The saddest Alice in Chains song, according to science
Conventional wisdom is that Nirvana’s surprise 1991 hit ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ single-handedly caught the music world with its pants down, zapping dead hair-metal and power ballads overnight with its thunderous grunge bludgeon of Gen X angst and punk assault coated with a radio-friendly, widescreen production polish destined to thrust the ‘alternative’ well and truly into the mainstream. While this truism isn’t entirely unfounded, the Seattle dam that finally broke and dominated the early nineties had been chipped away by bands like Green River, Soundgarden, and the city’s Alice in Chains.
Formed in 1987 after an initial flirtation with glam, Alice in Chains swiftly established a distinctly bluesy heavy metal mark within the grunge movement, indebted to Black Sabbath and Deep Purple and conjuring songs that reach into humanity’s grubby and wounded condition, wrestling hope from its bruised, universal nature of being.
Speaking to The Skinny in 2013 and reflecting on the band’s thematic gloom, guitarist Jerry Cantrell shed a crack of light: “That darkness was always part of the band, but it wasn’t all about that. There was always an optimism, even in the darkest shit we wrote. With Dirt, it’s not like we were saying, ‘Oh yeah, this is a good thing’. It was more of a warning than anything else, rather than ‘Hey, come and check this out, it’s great!'”
Elaborating further on their sobering optimism amid the melancholy sludge: “We were talking about what was going on at the time, but within that there was always a survivor element – a kind of triumph over the darker elements of being a human being. I still think we have all of that intact, but maybe the percentage has shifted.”
Believe it or not, serious scientific research has gone into what creates dark and sad songs. Commissioned by the creepy HappyOrNot smiley faces feedback terminals, we’re all subjected to in convenience stores, Durham University’s Music Psychology professor Annaliese Micallef Grimaud was put to task compiling data on what song ingredients elicit the greatest happiness or misery from its listener, analysing tempo, dynamics, frequency values, and pitch levels.
From this model, it was deduced that Pharell Williams’ chart-topper and source of trauma for retail workers around the world ‘Happy’ from 2013 was, funnily enough, the happiest.
When it comes to assessing a song’s level of grimness, Grimaud found that “a slow tempo, minor mode, legato articulation, soft dynamics level, low pitch level, and a dark timbre help convey sadness in music.”
Top of the woes was Nirvana’s haunting ‘Something in the Way’, Nevermind‘s starkly austere final track (before ‘Endless, Nameless’ scared the shit out of you when forgetting to stop the CD). Following closely behind was REM’s ‘Everybody Hurts‘, Eric Clapton’s ‘Tears in Heaven’, and Alice in Chains’ ‘Nutshell’.
A downbeat, introspective acoustic cut from their Jar of Flies EP, ‘Nutshell’ is a painfully intimate examination of singer Layne Staley’s battle against heroin and the exhausting trappings of fame. Further immortalised as the opening song on their 1996 MTV Unplugged session, ‘Nutshell’ has become a firm fan favourite and band ode to the late frontman, bassist Mike Inez confessed, “That song still gets me choked up whenever I play it. I get a little teary-eyed, and sometimes when we’re doing the arena runs especially, they’ll have some video footage of Layne…We’re not looking at the audience, we’re looking back at Layne, and it’s pretty cool that there’s still that song for us. Yeah, it’s just a sad thing.”
