Excerpt from Politico interview: “Beneath their station in life”

Here is a partial transcript of an interview with Billy Corgan conducted yesterday by Politico’s Patrick Gavin, who asked Corgan about his testimony regarding the so-called “Performance Rights Act”.  In the transcribed segment, Corgan talks about one of his reasons for supporting the House bill:

There’s nothing worse to me than an elder artist who deserves to retire gracefully who’s forced back out on the road, maybe past their prime, because they’re not getting the revenue streams they should have gotten.  I believe it was Congresslady Waters who brought up the point, or maybe it was Ms. Jackson Lee, about how many African-American artists were taken advantage of in the past, and that’s a huge thing.  So you can imagine some of these Motown artists, Stax artists from the past, so they never really got paid for creating what are great works of art in American culture, and they’re forced into, you know, different forms of poverty or having to do things that are probably beneath their station in life.  And that’s something that touches me very personally as a fan particularly of older music.