The Smashing Pumpkins' Billy Corgan talked frankly about how the opposition to the conservative faction in the U.S. hasn't trickled down to its artists and their work. Corgan told Australia's Triple M radio station, "I'm curious about that, because the one thing that I think is historically different about this time, if you look at the turbulent '60s or the turbulent '70s in the U.K., stuff like that, there seems to be almost a consensus between the musical class and the political class, so there doesn't seem to be friction. I mean, there's friction against one political party, but there doesn't really seem to be a counterculture, which is kind of strange."
He went on to say, "Like they said in the last election — this is not my words; this is what I read, somebody said — if you're in agreement with the big tech companies, the government, and the media, you're not against anything. So it's kind of strange — and I'm saying this for young musicians — will there be a class of musicians that rises up against what is now seemingly a social consensus in America? Because I can't say that's ever been the case that I've ever seen in my lifetime, and going back historically, that hasn't been the case. There's a weird alignment that's going on that doesn't seem to be engendering protest music; it seems to be more self-congratulations or something."
A while back, Billy Corgan explained to us the lasting impact of his band and other '90s rockers on American society: ["As much as the music of the late-'60s was about a flowering consciousness, the music of the early-'90s was about a flowering of reality, and kind of calling America out for the phony, kinda shiny object that it is. And that's it. We just shattered it to pieces. Nobody knew how to pick up their own pieces, including ourselves, and we're still dealing with that. But there's an arc of energy there between 1989 and 1994 that's unmistakable."] SOUNDCUE (:28 OC: . . .1994 that's unmistakable)
Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan On Impact Of ’90s Music :
