Image Courtesy of Martha's MusicSmashing Pumpkins' Billy Corgan famously did not get along with Kurt Cobain. However, just because they weren't buddies doesn't mean that Corgan didn't respect the Nirvana frontman.
"Now, [Cobain] and I didn’t necessarily get along. But I like to sing his praises, because he really was that talented," Corgan told U.K. newspaper The Independent. "I like to think the world with him would have been a better place, and I like to think a lot of the crap music that followed wouldn’t have existed if he had been around to criticize it. Because he had the moral standing to slay generations with a strike of the pen."
"In the purest sense of the word, we were competitors," he continues. "He and I were the top two scribes, and everybody else was a distant third."
A fair amount of animosity between the two '90's alt-rock heroes stemmed from Corgan's past relationship with Cobain's wife, Courtney Love. In October, Love said in an interview with BBC Radio 6 that the Pumpkins' seminal album Siamese Dream was almost entirely about her.
"[Corgan] stopped writing about me and then he stopped having hits," she said.
The newest Smashing Pumpkins album, Monuments to an Elegy, comes out on December 9.
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