Billy Corgan recently discussed a rejected Smashing Pumpkins’ “I Am One” music video and why the band rejected it due to feeling the record label was taking advantage of the Grunge explosion by commissioning it.
“It’s Video Flashback Friday! ‘I Am One’ is the tune, with a video we rejected at the time simply because the record company commissioned it to take advantage of the grrunge explosion. Not sure when or why the footage was shot (obviously at the Metro/Chicago) but the result was essentially buried until 2000.
#smashingpumpkins @smashingpumpkins @chamberdrums @jamesihaofficial @jjjschroeder @jackbass89 #neversayneverrr.”
Corgan also recently wrote on Instagram, “Knowing most don’t read these missives is a somewhat dangerous temptation. Because it does encourage me to speak freely. But let’s be honest: free speech is a rapidly devolving concept, and many are now faced with a historical choice, which is speak your peace and invite anything but, or simply stay quiet and watch the world as you know it disintegrate before what I am consistently told is my untrustworthy eye. As in: ‘Hey mister, what you see happening isn’t really happening. Got it?’
I beg to differ, and hence the conundrum. So let’s just say i choose to speak through my work, and if you can hear what’s actually being said, all the better.
It also occurs to me that the need for othering, occlusion, or what passes nowadays for social shame has been carefully engineered over millennia as a most decided instrument of control. Or, to put it bluntly, what would be the need for such use of force. Or-or as Mick Jagger once said, ‘Why break a butterfly on a wheel?’ Lastly, I would like to illuminate something I said in a recent interview, where I referred to my rejection of the shadow world that is presented to us all as some new kind of Utopia. If you see the world through your window a simple, polemic choice: real or not real, sunny or raining, your humanity should kick in and say ‘It is my wish to know.’ And it’s that wish that comes from your own knowing that makes these choices easy. Break a false dream and you are free. Accept it and you will work at the behest of something unseen. To me, the stuff of nightmares. To others, cold comfort.”
