The one genre that Chris Cornell couldn’t stand hearing: “Nobody got it”
In the golden age of grunge, people didn’t really know what to do with a band like Soundgarden.
Everyone in the group were the best that Seattle had to offer, but even for a band that seemed poised to take over the world, there was no chance that they were going to gel with bands that had more of a punk edge to them like Mudhoney. Chris Cornell certainly wasn’t going to keep his voice at bay to satisfy fans, but when looking at their records, he had a better idea of what he didn’t want his legacy to be.
Because when you look at the biggest names coming out of Seattle, Soundgarden seemed to be the most indebted to classic rock whenever he made a new record. A lot of the songs may have been a little bit uneasy to get under the fingers when trying to parse out their guitar riffs, but it’s a lot easier to jam along to a song that’s in seven when you have a voice like Cornell’s on a song like ‘Outshined’.
Judging by what Cornell had been doing for the past few years, though, he felt that he needed to be something more than what he heard on the radio. There was no shortage of bands that were taking their cues from Led Zeppelin when they first began, but Cornell felt that everyone got it wrong when they started piling on the layers of lipstick and making every song sound like it was all about partying.
There was certainly room for the typical rock and roll tropes that everyone learned from people like Aerosmith, but the hair-metal movement seemed like the most boneheaded version of what rock and roll was meant to be. Sure, the bands had decent guitar riffs, but outside of Van Halen, every other act coming out of Los Angeles was always going to be a little bit more stupid than the last.
So when Soundgarden came out with Badmotorfinger, he wanted it to be the antithesis of what those hair bands were doing, saying, “If you took the kimonos and the hip-shaking and the light show from Led Zeppelin, instead of the rhythm section and the songs, you fucked up. I mean, Jimmy Page used to wear argyle vests and play guitar with a bow and was into Satanism—that’s way fucking cooler than his dragon bellbottoms. That’s pretty simple, but nobody got it. So to the rock world, Badmotorfinger was the first real classic of thinking-man’s metal.”
And since Cornell wasn’t able to take the piss out of the genre on ‘Big Dumb Sex’, the least he could do is try and beat the hair metal bands at their own game. He could make Zeppelinesque riffs just like everyone else, but there was a lot more grit behind a song like ‘Rusty Cage’ that you weren’t going to find from the average metal song, especially if you were looking to bands like Motley Crue and Poison as your rock gods.
Cornell had something more to say, and even when the songs didn’t make a lot of sense, you could tell that he had more passion than anyone else in Los Angeles. His brand of singing was usually abused to high heaven every time Cinderella sang, but if the rest of the bands from that genre seemed to be screaming their heads off and hoping for the best, Cornell had tested every boundary of what his voice could do by the time that he made his classics.
So while Badmotorfinger did signal the beginning of a new regime in metal music, it was also a wave goodbye to what everyone had been dealing with for years on end at this point. Everyone had become fed up with the corporate approach to rock, and the next best thing was to get a musician that could actually manage to make people feel something again.
