17, 1967, exactly 54 years ago today. We crank up the volume and raise our cans and handles to toast the health of one of the most interesting musicians of our time and a man who has never been afraid to speak his mind.