The bands Chris Cornell thought were complete sellouts: “I knew it would happen”
Throughout his entire life, Chris Cornell never struck anyone as the kind of person who would bat down any other bands.
He knew what he liked and what he didn’t like, but there were far too many instances where people were doing their own thing for him to get too worked up about what someone else was taking from him. But when looking at how the Seattle scene ended up unfolding, it wasn’t long before most of the biggest names in the genre wanted absolutely nothing to do with grunge music.
The mainstream wasn’t where any of them felt comfortable, and while Cornell was the one person who seemed to be the most cut out to be a rock and roll star, it was only a matter of time before the band ended up going their separate ways anyway. But when a movement becomes that big, it doesn’t take long for the rest of the world to want five more of what they had already had.
That might have been good news for some Seattle hopefuls, but that also meant that some musicians who had no business being an alternative musician were trying to become stars. Some of the biggest names in music were now looking at the flannel shirt crowd as nothing but another trend coming out at the time, and Cornell was less than impressed with what the non-Seattle bands were doing.
That doesn’t mean that everyone not from the Northwest was automatically bad by any stretch. Smashing Pumpkins were kindred spirits with the Seattle scene despite coming from Chicago, and Trent Reznor was making a name for himself playing caustic music with Nine Inch Nails, but it started to look a little bit more desperate when bands like Silverchair started to become the biggest thing in the world.
Because, really, these first “post-grunge” bands seemed to take all of the lessons that the old guard had to teach and didn’t apply a single one of them. A lot of them had their eyes set on stardom from the word go, and while that’s not necessarily a bad thing in the industry, it does come off a bit more disingenuous coming from a genre that was all about trying to make the strangest music out there.
And from the moment that Cornell became a star, he knew that these sellout bands were bound to come up sooner or later, saying, “I knew right then that somehow the industry was going to be able to capitalise on it, in a way that would convolute the whole thing and create, in a sense, a genre out of it that they could control, repackage and sell. I couldn’t imagine what that music would sound like, but I knew it would happen. When it did materialise, it was Stone Temple Pilots, Silverchair and Days of the New.”
Not all of these are legitimately bad by any means, but when looking at their track record, it’s not like any of them were breaking new ground. In fact, the only post-grunge band that seems to get a pass amongst the Seattle faithful is probably Foo Fighters, and the only reason they do is that they have one of the greatest musicians from the Seattle scene already in the group.
So while you shouldn’t swear off bands like Days of the New or Stone Temple Pilots by any means, Cornell knew that it wasn’t the purest kind of grunge out there. There were more than a few bands that never got the attention that they deserved, and the fact that fans settled for ‘Touch Peel and Stand’ over any of Mudhoney’s work was the real tragedy in Cornell’s eyes.
