Billy Corgan Attacks 90’s Grunge Bands: “As Far as I’m Concerned, Fuck Them”

Just when you thought he could go a week without saying something deemed as a social faux pas. Having taken on Radiohead, and the entire original Smashing Pumpkins’ line up, Corgan now has the entire grunge movement in his cross hairs, and is firing rapidly.

According to Fuse, who recently interviewed the famous Smashing Pumpkins’ frontman as he does the media circuit following the release of the band’s latest album Oceania, Corgan’s beef stems from the current crazy number of 90’s grunge acts re-forming and re-touring their original brand, cashing in on the profits. In Corgans eyes, this is an absolute affront to the Grunge ideals, telling Fuse: “My point of having a problem with nostalgia acts for the artists that are from the grunge generation is it basically subverts the original meaning of the grunge generation’s music, which is rebellion…So basically, everybody in their 40s are now all phoning in, let’s call it for what it is. And yeah, maybe [they will] put out one new song on the greatest hits album, but it’s not really getting back on the horse.”

Billy continued explaining that the process of reunion tours for grunge acts is against the message of the original movement. “As far as I’m concerned, fuck them, because they’re lazy or they’re scared. I grew up in a generation that had a message. Where is that message? If it’s going to be subverted by simple economic downturns, then the message wasn’t real at all.”

Corgan singled out one band in particular, Pavement, who actually singled The Smashing Pumpkins out before it was cool, back in 1994, with the song Range Life, which contains the lyrics ‘Out on tour with the Smashing Pumpkins / Nature kids, but they don’t have no function / I don’t understand what they mean and I couldn’t really give a fuck.”

“No better case than Pavement, complaining about me in the ’90s, now doing the greatest hits tour… Why? Ca-ching in. Maybe that’s why they were obsessed with integrity, because they didn’t have any”, Corgan said.

Billy and The Smashing Pumpkins will be in town for Splendour in the Grass; that’s so soon, you can almost taste it. I wonder what Billy will pick on next; we should have a competition of guessing it.

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