iMatt :: The Blog of Matt Clare

I picked up a copy of risen (risenmagazine.com) today because Billy Corgan was on the cover. As you may or may not know, I’m a huge Smashing Pumpkins fan. Not only do I have over forty of the bands released disks *, but more than that, I consider Mr. Billy Corgan a major inspiration in my life. Every teen has their angst, Billy channeled his into expressions of love, sadness and happiness that shaped how I see the world. That resonates with me (and most other bloggers).

The interview covers how Billy suffers his fame willingly, but suffers none the less. He said the lowest point was when one of the staff members at the funeral service for his mother (which, not mentioned in the article, is not his biological mother….) said “I’m sorry to hear about your mother. Can I have an autograph?”. The supposed, hard hitting magazine printed that Billy told him to ‘f-uck’ off. Building on that, Billy spoke about a tabloid article that he saw with photos of Brittany Spears at the beach and the caption ‘Cellulite at 22?’. Celebrity is pain: it’s pain to be a celebrity, it’s pain to be holding yourself up to that (body) image.

One section that I thought really captured what is Billy Corgan was his response to ‘Would you rather be blissfully ignorant, or have knowledge and be a little grumpy?’.

The other day I was looking at my cats, and they were blissfully being cats, chasing a bug or something, and I thought, God, I’m going to have to bury these guys some day. That’s the beauty of life; you can’t really appreciate the depth of your love for something unless you’re willing to embrace the sorrow that exists as the expression of life. It’s there. If you want to stay in the moment of oh, that’s cute, the cats are playing, I don’t think you can get to the depth oh how amazing it it that these two little creatures are programmed to chase a bug.

That’s Billy Corgan.

The new album sounds good and I can’t wait to hear it. As for the poetry of Blinking With Fists, his book, I’ll be honest: I relate to the subject of poetry, and if it’s at all abstracted I don’t get it.

So that’s my contribution to the cult of celebrity pain.

* I also have a whole bunch of bootleg MP3s, but as Billy once said, if you’re after our bootlegs then you probably have already bought all the albums you’re going to buy. Just don’t perpetuate the bad live shows.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 7th, 2004 at 23:37 and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.