The album Chris Cornell thought his fans would hate: “Some people are gonna be mad”
Every musician should feel comfortable taking some risks throughout their career. No one has a responsibility to play the same song over and over again, and it can sometimes be refreshing to get a new perspective on your material by stepping out of your comfort zone. Then again, Chris Cornell admitted to taking a massive gamble when he made his 2009 album Scream.
Given his track record for rock and roll, though, fans shouldn’t have really been surprised that Cornell wanted to push himself. As much as his voice cut through the mix of nearly every band that he was in, none of them necessarily sounded like each other outside of those insane, wailing vocals.
Temple of the Dog was meant to be a downtempo record at the best of times. Soundgarden was an art-rock take on metal throughout their discography, and when he joined Audioslave, Cornell had graduated to being the kind of stadium rock frontman that he was always meant to be. Even in his solo career, albums like Euphoria Morning sounded closer to an acoustic Zeppelin record than grunge.
After putting Audioslave on the back burner, the announcement that Cornell was going to be working with pop guru Timbaland on his next album did trigger some alarm bells. It’s only natural for Cornell to work outside of his wheelhouse, but the thought of one of the greatest voices in rock working with the guy who worked magic for Justin Timberlake and Missy Elliott was going to be a tough pill to swallow.
It’s not like Cornell wasn’t aware that Scream was going to piss off his fanbase as well, telling The Strombo Show, “Even when I made the decision that it was something that I wanted to do, I said, ‘What’s the fallout going to be like?’. Even Timbaland said the first day we sat down, ‘Some people are gonna be mad,’ and I was like, ‘I know’. Then I thought past that because I’ve been through that before with Audioslave.”
Then again, maybe Mr Mosley was onto something when he told Cornell it was a bit of a risk. There are a lot of great moments on Scream, but seeing Cornell so drastically switch up his sound on the record did get a lot of people scratching their heads a little more than they should have. It’s one thing to play up the frontman schtick, but seeing the singer behind ‘Spoonman’ suddenly try on his best Timberlake impression is a little bit hard to take in.
While Scream is definitely a flawed record, and people would have to stretch to call it great, it’s still an important record in Cornell’s discography. Even though the gamble didn’t pay off, this was a way for him to let out that artistic side of himself before turning to more acoustic-based music later in his career.
If anything, it’s albums like this that should serve as a reminder to fans about what their favourite artists can do. People can scream all they want about how they wanted ‘Like A Stone Pt. 2: Still Stoned’, but would Cornell really have been satisfied if he was put into that box for his entire career?
