Billy Corgan on ‘Jerk’ Anderson Cooper: ‘Attacking Me for Doing Charity!’

Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan doesn’t understand what led CNN’s Anderson Cooper to mock him on-air for helping a local charity.

Last month, Cooper aired a “Ridiculist” segment mocking Corgan for posing with his two cats on the cover of PAWS Chicago, the magazine of a no-kill animal shelter in the rock star’s hometown. “Perhaps Billy Corgan is, I don’t know, off his alternative rocker,” Cooper said, “but I think maybe there’s more to this. Maybe he’s being ironic, or maybe when the cool rock stars start doing less rockstar-y things, it kind of makes us face our own mortality.”

In a lengthy HuffPost Live interview on Tuesday, Corgan expressed to host Caroline Modarressy-Tehrani his palpable disgust over how “jerk” Cooper was “attacking me for doing charity.”

He also suggested that “If you look at the subtext of what he’s saying, he’s saying, ‘Don’t disappoint me.'”

Corgan further lamented how Cooper attacked him with “headlines”-like sensationalism, forcing the rocker to counter with his own attention-grabbing moves like a Smashing Pumpkins t-shirt captioned “Fuck You, Anderson Cooper.”

Watch the full interview below (Cooper bit starts ~12:00), via HuffPost Live:

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