Whew! Hi everyone, Bigthony Headtano here, the internet's busiest music nerd, and today it's time for some bald-on-bald violence, because once again on the channel we are talking about the smashing pumpkin himself, Mr. Billy Corgan, one of the most influential songwriters of the 1990s. Hands down, no debate on this one, and Billy, even though he doesn't have a new record out there to push, he has been doing a lot of promo lately because he's been doing a podcast.

One of the many recent interviews Billy has given recently was on an episode of The New York Times Popcast, and let me tell you, Billy was dropping some doozies on this pod. He talks about the social advantages of his age gap marriage.

Popcast: Is it helpful at all in your relationship that you two are of different generations? Billy Corgan: Well, that gets into, I don't want to make all the feminists mad.

He also questions whether or not he inspired the egotism of one Kanye West.

Billy Corgan: So as an artist, that's what I saw Kanye doing. It was like, I'm going to pick the fight and make you decide whether or not I'm a genius or not, whether I'm an idiot or not. That's what, that's what that game is. And I wonder if he got that game from me, but maybe it was just in the water. Popcast: You went on InfoWars first.

Believe it or not, Billy Corgan is so egotistical. He believes in his heart, he taught another man to be egotistical. As if Ye had not even considered being egotistical until he saw Billy Corgan. Obviously, it takes a very special guy to think that.

But for the purposes of this video, I would like to talk about the art of music criticism, because Billy also has some thoughts on that. And see this commentary, if you will, in the context of conversations we've had before on this channel, where Billy has more or less floated some conspiracy theories as to why rock music got dialed down in the 90s and 2000s. Something that when picked apart is maybe not quite as true as Billy would like us to believe.

And I think there's similar issues going on with his beliefs around music writing and criticism in the indie space too. And nobody was willing to raise the hue and cry, including the pitchfork class.

Billy Corgan: And nobody was willing to raise the hue and cry, including the pitchfork class. I was like, I'm out. Fuck all you people. Fuck all you people. Popcast: You brought up Pitchfork a lot, it seems to be occupy a substantial space (in your mind) I wonder, is it about something that was written about your band specifically? Billy Corgan: It's a stand-in for the hipster writer class, which by the way, I fought all through the 90s. The evolution of that class in the early 2000s was suddenly like, okay, alternative music isn't shiny or bright enough. And we're going to get a lot more clicks with Rihanna. And now we're going to hold Rihanna up as an alternative star. And we're going to give her all off the glow of alternative and street culture without the same criticism. Popcast: I don't want to talk about Pitchfork, but they were also championing bands at the same time. Billy Corgan: Who did they hold up as a vision of mockery? Okay. The guy sitting right here. Okay. In the cultural turnover, which is to be expected, they turned everything that I stood for into a negative. Right.

Excuse me, Billy, what? I mean, look, if you guys have been watching this channel, you know that I have my criticisms of Pitchfork. It's voice, it's writing, it's history. I've made that no secret. In fact, if I thought the music writing scene in the 2000s was near perfect and not in need of additional voices or perspectives, I probably wouldn't have started my YouTube channel. But with that being said, it is completely ahistorical to pretend that Pitchfork or any similar indie centric site, the only purpose these platforms served was to hoist up figures like Rihanna as if Billy Corgan's class and generation of artists was being replaced by Rihanna by Pitchfork, which I should get out of the way, one of the most hilarious things about that assertion is that woman doesn't even come out with music.

If something is standing in the way of praise for Billy's work in the hipster writer space, it can't possibly be a woman who's not even coming out with anything. But with that being said, as somebody who has much of the late 90s, early and mid 2000s, early and mid 2000s music culture dynamics vividly held in my memory, no, I don't ever recall there being a time where alternative music was explicitly replaced by Rihanna because of Pitchfork.

There may have been positive reviews and coverage of Rihanna's work because during the Poptimus shift of the 2000s, a lot of music writers and snotty types seem to kind of warm up to the pop music a little bit more, which is not inherently a bad thing, even if there are a lot of issues with the mainstream music industry. But with that being said, the bulk of Pitchfork's coverage, and most indie sites for that matter, revolved still around indie music and rock music, music that despite hitting a commercial peak in the 2000s, you could still very much pitch as alternative in a lot of ways.

In fact, I think you could read a lot of the indie bands that peaked in the 2000s as basically the next wave or the next iteration of what the alternative scene was going to be during that decade. In fact, a lot of those big and major bands were hugely inspired by acts like Smashing Pumpkins. But again, for Billy to act as if Pitchfork's main mission of the time period where he was coming out with some of his worst music and really on the downturn as an artist would be ignoring the fact that Pitchfork over this course of time was routinely praising and handing some of their most positive coverage to bands like Radiohead, Flaming Lips, Deer Hunter, Animal Collective.

Are these not experimental alternative bands who are doing weird things? I mean, honestly, you could argue that some of these bands creatively and aesthetically are a little bit more subversive than Smashing Pumpkins. If Billy Corgan's written a record weirder than Strawberry Jam, I haven't heard it.

Now, of course, over this period of time, are there also mainstream artists that Pitchfork very much went hard for culturally? Yes. Ye, Kanye West being one of them. However, Billy Corgan doesn't really seem to mind him. In fact, he thinks he inspired him to be egotistical. But look, as flawed as Pitchfork and many comparable platforms and music writing as practice are even in the midst of this very real Poptimist shift that Billy is talking about, none of these sites, the ones that are still successful and still being talked about today, gave up on reviewing and talking about underground and alternative music. Billy paints this paradign shift as if we live in a current day where nobody's talking about any alternative music at all, which is not true. I mean, last year, Pitchfork's album of the year was like a neo-psychedelic Latin electronic album. One of the most surprising things a site of that size has championed that hard in quite a while. But also on top of that, we currently live in an age where the influence of Billy's music, the early Smashing Pumpkins stuff, is coming around hard, inspiring a lot of rock and pop artists who are quite relevant right now. People like beabadoobee and the like. And as a result of that, Billy Corgan should honestly be celebrating this current music paradigm. People have been saying for a minute, thanks to acts like Geese and the like, rock music is back.

However, that cuts against this sky is falling chicken little narrative that Billy wants to paint, which I'm sure on some level he genuinely feels because for him, the barometer of whether or not he's relevant and whether or not rock music is truly back is whether or not people like his new music. When speaking for myself and other music critics and writers who I have had conversations with, basically the sense that I've gotten is that the reason Billy's new music isn't really beloved or praised anymore is, well, we don't really feel like it's that good.

Billy Corgan: There was a moment in my life where I was being rewarded for being completely anarchic as an artist, not as a MTV guy. Okay. And at some point that all goes away. And then you got people younger than you holding you up as a vision of mockery. Here's what not to do. Mocking, bullying, laughing. And why they're holding up pop people is if they're Jesus walking on water. And you're like, I'm a guy with crooked teeth.Like, what the fuck do you want me to do? By the way, I'm still one of the best songwriters in the world. Generally speaking, your classes are fucking hypocrites. What I'm saying is you, the general lot of you don't really believe what you pretend to believe. And the street level value of a truly authentic and organic musician who came up from the ground is a lot more valuable than people who live in ivory towers truly understand.

Okay, first off, I want to say, in regards to the Popcast, I get that on some level they're just letting him talk and talk and talk because the more he yaps, the more clips and footage they have to post onto the internet. But how are you going to sit there while he's calling you a hypocrite to your face and just take that? Stand up for yourself! Because how are you going to sit here and say, you guys don't actually believe what you believe? I don't believe that you actually like Beyonce when you say you like Beyonce. How do you know? I'll tell you this, I can name probably 25 to 40 recently released pop albums that I would rather listen to than Zeitgeist or Oceania or Sear or any of the Atom acts like as music writers and commentators, especially ones who contribute to indie centric platforms, should we be doing our best to be a friend to the new and be supportive of bold and envelope pushing and forward thinking ideas and maybe not devote all of our focus and all of our coverage and all of the cultural thrust and capital that we have in our hands to just simply praising pop artists or industry artists who are going to get the acclaim, are going to get the sales and are going to sell out the tours anyway? Sure. Yes, of course.

The issue is, from what I can see, there's no shortage of that. There are new up and coming and exciting acts being championed every day. The problem is Billy is receiving the very lukewarm and negative receptions to his new music and basically projecting that into how critics must feel about all new alternative music, which is not true, not even in the slightest. So again, this is just so dumb. It's such an annoying, stupid conversation. Can we please stop letting Billy Corgan start it and just force him to come to terms with the fact that he should be writing better songs right now? Because the sooner we do that the sooner we can maybe stop hearing his whining and instead hear some better tunes. And I think I'm going to leave it there.

Thank you very much for watching. Over here next to my head, it's another video you can check out. Hit that up or a link to subscribe to the channel.

Anthony Fantano, Billy Corgan, forever.