Billy Corgan and Courtney Love have a lot in common. They're both enormous stars from the golden era of '90s alternative rock. They've dated. (Love says Siamese Dream is mostly about her.) They're both known for being a little more friendly to the idea of fame than their '90s grunge peers, and also vocal about their disdain for the indie scene in turn: Courtney has beefed with Bikini Kill and Pavement famously mocked the Smashing Pumpkins in their canonical 1994 song "Range Life." They both wrote Hole's biggest hit, "Celebrity Skin". They've both employed Melissa Auf Der Maur as their bassist.

And they both have a lot of complaints, still, in 2026, about ex-Sonic Youth icon Kim Gordon, who has a new album out, Play Me.

Love has made headlines this year for teasing a bogus Hole reunion and praising Geese while calling their young fans gatekeeping trolls. And now she's guested on Corgan's podcast The Magnificent Others to take more shots at Kim Gordon. (In her Geese ramblings, she'd said "I feel like it's 1990 and I'm trying to impress Sonic Youth again.") Corgan singles out Love versus the "ranks of indie girls back in the day": "They were hardly charismatic."

About 45 minutes into the interview, Corgan turns to the subject of "the pernicious and horrific meanness of the indie community at the time," and Courtney, who says she's friends with Thurston Moore now, refers to Gordon, saying "Speaking of gatekeepers, he was never a gatekeeper type. His partner was the worst." Corgan notes, "I remember in Holland I was hanging out with you and they were so mean. I was a fan and I came in to pay my respects and I was treated so rudely by them."

Love alleges that Nirvana's "Heart-Shaped Box" was sarcastically referring to Gordon when Kurt Cobain sang, "forever in debt to your priceless advice" and claims Gordon "sold all of Thurston's vinyl" to pay for Coco's college education. Corgan theorizes that the Olympia riot grrrl scene hated Love because they thought of her as a "class traitor" pretending to be from a trailer like Cobain. Love also claims to have played up her early interest in noise-punk to appease Gordon, who produced the first Hole album, Pretty on the Inside (the track "Babydoll" does bear a striking resemblance to contemporaneous Sonic Youth). "The real sellout was those of us that bent to the market, the market of Kim Gordon," she concludes. Corgan agrees, later saying those hipsters "don't have a real conception of authenticity."

For her part, Kim Gordon minced no words in her 2015 memoir Girl in a Band about either of these two. On Love, Gordon wrote, "I have a low tolerance for manipulative, egomaniacal behavior, and usually have to remind myself that the person might be mentally ill." Gordon referred to Corgan "whom nobody liked because he was such a crybaby, and Smashing Pumpkins took themselves way too seriously and were in no way punk rock."

Watch Corgan and Love continue to try and put out those 11-year-old burns below.