The album Trent Reznor thinks embarrassed Chris Cornell: “Jesus”
Not every album is necessarily something to be proud of in rock and roll. Many artists can see every record as an opportunity to bear their soul, but if there is that much money being poured into making the perfect song, there’s a good chance that the label is going to stick their nose into everything and start wondering what they could do to create the album they think the fans would want. Trent Reznor might not have spent every waking hour of his career thinking about the fans, but he knew when he saw some of his fellow rock legends going through a creative tailspin.
Judging by what he brought to the table in the late 1980s, though, Reznor was never satisfied going in one singular direction. While it’s easy to call Nine Inch Nails industrial music plain and simple, there are subtle hints of beauty and pop magic on their records that are impossible to hear in a band like Ministry or Orgy. Reznor had the perfect ear for hooks, and even in the era of grunge, people were more than willing to give ‘Head Like a Hole’ a shot.
Because, really, Reznor’s synthesiser-heavy approach to rock and roll should have been dead on arrival once the Seattle scene took over. The whole ethos of grunge was about stripping things back to basics, but the aggression behind Reznor’s music more than made up for the piano-heavy songs, like hearing the stuttering beat on ‘March of the Pigs’ or the pure hostility of ‘Heresy.’
Once grunge fell after the death of Kurt Cobain, every band was left to fend for themselves, and Chris Cornell was now being looked at as one of the few leaders still standing. Eddie Vedder had run away from the limelight, but Cornell was every bit the rockstar that Robert Plant was, and yet after Down on the Upside, Soundgarden’s breakup left everything hanging in the balance before Cornell started his solo career.
Whereas Audioslave holds a special place in the hearts of 2000s rock fans everywhere, there was a lot more for him to explore outside of rock and roll. Out of all the people that he could work with, though, Timbaland was one of the oddest choices he could have hoped for, taking the same R&B-infused beats that he had started with Missy Elliott and Justin Timberlake and trying to pair it with Cornell’s harsh vocal tone.
There might have been a strange universe where both of these sounds could have blended well together, but Reznor remembered feeling secondhand embarrassment for the record, saying, “You know that feeling you get when somebody embarrasses themselves so badly you feel uncomfortable? Heard Chris Cornell’s newest record? Jesus.”
While Cornell admitted at the time that a lot of his fans were going to be mad, the cold response from the rest of the rock community didn’t do him any favours. He was ready for a change, but since this one was a very drastic departure, it made sense to see him start going back to his roots on his later projects, whether that was reforming Soundgarden or making acoustic-driven tunes during his solo career.
Reznor might not have been looking to drag Cornell through the mud by any means, but listening to the record, it’s hard to argue with those embarrassing claims. Every artist has the right to stretch, but seeing Cornell make his version of FutureSex/GrungeSounds was never going to please everybody.
