Billy Corgan on Smashing Pumpkins’ New Tour, Quitting Twitter

How did Liz Phair wind up on this tour? It’ll be great to see her since she hasn’t played much in recent years.
Very early on in discussions about the tour, her name came up, and I said “yes” instantly. I’m a big fan of Liz. She truly represents the kind of independent spirit I’m out here trying to find. She’s also a real groundbreaking artist, which I think is a perfect fit for us.

Might she perform with you guys at any point during the tour?
I have invited her to join us on some of the stuff because, like I said, it’s very vocal-heavy as far as group singing and stuff, so I would love to have her involved. We haven’t had a discussion yet on what that might be. I’m not sure she wants to do it, but I’m hopeful. 

You quit Twitter last year. Do you find it refreshing to be free from that?
I’m not a big fan of social-media models that take a lot from people who have notoriety and don’t give a lot in return. I think Twitter, in particular, has been a really poor model in terms of return.

But you used it for years.
Yeah, I would argue to my detriment.

It must be nice to not have random people just taking shots at you all day long. Things get so toxic on there.
I agree with that, but you can make that argument across the entire social-media spectrum. I think ultimately artists are gonna figure out how to take advantage of the opportunity to talk people in a very direct way without having to deal with this empowerment of the mob. And then even worse, you work for an esteemed publication, allegedly, and then you have the troll puppets sit around and literally comb through everything you do and then run an article about the size of Manson’s penis. I don’t know if you saw that headline. That was my favorite recent one.

I remember seeing that one.
Yeah, I did a video with a friend of mine who works for a wrestling company I work with. We did a funny little video where he was talking about the size of his penis, and I jokingly said that Manson’s was bigger. It’s obviously a spoof video and we were just joking around, but there were literally headlines of “Billy Corgan Talks About the Size of Marilyn Manson’s Penis.”