The Soundgarden album Chris Cornell called his musical “reinvention”
To survive as an artist long-term, there needs to be a good amount of progression and embracing change. With Soundgarden, staying put simply was never an option.
Like most of their Seattle peers, Soundgarden made a particular splash in the grunge scene. Back then, grunge was the much-needed shakeup the rock world needed, fanning the flames of post-punk aggression with something slower, more considered, and sluggish in demeanour to match the fatigued resignation of some of its major players, like Kurt Cobain.
With Badmotorfinger, Soundgarden did everything right. But it was also of its time, a spark that hinged on the grunge zeitgeist that also hinted at what was to come. No one staying put in the grunge scene would have ever gotten very far doing the same thing over and over again, Nirvana and Soundgarden included. Which is why, when the time came, Chris Cornell understood that they’d crash and burn if they didn’t reinvent themselves in a way that proved they could shape-shift without losing the core of what made them great to begin with.
Most bands never really got the chance to prove themselves in the same way. Nirvana would have obviously been best placed to give it a try, but Cobain never got the chance to flex those muscles. Maybe the answer was something like Foo Fighters, but even that seems a bit removed from whatever the natural progression would have been back then, unless we take Soundgarden as a prime example of how to ride the wave while also establishing your own path.
All things considered, the success of Badmotorfinger actually bought Soundgarden a bit of time before it came to shaking things up. But that was more of a blessing than a curse, because by the time it came to working on Superunknown, Soundgarden were already in a good position. They had developed sonically and as a band and were ready to venture into a new territory, even though many people were still hearing about them for the first time.
“With Superunknown, we were a band that was in need of reinvention by then,” Cornell told Guitar World. “We had already been a band since 1984, so when Badmotorfinger came out and sold so many records and people were starting to hear about it, we were already at a point creatively where we needed to move, and we did with Superunknown. It was actually a mature part of our lifespan as a band, even though people were just hearing about us for the first time.”
With Superunknown becoming so successful so quickly, you’d think that it made them feel a little out of sorts, especially with such success being so heavily associated with sellouts in the rock world. And when most rock or grunge bands tried to reinvent themselves in the same way around that time, people usually saw it as an indication of lost direction or an attempt to pander to commercialism.
But Superunknown was always its own beast. This was mainly because, as Cornell saw it, they only ever focused on the bits they enjoyed the most, like songwriting and recording. Making it big was never really on their mind as much, which also probably played into the success of the record. People can tell when you’re faking it, especially if you switch gears from one sound or genre to another without the know-how to actually do it well. But in this case, they remained authentic while also taking their art somewhere fresher.
