Billy Corgan is a very good interviewer (interviews Vai about the DLR band)

[Jimbilly]

I went rabbit trailing after seeing him interview Vai

 

[velorush]

Billy Corgan is a very good interviewer

FIFY 😉

He did permit Vai to get a few words in toward the end. 😆

Vai's humility and perspective is always refreshing. I cannot imagine the level of hubris I would project if I had even a tenth of his ability.

 

ETA: Only joking. I took Mr. Corgan's soliloquy to be less about Mr. Corgan and more of an attempt to compliment Vai, which Vai (as he always does) deflected. 

Edited August 18, 2025 by velorush

[LucSulla]

I try to watch those, but Billy talks so much that I rarely make it through. It's really not even about himself I realized this morning watching this exact clip. Two-thirds of his interviews are time he spends lining up the question, contextualizing everything to death, instead of just tossing out something and letting his interlocutor just talk.  

"I know in that period in the 80s, there was less cross cultural pollination, nor did we live in a time where everything was at least viewable in a few seconds by using a device in your pocket. My first experience was in the late 90s, and while this influence was far more well known by then, I found myself uniquely taken aback by my first actual encounter. And then I think of you, young, maybe 24-years-old, having flown across the Pacific for probably your first time. And then there is the jet lag an culture shock. I know from my own experiences when we started touring overseas that the rush of new things in strange tongues that can't be understood is both enticing and overwhelming. So I think of you, back in 1986, when the world is different from even where we were in 1996. Remember, there was no internet in any serious way. All we had were magazines. I mean, there was Weird Science, the 1985 John Hughes film, that I believe is really the first meditation on the teenage condition and how the internet might affect that, but I don't really remember that establishing a view of the internet as we would come to know it. 

So, I say all of this to ask, what was it like having Ramen for your first time - real, actual Ramen, not from a package."

That's every damn question it feels like. 

[velorush]

Cool short from that interview popped up in my feed: