The “bullshit” genre Chris Cornell wanted to see die
The entire grunge scene wasn’t meant to be the destroyer of genres when Chris Cornell first started making music.
He wanted to make the best music that he could that was underground, and even if he had the voice that could match nearly anyone else’s in the rock sphere, there was no point in his thinking that he was going to be one of the greatest frontmen of all time when Soundgarden started. But when the rest of the world caught on to what Seattle was doing, Cornell felt that the time was right for rock and roll to stomp out a few more genres in its path while it had the chance.
Then again, Cornell wasn’t the kind of person who wanted to see other bands become irrelevant or anything like that. In fact, there’s a good chance that no one in Seattle was looking to absolutely destroy the Sunset Strip, but since that style of music had been going on for five years too many by the time that Nirvana broke through, it felt like no one would have been considered cool listening to the new Skid Row or Warrant album ever again.
There are certainly a lot of bands that got unfairly swept under the rug at the time, but the more misogynistic angle that they were working with was already something Cornell wanted to leave in the past. He was already the kind of massive frontman that could sing like Robert Plant, but he was also living proof that bands could still get their point across and have millions of fans without talking about the usual sex and drugs topics that everyone else did.
And when you look at Cornell’s lyric sheet, it’s more than a little bit dark when talking about his own demons. It’s hard to really gauge what some of his songs are really about, but when he cut down to the bone on songs like ‘Outshined’, he put a spotlight on the internal problems going on with grunge. A lot of these bands were dissecting their emotions in song, and they weren’t leaving anything to the imagination.
But right when rock and roll started to get a little bit more real, it looked like hip-hop was starting to carry the reins for the toxic side of lyricism. There was no shortage of great songs coming from everyone from Dr Dre to Snoop Dogg, but when you listen to ‘Nuthin but a G Thang’, it’s not like they are talking about living a clean lifestyle or being super respectful to women when the song is over.
And with the music getting even more focused on sex and drugs, Cornell felt that style of rap needed to go the same way that the hair metal bands did all those years ago, saying, “If I had something to do with the killing of bullshit, I’m thrilled. I’m waiting for it to happen in rap. You look at people with the gold jewellery, the Mercedes they can’t afford, rapping about how much money they make. You can’t help but think at some point, rap fans will think, ‘Fuck this. There’s these other guys over here and they don’t do that, and they’re encouraging me to be myself.’”
But whereas grunge wiped hair metal off the face of the Earth, it’s not like there wasn’t some rap music that didn’t cater to the more hedonistic lifestyle. There were plenty of artists willing to be more playful with their songs, and even though Dr Dre might not have been the best wholesome figure for kids to latch onto, it was a lot easier for others to gravitate towards people like A Tribe Called Quest if they got too disgusted with what the mainstream was doing.
Because at the end of the day, hip-hop did thrive on that shocking angle when it first debuted, and while most people would have been glad to see it die, it wouldn’t have been able to open the door for more progressive minds in the hip-hop sphere. Just like people needed to go through years of Aerosmith and Led Zeppelin to hear Soundgarden, it might have needed a few more years before people started to identify with what someone like Kendrick Lamar was saying.
