‘Scream’: Chris Cornell and Timbaland’s R&B catastrophe
It’s been a long time, but we’re only just starting to see rock and hip-hop regularly being welded together in a way that doesn’t lead to humiliating nu-metal bollocks. Until SZA’s ‘F2F’ and Lil Uzi Vert started making compelling arguments for how the two genres could effectively coexist, pickings were desperately slim for years. It reached a point where even the most successful artists, like producer Timbaland and Soundgarden’s late great singer Chris Cornell, absolutely couldn’t make it work.
It’s certainly not that the man didn’t try. If there’s one thing that Cornell did his entire career, it was give his 100% to everything, whether that was a good idea or not. It’s clear that Cornell exited Soundgarden with something to prove. The rift that ended the band for 12 long years came from him wanting to take their sound away from the heavy riffing that had made them one of the most popular bands of their era.
Cornell’s activity in his early solo career and time fronting Audioslave made some tentative steps away from heavy music, but his biggest leap yet wouldn’t come until 2009. For the two years leading up to that, Cornell had been on the road with Linkin Park’s Projekt Revolution and had struck up a friendship with that band’s lead singer, Chester Bennington. Clearly, Linkin Park’s agreeable, occasionally cringe-worthy fusion of hip-hop and rock had rubbed off on Cornell.
The next time he went into the studio, it was with a plan to remix his entire last solo album, 2007’s Carry On, with the man whose sound defined 2000s hip-hop, Timbaland. The two got on so well that the project expanded into an entirely new studio album, 2009’s Scream. Tragically, the two artists have nothing but positive things to say about the making of the record. In a radio interview for Ryan Seacrest’s ‘On Air’, Timbaland rather shockingly called the record “the best work I’ve done in my career”. A quick reminder that this man produced ‘Get Ur Freak On’ and ‘Dirt Off Your Shoulder’.
A part of me wants to like this record. Or at least respect such a dramatic swing for the fences, but the resulting product is mostly boring as sin, peppered with some of the absolute worst things that either man has recorded. Single ‘Part Of Me’ is a humiliating attempt to make a club banger, and the title track goes for ‘Cry Me A River’ style moody pop thrills but instead brings out the worst of both creatives. Cornell’s usually paint-stripping voice lost all power and colour among Timbalands rigid, static beats. What you’re left with sounds like a noisy hairdryer going off during a commercial for a particularly futuristic shower gel.
In 2022, Timbaland made a song for his Bored Ape NFT alter-ego Congo. Scream is still probably the nadir of his whole career. Since there’s so much talent involved on the record, how does it all go so wrong? I think the key lies in a quote Cornell gave to The Guardian at the time that he probably didn’t realise was the death knell of the whole project. In the interview, he said, “I don’t listen to Beyoncé or Jennifer Hudson records. To me, R&B means Aretha Franklin, who is otherworldly.”
There you have it. It’s cool that he shouts out Aretha Franklin, but he’s not making a classic R&B album. The music he’s made on Scream sounds a lot more like those Jennifer Hudson and Beyonce records he’s subtly dismissing as not “real R&B”. It’s an old person’s idea of a young person’s music, where he doesn’t feel the need to change up his singing or songwriting style to fit the bill. He seems to think that all he has to do is be Chris Cornell, and then Timbaland will R&B-ify it to make it cool, and that’s not how anything works.
There’s a reason the likes of Death Grips, Denzel Curry and JPEGMAFIA make rap-rock crossovers that don’t just work but outright define the genre in the modern day. It’s because they understand both genres and deploy them in a way that complements each other. What we have with Scream is more akin to that Stan Lee cameo in The Simpsons, where he destroys a kid’s toy Batmobile by crushing an action figure of The Thing into it. Music doesn’t work through sheer force of will. To make something new, you’ve got to understand what you’re using to craft it.
