Remember when you still had the capacity to laugh at Billy Corgan defending Nickelback?
Today every hour brings some fresh hell in the form of another actor, director, comedian, or musician accused of sexual misconduct, a bracing recalibration of what constitutes a newsworthy scandal that’s left us all with little room in our overtaxed brains for just basking in the lukewarm heat of lower-wattage stories. Do you even recall what it was like? To read about some celebrity saying something slightly dumb or petty or risible in a purely minor-key fashion, then bandy about jocular responses that didn’t have to take into account anyone’s pain or systemic oppression? Remember when show business news was mostly just stupid? When we might have shared an inconsequential laugh at Billy Corgan defending Nickelback? Steal away with us now to those simpler times. It’s not hurting anyone, for once!
The Smashing Pumpkins frontman—who recently reclaimed the grown-man moniker William Patrick Corgan—shared some of that age-ripened wisdom on today’s foremost forum for it, The Joe Rogan Experience. In a far-ranging, two-hour discussion that doesn’t feature any terrible political opinions or uncomfortable personal revelations, thank God, Corgan touches on his childhood, his pro wrestling side career, and the general state of the music industry. But the single moment that can provide us brief, amusing distraction from mankind’s constant, self-immolating moral crisis came when Rogan made a Nickelback joke and then Corgan got a little huffy about it, prompting him to call the band’s Chad Kroeger “an incredible songwriter.”
He then had this to say: