‘Superunknown’: grunge’s answer to prog rock
By the time genres like grunge came along, the glory days of rock and roll seemed like a thing of the past. There were bound to be more kids with guitars angry enough to get their songs in the charts, but there were hardly any more opportunities for the more excessive rock and roll bands to start climbing the charts when the order of the day was authentic. So if stadium rock was out, prog-rock shouldn’t have had a prayer, but Soundgarden managed to find a way when working on their magnum opus.
Compared to most of their Seattle brethren, though, Soundgarden were a much different beast. There were commonalities in the way that they played the same clubs and bucked the trends of the mainstream, but there was always something about Chris Cornell’s impressive shout that made him fit right in alongside the greatest singers in the 1980s hard rock scene, despite Cornell himself not wanting to be caught dead onstge with Poison.
But by the time that grunge started to fall after Kurt Cobain’s death, Soundgarden were already local legends. They hadn’t reached the same heights as Pearl Jam or Alice in Chains, but Badmotorfinger was the purest form of what grunge was supposed to be, whether that was taking the raw sludge of ‘Outshined’ to radio or making the guitar tone sound menacing on ‘Rusty Cage’.
But right as grunge was on life support, Superunknown became the greatest answer to people questioning the genre’s relevance. Grunge was still alive and well as long as Cornell was singing, but anyone who had grown up listening to Alice in Chains’s riffs and Nirvana’s pop choruses was in for a rude awakening once they heard the twists and turns this album had in its arsenal.
Whereas most bands were focused on playing straight-ahead, this is the closest the genre ever came to progressive rock, even if it sounded close to what was out at the time. There were many twists and turns that no one might have seen coming, but since Cornell already sounded like an alt-rock version of Robert Plant, this was the lovechild of Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, and Pink Floyd all put under one roof.
So, what makes Superunknown a prog album?
It’s easy to classify a prog song as something that doesn’t play by the rules, but Superunknown isn’t all that different from what the rest of the world had heard from grunge. They could make anything heavy when they wanted to, but whenever someone wanted to bang their head or tap their foot to what they were hearing, they would notice something a little different in every song.
Whether it was how Cornell wrote the riff or how Matt Cameron interpreted it, almost every other song is in a different time signature other than 4/4. There had been a few songs in odd metre in grunge like ‘Last Exit’ by Pearl Jam or ‘Them Bones’ by Alice in Chains, but none of them grooved as well as ‘Spoonman’ in 7/4 time or adding an extra beat into ‘Fell On Black Days’ to make it 5/4.
That’s before even getting into the tunings on the record, which are all over the place. Outside of ‘Black Hole Sun’ being the most mainstream song, being tuned to drop-D is the least difficult one for people to get their heads around, especially looking at the detuned sounds of ‘4th of July’, tuning to strange Joni Mitchell-style chords on ‘Head Down’ or tuning to a massive open E chord like Crosby, Stills, and Nash on ‘My Wave’.
But does Superunknown work as a prog album?
Ultimately, the album was never intended to be featured among the same shelves as Genesis and Rush, but there is enough musical dexterity here to warrant people looking into something more complicated. Even if most of their songs were coming together naturally, hearing something this abnormal on a song in the 1990s was a nice palette cleanser from the same 4/4 rhythms and power chord riffs on the radio.
And it’s not like the prog tendencies have been ignored by the newer generation. While a band like The Pretty Reckless is as straight-ahead rock and roll as it gets, even they have their moments where they throw in strange time signature changes because of the influence Soundgarden had on them starting out.
It might not be everyone’s first answer when talking about 1990s prog, and chances are none of the members of Soundgarden were thinking along those lines, but Superunknown did something even better than being a traditional prog record. It helped expand the minds of kids in terms of what rock and roll could be, and that’s hardly ever a bad thing when talking about pushing the genre forward.
