The one band Chris Cornell never wanted to become: “The most uncool thing”
The grunge scene almost felt like its own unique entity when Chris Cornell first began Soundgarden.
While they weren’t going to be mentioned in the same breath as people like Michael Jackson or anything, there was a certain pride in having that sound that the rest of the world didn’t care about. And when Seattle blew up in the wake of Nirvana, Cornell knew which bands he needed to follow in the footsteps of and those he needed to stay far away from once the spotlight was on him.
But when listening to Soundgarden, it’s hard to think of any of their songs being written with the intent to have a single. ‘Black Hole Sun’ is one of the hookiest tunes in their catalogue, but nothing on the charts really sounded like that. It was like The Beatles if they had been given a shot of absinthe before they played, and the more progressive moments of a record like Superunknown didn’t sit right with everyone that had been used to the four-on-the-floor beats of rock and roll.
That’s because, by the numbers, rock might as well not have been a piece of Cornell’s vocabulary. He had mentioned being rescued from being a Kiss fan when he discovered Led Zeppelin for the first time, and aside from his shriek sounding more than a little bit similar to what Robert Plant could do with his old band, there was also a punk recklessness to the way that they played.
Cornell didn’t want to be the standard rock and roll frontman whenever they performed, which probably explains why a lot of their songs were more than a little bit goofy. For as heavy as a song like ‘Spoonman’ is, no one would have ever thought to make a song specifically based on one man’s ability to play the spoons, nor would anyone have considered the dark poetry that Cornell started writing on ‘Outshined’.
But one thing was for sure: they weren’t going to get mistaken for a hair metal outfit. Cornell did have the luscious locks to pull off being a hair metal frontman if he wanted to, but when looking at the rest of the rock scene at the time, ‘Big Dumb Sex’ was everything that the Seattle scene hated about the Sunset Strip. They weren’t interested in the misogynist take on rock and roll, and when it was taken seriously, Cornell made sure to clear that up real quick.
It would be a cold day in hell before he was mistaken for a glam artist, and when talking about the tune later, and Cornell said that he even had to put his Zeppelin influences on the shelf for a little bit to get any semblance of credibility, saying, “I guess because we’re American and because of our influences as kids, it sounded to people more like Sabbath or Zeppelin. That was the most uncool thing anyone could do at this point in music in this city. That was a turning point in our career as a band. Because we could play any atonal, post-punk, ridiculous, quirky shit, and everyone thought it was great.”
Even later down the line, Kim Thayil offered the same sentiment when looking back on those times, saying, “What was considered metal at the time was the kind of spandex music for the future housewives of America. Those bands sounded like the Partridge Family with fuzzy guitars. We didn’t sound like that. We didn’t look like that.” Cornell may have been the closest thing to a metal god that the Seattle scene had, but ‘Big Dumb Sex’ really tells everyone all they needed to know about what they were about.
They wanted to take the piss out of rock and roll in a sense, and in doing so made some of the greatest hard rock that anyone had ever come up with back in the 1990s. They weren’t going to be lumped into the metal category, but there were bound to be a few people that were emulating Cornell when making their first steps into heavy music.
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