The Onion: Why should anyone buy your record?

James Iha (guitars): Well, by buying anything these days, we step into a bourgeois quagmire of sorts. We are all victims of what Marx called a false consciousness, whereby the purchase of the hard-rocking alternative angst of The Smashing Pumpkins has somehow freed us from our chains. We still exist in the wide-awake nightmare of the dominant class.

O: Do you think your record will help people?

JI: Help people? I need help. You need help for even asking. In our self-made postmodern apocalypse, we are eating, breathing, eBaying our way into oblivion. Art is dead.

Hi this is Billy Corgan – experience – create – understand … only on screenblast.

The Beginning

Growing up I was a huge fan of David Bowie and The Beatles and Pink Floyd … and I was always intrigued by the idea that a band could be something that they're not. The Wall deals with the concept of Alien Nation, Sergeant Pepper deals with the idea of a band being some other idea and playing within a personality, David Bowie toyed with the concept that he was a man from another planet. With this last album I thought it would be way easier to assume a character to say what I wanted to say, express what I really wanted to express. So I sort of struck upon the idea that we would imitate ourselves, and that’s where the idea was born, we would sort of be a fake version of the band. In trying to write the Glass character I tried to write in shoes that I don’t necessarily feel, I tried to take it to extremes that I personally wouldn’t go, well I don’t sort of believe that I am not some type of prophet, but I got into the shoes of what it would feel like to believe that you really are possessed with something that the whole world must hear.

The Fans

Well I saw the fan participation, as a critical element of making this whole idea work. You know if the fans hadn’t become so intrigue with the whole story and there hadn’t been so much activity on the internet then this series, this animated series would never have ever happened, in an essence this is the ultimate interactive experience. We allow fans to come into a part of our world that most bands wouldn’t allow access too. As much as fans have participated in the story and tried to figure out the mysteries we lay before them, they still don’t understand the flesh and bones of it. They sort of see it as a fairy tale but its not really a fairy tale its actually a fable in the sense that its about real things and real people. Behind every part of the story is an actual there is … both a success and tragedy – its our own behind the music and I guess fittingly so better as cartoon characters [giggles] than real people.

The Girl

June in the story really embodies the female essence against Glass’s male energy, but Glass is sort of an endroganice figure and in some ways the feminine June has some male characteristics. So the lines are constantly blurred in the story, but the simplest version is that she is just his girlfriend and it all goes from there.

The Music

What we are going to try and attempt to do with the music is bring to a provision of the band. In some ways when the band were making the Machina album we doing do as good of job to completely full fill the story part because we were still worried about being The Smashing Pumpkins. In this sense there are no constraints the musical ethstetic of what the Glass and The Machines of God music represents, I think musically it will be a little bit more ferocious and a little bit more futuristic. I am going to bring in outside people to mix some of the Pumpkins music bringing in some older songs cause conceptually they do fit into the story. And we are also hopping to bring in some other artists to cover some of the Pumpkins songs to bring a little bit more perspective, because there’s songs from Machina 1 and Machina 2 where I am actually singing the females sorts of versions of the songs, they were really more written from a female perspective. Well I think with some of the songs sung from a female perspective would make a lot more sense within the story.

The Future

I really hope that the entire idea of Glass and The Machines of God continues to grow and change. I don’t see it as a final process and I still believe that the story is still being written. I think over time the story will grow in people’s minds, I think it’s a very hyper world right now and it’s hard for people to take pause and see the depth of this whole project. But I think the idea of a band using its website to bring in interactivity, with the bands actual reality, not just some serving thing where you put up some pictures, and send a couple of records every once and a while, but where fans actual become part of the band and the construct of the band. I think that this is something that is going to become more and more a part of rock ‘n’ roll, because rock ‘n’ roll is bigger than the artists anyway, and it is really about the energy of the fans. Fans are not going to be satisfied at some point where they go to a concert once every 2 years, or buying some CD or downloading some tracks everytime somebody feels like putting em out. I think ultimately fans are going to own the bands, not the other way round.