The band Chris Cornell and Kurt Cobain both agreed was the worst: “I was offended”
For a genre that was sound mythologised as grunge, it’s hard to think of Kurt Cobain and Chris Cornell being lumped in the same category.
Sure, they both grew up in Seattle and had some of the best hits of the 1990s, but when you look at the way they approach their songs, it was like night and day compared to everyone else in the Pacific Northwest. They both wanted their music to sound different, and even if they didn’t construct songs the same way, they at least had a common goal of what they didn’t want to sound like.
If anything, the grunge scene was already about making things sound a little bit weird. If you look at what the other bands around that time were doing before the genre blew up, Mudhoney and the Melvins weren’t exactly trying to get on the radio. It was distinctly anti-commercial, and that’s how Soundgarden and Nirvana started off when they started to perform some of their first major tunes.
Cornell may have been the one who looked like a rockstar out of anyone in Seattle, but he didn’t see himself in that way. It’s no secret that he had a lot of respect for what people like Robert Plant had done years before him, but there were also more than a few songs that seemed indebted to everything from Joni Mitchell’s strange guitar tunings to whatever strange Captain Beefheart-style influences they had, making their avant-garde tunes.
It wasn’t all that sophisticated, but at least it had nothing to do with what the hair metal scene was doing around the time. The Sunset Strip in Los Angeles had become the hub of every single wannabe rock and roll star out at the time, and while it was hardly a bad choice for any hopeful musician to start, Cornell got the idea that he wasn’t really interested in becoming the next Guns N’ Roses.
Soundgarden were at least gracious enough when Guns took them on tour, but Cornell felt like their behaviour was the exact opposite of what he wanted to do when he saw the ‘Estranged’ video, saying, “Who else is going to give a shit about the fact that he can afford that kind of attention? It goes beyond decadence; it’s spitting in the face of the people that have put you there. I was offended by it, and I don’t get offended by much.”
And it doesn’t really take a musical scholar to see what Cobain hated about Guns. Axl Rose was one of the most insufferable frontmen he had ever seen, and he would do anything to make sure they didn’t get attention, calling them “really talentless people” every single time he saw one of their videos on MTV. So when the Seattle scene made it above ground, it felt like everyone got a respite from Rose’s antics.
The order of the day had shifted, and now, suddenly, everyone was focusing on bands that had a lot more authenticity about them. No one was going to relate to a video where one of the biggest stars in the world jumps off a massive ship and goes to swim with dolphins, but they could reasonably hang out with someone like Cobain, who just wanted to talk about obscure rock bands and play his guitar as loud as he could.
So while Rose did have his own fair share of spats with the members of Nirvana over the years, he couldn’t stop what was happening. Cobain and Cornell were becoming two of the biggest stars in the world, and the only thing that Rose could do was look on and watch as the alternative revolution got underway.
