Billy Corgan says, unlike him, the mainstream media’s out of touch with Americans
Billy Corgan, founder of the mega-successful Smashing Pumpkins and a tea house in Illinois, has expressed concern that the so-called mainstream media has fallen out of touch with working class Americans. You know, the kind of people who can take off work for a month—with no consequences—to ride around in a van, interrupting people’s workdays to talk about how everyone’s working, including the guy asking questions about what it’s like to be working. Corgan says he grew up with these salt of the earth people in Elk Grove Village, and frankly, he thinks the media no longer “gets them.”
That’s the gist of what he discussed with The Loop morning radio host Mancow (of the Mancow Mullers) recently, while on the road for the second day of his 30-day tour of the country. Corgan’s attempting to see “if the American culture that I recognized as being a part of was still there,” which is presumably why he was still puttering around in Illinois when he called up the radio host.
The Corgan-Mancow conversation occurred not long after CNN reported on a Russian-compiled dossier about President-elect Donald Trump. The network didn’t actually disclose the contents (BuzzFeed did), but it was nonetheless taken to task by our future bloviator in chief over the veracity of the info therein. Without referring to CNN by name, Corgan described the incident as “a watershed day with the media,” presumably because he can’t believe journalists would incur the wrath of the “hashtag generation” which so terrifies him. But that media coverage isn’t “really in touch with the world I grew up in. I know there’s a gap there,” says the man with direct access to a well-known radio host.
Of course, all this talk about being down to earth doesn’t quite jibe with the insight Corgan shares about our affluential president-elect: “I hate to make the most obvious point: If you’ve got 10 billion dollars, you’re not hiring hookers.” But maybe the platinum-selling artist just likes to keep a foot in both worlds. In any case, there’s no questioning his follow-up remarks that “[w]e’re facing some incredible challenges in our country and our culture, and I think it’s a ‘roll up our sleeves’ time.”