Say hello to heaven
The best of Chris Cornell
Welcome to the latest edition of the Hell World Top 5 Songs series. This time we're going to discuss the music of the late Chris Cornell.
If you missed previous editions please check out the pieces on Jason Molina, The Cure, Elliott Smith, R.E.M., and Weezer.
And I'd especially recommend this one on David Berman who we lost five years ago yesterday.
I'm lucky to have an extremely talented assemblage of writers joining me again. Thank you very much to them and thank you to you for reading.
As usual some people ranked their choices in order and some didn't and that's fine because it doesn't matter. The thing is the music. And our feelings about the music.
Please consider a free or paid subscription to this newsletter if you can.
Here's a playlist to listen along to.
Jack Hamilton
I was in seventh grade the first time I ever heard Chris Cornell sing, a hell of an age to be when grunge broke. I remember being at a middle school dance in the very early months of 1992 when a DJ who called himself Mark the Shark played Smells Like Teen Spirit and an entire gymnasium of tweens lost their fucking minds. Suddenly kids who mere months earlier had raced to the Newbury Comics across the street from the Burlington Mall (crossing that street was harrowing) to buy the Use Your Illusions on cassette were throwing their money at Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam, Mudhoney, the Singles soundtrack, and Mother Love Bone if you fancied yourself a historian. In retrospect it feels like the last monumental shift that happened in rock music during a time when rock itself was still at the top of the cultural and commercial heap. (The Chronic, the album that I think of as finally making it impossible for radio and MTV to continue ignoring the cutting edge of hip hop, was still a year away.)
And then of course there was Soundgarden, a band that, like all the truly great ones, felt both totally indispensable to that moment while also seeming to exist autonomously from it. They were steeped in subgenres and micro-traditions that grunge, at least in people’s most facile understandings of it, supposedly stood in opposition to. They were technically monstrous players and unapologetically so: you could clearly hear the influence of the proggier corners of metal that the Seattle scene was allegedly vanquishing, just as you could hear the bombastic arena rock legacies of Queen, post-60s The Who, and of course the granddaddy of them all, Led Zeppelin. At age twelve I had only the faintest grasp of this lineage, of course, but I still remember the first time I heard Badmotorfinger and wondering what the fuck had just hit me. A lot of that had to do with Chris Cornell, a singer whose voice seemed to channel whole histories of music while also doing something new and distinct. From a timbral and technical standpoint his was an astonishing, otherworldly voice, but it was what he did with it that was so startling: every great Cornell performance was and is a masterpiece of vocal craft, a voice with the power to rise above walls of guitars that maintained all the subtlety and command of a great soul singer. To paraphrase Steve Earle, Cornell was the greatest rock singer of the 1990s and I’ll stand on Kurt Cobain’s celestial coffee table in my Doc Martens and say that to his face. Here’s five of his best, in my estimation (in chronological order).
Outshined
An admittedly sentimental choice, because to the best of my recollection this is the first Soundgarden track I ever heard. An evocative jumble of lyrics that are both elusively opaque and also perfect (“I’m looking California and feeling Minnesota” remains an all-timer), to me this track showcases Cornell at his early best and most versatile. My favorite moments are the startling little detours into pristine jangle-pop on the “so now you know who gets mystified” pre-chorus (Soundgarden were the only Seattle band who could pull some shit like that off), when Cornell’s voice effortlessly slides from overpowering belter into a yearning, almost McCartney-esque sweetness.
Hunger Strike
I’ve never been a huge Eddie Vedder guy—an irrational part of my musical identity is wrapped up in the idea that being influenced by Jim Morrison makes you definitively sus—but good lord is this song a tour de force of vocals. Cornell is a superior enough singer to Vedder from a purely technical standpoint that this record could have been a complete mess, but I think it really speaks to the former’s musicality and the obvious mutual respect that the two singers have for one another that the pairing works so well here. Whenever I listen to this song I hear Cornell’s composition—a fantastic and truly unique piece of songwriting—pushing Vedder in the most generous and productive ways. The result is one of the best duets between male rock vocalists of the post-Beatles era.
Fell On Black Days
Badmotorfinger was Soundgarden’s breakthrough; Superunknown arrived less than three years later and became an absolute fucking monster, one of those albums that was inescapable on rock radio for at least a half-decade. I just looked it up and as of 2022 it’s been certified sextuple-Platinum by the RIAA; given how ubiquitous it was throughout my teenage years you could have easily convinced me it sold two or three times that. Fell On Black Days was the last single released from Superunknown and maybe my favorite track on the whole album, just a terrific piece of songwriting that Cornell sings the absolute hell out of. Maybe his most subtly dynamic and fiercely controlled vocal performance.
Cochise
As is the case with a lot of supergroups I sometimes found the idea of Audioslave more compelling than the reality, but when their shit worked it really fucking worked. In hindsight Cochise being chosen as the band’s first single might have been something of a disservice, because it sounded exactly like everything you’d ever dream a track featuring Chris Cornell singing with the Rage Against the Machine rhythm section might sound like. It wasn’t just proof of concept, it was perfection of concept, and where do you really go after that? This is Cornell in Plant-esque, arena-rock god mode, and in 2002, at the height of bands like Creed and Nickelback dubiously carrying the torch of that whole idea, it was nothing short of thrilling to be reminded that there was still a singer out there capable of something like this.
Nothing Compares 2 U
Not sure what else there is to say about this other than it’s an all-time great singer taking on and honoring one of the best songs anyone’s ever written. The fact that Cornell released it a day after Prince’s passing and less than a year before his own, makes the whole thing all the more beautiful and almost unbearable.
Jack Hamilton teaches at the University of Virginia and is the pop critic for Slate.
Eric Renner Brown
Say Hello 2 Heaven
Not just one of the great Cornell vocal performances, but also one of his greatest songwriting turns – one that transcended the tragic death of Mother Love Bone's Andy Wood to become one of alt-rock's enduring anthems about pain and loss. "The amount of times someone has requested I play that song for someone else who's died have been numerous," Cornell said in a 2016 interview. It's a devastating irony that now the song's lyrics could be applied to Cornell himself – and that he isn't around to sing it anymore.
Mailman
For the sake of diversity, I promised myself I'd only include one Superunknown song on here. A tall task given that, realistically, there are seven or eight songs on Soundgarden's 1994 opus that I'd probably rank above anything else Cornell recorded in his career: Fell On Black Days, Black Hole Sun, Spoonman – titanic, era-defining singles. All brilliant. Today, my gut is telling me to go with Mailman – on another day, it could've been Let Me Drown or My Wave or Fourth of July. Mailman is Soundgarden and Cornell at their best, bleak and ominous, but with vocals that inexplicably give it a dark allure at the same time. The pre-chorus is eerily beautiful, and there's nothing better than when Cornell hits the "Riding!!!" high note.
Burden In My Hand
Soundgarden has always felt like grunge's Zeppelin, and their Zeppelin-iest major single is an earworm that sounds equally at home on classic rock and alt-rock radio. Like Black Hole Sun, it topped Billboard's Mainstream Rock chart – along with fellow Down on the Upside single Blow Up the Outside World, one of just three Soundgarden singles to accomplish that – and deservedly so, even if for some purists, it represented the band's drift into the decadent largesse of their classic rock forebears. (Guitarist Kim Thayil called it – ironically? – "The Hey Joe of the 90s.") Whatever. This song rules – and in hindsight, doesn't sound too far removed from Soundgarden's core aesthetic.
Like A Stone
What was more improbable, that Cornell would have another huge alt-rock hit outside of Soundgarden, or that Rage Against The Machine's instrumentalists would have another huge alt-rock hit without Zack de la Rocha? Probably the latter. Cornell takes this relatively pedestrian instrumental – well, outside of Morello's otherworldly guitar solo – and elevates it into a power ballad that's particularly searing, even by his standards, easily adapting his vocal anguish for the song's electric bulk and its acoustic coda. It's little surprise that, with its No. 32 peak on the Hot 100, Like a Stone became the biggest crossover hit any of these guys in any of their massive bands.
Nearly Forgot My Broken Heart
Front not one, not two, but three major alt-rock groups and one's solo output can go underappreciated. I wouldn't call Cornell's releases under his name particularly essential – though it includes an impressive posthumous covers collection featuring his takes on Prince, Harry Nilsson and more – but I've always had a soft spot for this single from Higher Truth, the fourth and final album he released in his lifetime. If Soundgarden was something like grunge's analogue to Zeppelin, Nearly Forgot My Broken Heart, with its mandolin and strings, feels like a song that Cornell might've pulled directly from Zeppelin IV's reject heap (Higher Truth's Tolkien-y album art helps). And he gives Robert Plant's vocal skills a run for their money.
Eric Renner Brown is a senior editor at Billboard.
J. Bennett
My top five Chris Cornell songs are all Soundgarden songs. I wanted to include 4th of July, Mind Riot and Hands All Over, but that would’ve been too much. It might be too much anyway.
The Day I Tried to Live
Creepy, dissonant and enormously satisfying, The Day I Tried to Live is perhaps the ultimate “grunge” song. Self-pitying but hopeful, self-absorbed but cynical, soft but hard, it’s the second single of off 1994’s mega-smash Superunknown. It also has a time signature change and an incredibly seductive bassline courtesy of Soundgarden bassist Ben Shepherd.
The song begins with Cornell telling us about a voice inside his head. The voice says, “Pull the trigger, drop the blade and watch the rolling heads.” In other words: Carpe diem, motherfucker. The problem is that the voice is like that of the dog whispering in David Berkowitz’s ear back in 1976: Imaginary and full of bad ideas.
Cornell wrote The Day I Tried to Live about trying to venture out into the world and assimilate instead of isolating at home. He tries to get along with everyone and do the right thing, but he falters: “The day I tried to live, I dangled from the power lines and let the martyrs stretch,” or, “The day I tried to live, I stole a thousand beggars’ change and gave it to the rich” or—my personal favorite—” The day I tried to live, I wallowed in the blood and mud with all the other pigs.” He’s right, of course: It’s dirty out there. And the pigs are everywhere. In this way, the song anticipates the Covid era.
On the one hand, The Day I Tried to Live is about the introvert’s daily struggle to get out of the house. On the other, the song critiques society’s rejection of those who choose to isolate from the herd. Of course, it’s perfectly acceptable if society decides to isolate the individual. To paraphrase the legendary new jack swinger and coke dancer Bobby Brown, it’s their prerogative. But if the individual has the audacity to isolate him- or herself from society? Well, society tends to take major offense. Hence the demonization of modern iconoclasts like Colin Kaepernick, Wesley Snipes and Sinead O’Connor.
And yet, Cornell offers hope in the face of never-ending pressure to conform: “One more time around might do it. One more time around might make it.” Unfortunately, he couldn’t sustain this kind of optimism. Few of us can.
Pretty Noose
In all the well-deserved hoopla surrounding Superunknown, many casual rock fans forget that Soundgarden released another album before going tits up in 1997. That album was Down on the Upside, and it’s arguably one of their best. Opener Pretty Noose was the first single. It announced Cornell’s frustration with rock stardom, a sentiment shared by many of the leading “grunge” frontmen of the day. “And I don’t like what you’ve got me hanging from,” Cornell sings in the song’s triumphant-yet-bitchy chorus.
What’s often overlooked is just how prescient the tune has become in the Internet Age. The “pretty noose” metaphor predicted the routine character assassinations and online lynchings that take place hourly on social media, where those who have bad manners and/or make ill-conceived comments are choked out by armies of Russian bots. Is Pretty Noose a Nostradamus-style rebuke of cancel culture and political chicanery? Or is it a literal anti-lynching song, invoking the horrors perpetuated by the Klan and Klan sympathizers in the American South, not to mention the modern-day version embraced by police officers everywhere, who seem to delight in shooting/beating/terrorizing unarmed black and brown people? (We were, after all, just four years on from the Rodney King verdict when the song was released.) The answer is this: Anything is possible.
Ever humble and evasive, Cornell told MTV the song was about “an attractively packaged bad idea… something that seems great at first but comes back to bite you.” Storied 90s rock poster artist Frank Kozik, who directed the video for Pretty Noose, described the song as “your average bad girlfriend experience” to the Toronto Sun, a characterization that Cornell reportedly agreed with. What else do these men have in common? They’re both dead.
Burden In My Hand
“Follow me into the desert, as thirsty as you are,” Cornell implores us in the opening line of this Down on the Upside track. With its jangly open tuning and acoustic intro, Burden in My Hand seems, at first blush, like some New Age crystal Jesus-cult nonsense. Ever the Christ manqué—in both personal appearance and rock n’ roll martyrdom—Cornell has us predisposed to think this way. But alas, the lyric is a classic case of diegetic misdirection. Cornell doesn’t need us to join his cult or any cult—after all, this is 1996: If you’re listening to Soundgarden’s fifth album, you’re probably a fan already. He’s not leading us to the desert to participate in a sweat ritual, ayahuasca trip, or any sort of symbolic out-of-Egypt type bullshit. No, he wants to show us the body he’s buried there.
Soundgarden guitarist Kim Thayil called Burden in My Hand “the Hey Joe of the 90s.” At least that’s what he told the Michigan Daily. Written by coffeehouse folkie and former Citadel cadet Billy Roberts but popularized by Jimi Hendrix, Hey Joe tells the story of a man who murders his cheating wife and flees to Mexico, a region known for its desert terrain. Like Burden in My Hand, the killer in Hey Joe speaks in the first person. In both songs, the killer readily confesses to the murder. Where the two songs diverge is that the killer in Burden in My Hand wants us to view the corpse. Cornell wants us to see what he’s done—and to help cover up his crime. “I shot my love today,” he concedes. “Would you cry for me? I lost my head again. Would you lie for me?”
The plot is reminiscent of the 1986 hesher classic River’s Edge, in which a high school student strangles his girlfriend in the woods and shows one of his classmates the body. The classmate, played by quintessential thespian Crispin Glover, then brings more teenage witnesses to view the unfortunate girl’s naked, bluing corpse. Because snitches get stitches, no one calls the cops. At some point, Keanu Reeves tells his mother’s boyfriend, “All you do is fuck my mom and eat all our food. Motherfucker! Food Eater!” It’s one of the greatest movies ever made by humans, and Burden in My Hand would’ve fit beautifully on the soundtrack alongside Slayer, Agent Orange and Burning Spear, had the song been written a decade earlier.
Fell on Black Days
The fifth and final single released from Superunknown, Fell on Black Days provided a much-needed antidote to the idiocy of Spoonman and the nonsensical pseudo-psychedelia of Black Hole Sun. While Spoonman reveled in a patronizing bourgeoise fascination with street people (and their homemade musical instruments) and Black Hole Sun was basically Strawberry Fields Forever tarted up for the goatee-and-cargo-shorts crowd, Fell on Black Days deals with everyday depression and paranoia. Cornell even took the time to rhyme “life” with “life.”
As our man pointed out in a 1994 interview with Melody Maker, the song is about that intangible feeling of existential dread almost everyone has experienced: “You're happy with your life, everything's going well, things are exciting—when all of a sudden you realize you're unhappy in the extreme, to the point of being really, really scared.”
This, of course, was a lie. Let’s look at the opening lines of the song: “Whatsoever I’ve feared has come to life. And whatsoever I’ve fought off became my life.” It’s obvious that the song is about being hunted by Freddy Kreuger. It’s no coincidence that the first Nightmare on Elm Street film came out in 1984, the same year that Soundgarden was formed. The global fame that Cornell initially courted with Soundgarden and eventually sabotaged as he started to make records with Timbaland is the fear that came to life, much the same way that Freddy terrorizes his victims in their dreams before killing them IRL. As the song says, fighting off Freddy became Cornell’s life. This is reflected in the fact that there are nine Nightmare on Elm Street films—and counting.
“I’m only faking,” Cornell sings, “when I get right.” Indeed: Every time Freddy is “killed,” he somehow survives to make another movie. “Hands are for shaking, not tying,” Cornell concludes. Do we need to point out how this relates to Freddy’s infamous glove?
Like Suicide
To claim that this song was a premonition of Cornell’s death is both a massive oversimplification and an undeniable fact. Either way, it’s one of the most powerful songs written by anyone, anywhere.
J. Bennett is a freelance writer who contributes to Creem, Decibel, Revolver and The Creative Independent, among others. He enjoys dressing in the style of 1970s African dictators and shaking his fist at the sky.
Alan Siegel
5. All Night Thing
There aren’t that many songs by the Seattle bands of the late 80s and early 90s that I’d describe as earnestly, sweetly, romantic. About a Girl is probably the most famous one. But All Night Thing is my favorite. Cornell starts the Temple of the Dog track like this: “She motioned to me that she wanted to leave and go somewhere warm where’d we be alone.” You can feel how miserably cold and damp it is as they walk out of the bar and into an evening of possibility.
4. The Day I Tried to Live
I almost put Mind Riot off of Badmotorfinger in this slot, but wanted to go with something a little sunnier than that. I wouldn’t call this a happy song, but it’s a slightly hopeful one. In a Rolling Stone interview back in 1994, Chris Cornell said that it’s basically about trying to overcome social anxiety. Whenever I listen to it, I find myself repeating the “one more time around…” line to myself over and over. It’s an embarrassing reminder that bad singers shouldn’t try to imitate Cornell.
3. Shadow on the Sun
There’s a part in Collateral where a couple of coyotes run in front of Jamie Foxx’s character’s taxi. While he stops to let them cross the street, the hitman Tom Cruise plays stares out from the backseat of the cab into one of the animal’s glowing eyes. Right then, Audioslave’s Shadow on the Sun kicks in. I’m not sure if the scene makes the song eerier or vice versa, but it’s the perfect needle drop for a moment that, in Cruise’s words, has “a hypnotic quality.” Playing it when I’m driving through Los Angeles at night makes me feel like I’m behind the wheel of a car that’s much cooler than a Toyota Corolla.
2. Black Hole Sun
Five years ago, I spent too many words trying to figure out the meaning of Soundgarden’s Black Hole Sun. I don’t think I really did. I’m not even sure Cornell himself knew. “They’re just some words,” he once said. But honestly, who gives a shit if the lyrics are inscrutable? The song is a five-plus minute psychedelic trip led by a blissed-out Cornell. It squeezes you like a blood-pressure cuff but never releases the pressure. “Black Hole Sun is almost all tension,” Michael Beinhorn, the producer of the song, told me. “But it keeps dragging you along with it.”
1. Say Hello 2 Heaven
It’s hard for me not to break out my purplest magic markers to describe Cornell’s vocals on Say Hello 2 Heaven. By the end of the song, he hits a gear that no other 90s rock front man, save for maybe Kurt Cobain on a few occasions, ever did. If you told me he was levitating while recording the track, I’d believe you. The notes he reaches on the final chorus are so high that the late Mother Love Bone singer Andrew Wood, the man Cornell’s paying tribute to, can probably hear him.
Alan Siegel is a senior staff writer at The Ringer.
Stevie Caldwell
I want to be cool and tell you that I’ve always known Chris Cornell the solo artist, that I’ve followed his solo career since 1999’s Euphoria Mourning, but I can’t claim that. I discovered Chris Cornell’s solo work after his tragic passing. I remember being astonished at how much he’d put out! And me with no idea. Shameful Gen-Xer.
That’s part of the reason I decided to concentrate on the solo works instead of easily pulling out my Soundgarden and Audioslave faves. I can go on about how Room A Thousand Years Wide gets me in my feelings every time I hear it. I’m gonna try to talk about some of the songs that caught me later in life instead. I say try because I know how a song makes me feel, but I’m not sure about my ability to capture that in words. Kind’ve weird for a songwriter, right?
Take Me Alive
Okay, wait, wait, hear me out. I know that people clowned Scream when it came out, and there are some truly cringey songs on this album. I contend that if you approach this album with as little preconception as possible, you can view it for the fun, free experiment that I think it was. Easier said than done when we’re talking about Chris Cornell. I really respect the willingness to try something new and risky though.
There are actually a couple of songs from this album that I find fun to listen to, but this is one of my favorites because it features Cornell’s warm baritone. His vocal range covers four octaves and he masterfully moves between them in his songs, but his deeper register carries so much richness for me that I’m drawn to the songs that showcase that end of his range.
Take Me Alive puts that baritone front and center over a groove that is absolutely recognizable as a Timbaland trademark. The electric guitar pokes through on this track and manages to make it feel like more of a collaboration and not quite as drastic a departure from his other work. By the time we get to the chorus my head is bobbing and the layered, heavily harmonized style – very popular during that era, specifically in Timbaland’s music – feels like a great payoff.
As the kids used to say: It’s a bop.
Watching the Wheels
I really like Cornell’s take on this John Lennon song. The focus on a more folksy, acoustic delivery works really well for telling the story of someone dropping out of the rat race to take a step back and live life. I also love his vocals on this song – warm and husky.
It’s not lost on me that both versions of this song were released posthumously after the artists’ deaths, and I’d be lying if I said that didn’t give it some weight and also change the way I perceive the song, especially in Cornell’s case.
"No longer riding on the merry-go-round, I just had to let it go. I just had to let it go."
Hearing him sing that fills me with sadness and adds a dark tint to what would otherwise be a sort’ve positive upbeat tune.
Wrong Side
I find a lot of Cornell’s work to be melancholy and introspective and that’s often what draws me to a song. I love a good narrative in songwriting and Wrong Side is like hearing a good short story. This takes us through a sad, tragic tale of someone who’s dogged by bad luck and circumstances. The blend of Cornell’s lower and higher registers during the chorus are beautiful, and the production helps to give it a wide, expansive feel, especially when the bridge kicks in. It’s part spaghetti Western, part The Crow.
Long Gone (rock version)
This is probably the most standard rock song of all of my selections, and maybe that’s why it sticks with me. I didn’t care for the version on Scream (can you say Too Late to Apologize?), but this version hits all the marks for me for a song of this style. I think if Scream had had more of this balance it wouldn’t have been so poorly received.
One of the things I really enjoy about this song is the playfulness of the vocals. Cornell gets to try out deliveries that are rhythmically different from what I’m used to hearing from him. He’s no stranger to melismatic singing (I recently learned that term and now I’m gonna use it wherever I can) but here he’s leaning into a R&B-style elongation of syllables.
"Babaaayyy! I used to watch your flowers grow. Now it’s ladaayyyy."
It just makes me wanna do that thing where you purse your lips and roll your shoulders and snap on the two and four. You know how you do when a really good slow jam comes on. Whod have thought I’d get that feeling with a Chris Cornell song?
The pre-chorus vocals after the second verse feel a little sassy against a subtle guitar chunk. And then the bridge: "Broken wings, I can’t fly. Girl, I'm gonna need you to save me. Angel of mine."
The lyrics are a little cheesy, but man I love hearing this delivery in a rock song. I love the melding of genres in this tune in general. I feel like I’m getting the best of some good solid pop rock with a little of the hallmarks of a Timbaland production, but not in an overbearing way.
Disappearing Act
I love Disappearing Act for a lot of the same reasons I like Wrong Side. It’s melancholic, 6/8 time (with its similarity to 3/4). Disappearing Act feels like a struggle to come to terms with…mortality? Aging? Time?
"Build and tear down, with barely the time to say how did it get so late?"
Or is it about coming to terms with the lack of control and power we have over our lives, and that no matter how hard you try to steer through it life will have the final say? The lyrics and time signature bring to mind a steady slog through life’s terrain, head down and marching forward.
Then the guitar solo kicks in and it feels like the embodiment of anger and frustration, stopping your slog and yelling at the sky at the unfairness of it all. It pierces the gloom before fading away and leaving you spent, alone again in your reality.
Stevie Caldwell is a Boston-based musician who performs and records under the moniker And Then There Was One.
Julia Gumm
Look, I realize I’m not doing Chris Cornell any real justice with this list. His talents span decades, three bands, a prolific solo career, and I’m only pulling from a tiny sliver of that. However, the assignment is to write about my favorites, so here they are. A few songs, mostly A-sides, all from when I was very young, very into MTV, and probably watched them all premiere on 120 Minutes. So! With that out of the way, here it is. My not at all definitive, entirely personal take on Chris Cornell’s best.
5. The Day I Tried to Live
I once read that trauma is any experience that leaves you feeling hopeless. Despite a well-rounded list of ACE’s on my intake form, going by that definition I’m not sure I’ve ever experienced trauma. Some buffering agent within predictably activates and faithfully cushions the blow. Sometimes it’s love. Sometimes it’s Zen. More often, it’s sarcasm. “One more time around I might do it. One more time around I might make it.” Lol. Lmao.
Chris Cornell explained The Day I Tried to Live as a hopeful documentation of an attempt to live in the world as opposed to isolating. I mean, ok, sure, but the whole song is him snarling at the results. I recognize that analyzing Cornell’s meaning is difficult in light of his death and I have zero interest in framing decades of lyrics as a breadcrumb trail leading us to it. All I can speak to is what his songs mean to me.
The Day I Tried to Live is to me a teeth-gritted cousin of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s Carry On. This is white knuckling it through the blood and mud with all the other pigs when you can’t quite “rejoice, rejoice” – yet still have no choice – but to “carry on.”
4. Black Hole Sun
Even without its accompanying “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street to Rapture a Suburb on Mescaline” music video, the psychedelic space vibes of doom that volatilize off this song are in ways terrifying yet possibly, freeing?
Cornell accused some listeners of interpreting the chorus as borderline cheerful, insisting we understand the black hole sun is bad. While I won’t call it “happy” I do think it’s transcendent. Gleefully eerie. Beckoning us by its gravity into the, let’s call it “superunknown.”
Recently the alternate-timeline space race melodrama For All Mankind leveraged this 1994 chart topper to great effect as the soundtrack to the USA, USSR, and a fictional Space X stand-in racing headlong into the unknown of Mars. I thought that was such a perfect placement. Black Hole Sun lives in my heart alongside other 90s space-rock outings like Spacehog’s In the Meantime and Hum’s You’d Prefer an Astronaut. Different styles, but for me, similar vibes. Something about letting go into the infinite, maybe. Something about awe.
Sure, the black hole sun may be bad, but there’s no denying it is compelling. The slight drop D tuning provides enough sludge to keep us rooted in the earth, but the chorus, repeated like some foreboding Gregorian chant, suggests we’re to be consumed regardless. The point is, the song is hypnotic enough that you no longer care.
3. Like Suicide
From what I understand this song is inspired by Cornell having to dispatch a bird with a broken neck. This is an experience I almost relate to. I had a tiny flock of hens, see, and I loved them very much. One day the sweetest, most doddering hen had a run in with a hawk and got mangled up pretty bad. I was at once horrified but resolute about what I had to do. On my way to change my clothes into something that could stand to get bloodied, this song began playing in my head. However in this case my chicken, neck bent and wet with blood though it was, made a miraculous recovery and we were both spared. I felt for her though. Oh, I felt for her.
I expect the song isn’t entirely or only literal, but for a couple of minutes it was for me. Plus I just like it. It’s mournful, it’s empathetic, it’s pretty. I’m not a devout Chris Cornell fan but there are some Soundgarden tracks that grabbed me hard and continue to roll through my head as often as those by artists I deeply love. Even without my bird-feelings, Like Suicide manages to be one of them.
2. Blow Up the Outside World
This is probably the Soundgarden song I feel most at home with. It lacks a soaring classic rock, metal-tinged guitar solo (a thing I’m usually uncomfortable with) and follows the tried and true quiet/loud/quiet/loud formula I’m a sucker for. It does more than follow it. It extrapolates on it. The quiet is a resigned, velvety whisper and the loud is the absolute edge of where melody can live before it blows apart into feral screams.
I’m not a big technical proficiency music enjoyer. You’ll never find me ranking best guitarists or raving about someone’s vocal range. I’m not a musician, I’m just a person who listens to music and feels stuff. This song feels like a nor’easter. The calm before, then pelting sleet and snow, a break in the clouds, but here comes the west wind on the tail end that knocks over the garbage cans and rips off the porch awning before it all finally blows out to sea.
Being able to create that effect, primarily driven by the vocals, is a testament to Chris Cornell. I don’t know how many octaves his voice is, I can’t declare him the best singer of a generation. I can just say how he makes me feel, how this song makes me feel: empty and spent like a garbage can rolling down the street after a storm. But, in a good way.
1. Pretty Noose
The first track on 1996’s Down on the Upside signals Soundgarden is in the sweet spot where grunge bands create their best work. At least by my tastes. After producing their first polished chart topper it’s time to refocus and perhaps get a little weird with it. Not so much going back to their roots, but expanding outward on curious, gnarly branches. Sometimes the branches don’t hold, as was the case here. Down on the Upside was of course Soundgarden’s last consecutive album before disbanding.
It feels important to note that Soundgarden got their start earlier than their other commercially successful Seattle peers, and while enjoying moderate success, took longer to fully break into the mainstream. To put it in perspective, Kurt Cobain went from looking up to them while forming his own band, to becoming the biggest rock star on earth, to his death, all before Black Hole Sun hit the airwaves.
The genre was about to be shown the door even though these guys had just arrived. So, when it came time to put out the requisite stripped-down, under-produced answer to their colossal, multi-platinum hit, the reality is less people were listening. Down on the Upside sold a fraction of what its immediate predecessor did, which is to be expected no matter the landscape (see: Nevermind vs In Utero), but the fact that we were moving rapidly into a post-grunge world probably made it worse.
Which is too bad! Because it’s their best work! It feels softer than anything they put out before, but thicker. Dense. It careens around, less in control but more mature. Less metal, more whatever. It’s the only Soundgarden album I like enough to listen to the whole way through. I had it on cassette. I wore it out.
Pretty Noose is my favorite Soundgarden song, so by extension my favorite work by Cornell. It yanks you right in. It’s jagged. It’s pissed off for all the right reasons, or at least you feel it must be because you immediately relate.
The substance of Pretty Noose is a standard complaint form, registered and filled, but with an extra scream at the end for good measure. By then you feel liberated. Which is to say it’s a composition that does what rock music has always done best.
Julia Gumm is a writer and herbalist in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania
Jim Ruland
Chris Cornell means many things to many people, but these are his songs that meant the most to me in August 2024.
Gun
When I was in college… Just kidding! You don’t care about what was rattling around my head in 1989 and neither do I. Everyone knows this album rips. Look, I’m not some musicologist who’s going to drop some knowledge about octaves and shit like that. You don’t need to be a PhD in behavioral science to know what gets you hot when you’re watching pole vaulting, I mean porn. When I listen to Gun I hear someone singing their ass off. Full stop. It’s hard to believe Chris Cornell started out as Soundgarden’s drummer. This is the voice of a man who wants everyone to hear what he was to say.
Jesus Christ Pose
Congratulations! You were given a choice between Pearl Jam and Soundgarden and you made the right call. It takes a couple of minutes before Cornell comes in but when he does it’s worth the wait. He starts with notes so high only a handful of people who ever walked the earth are capable of replicating them, or would even want to, but when Cornell does it they absolutely 100% belong.
Hunger Strike
Hunger Strike is basically Chris Cornell’s show. He sings the first verse and plays guitar but it’s not until he comes in to back up Eddie Vedder at the end of the second verse that he really lets it rip. Three words. Five syllables. Cornell does more with that “yeah” at the end than most heavy rock vocalists get out of on an entire album. I asked my friend, Paul Rachman, who directed the video if he knew what he was getting into when he took the gig. Here’s what he said:
“When I was given the tracks to the album for the video, I was blown away by the range it showed he had. Collaborating with him on the Hunger Strike video idea for a week or so before the shoot was amazing: a true artist, caring and insightful. One of the most rewarding moments of my career.”
Just watch the video. Caveat emptor: If you are going through some things you’re probably going to lose your shit.
Beyond the Wheel
Oh, you thought this was going to be linear musical journey through time? Hell, naw. Let’s take a little trip back to 1984 when Black Flag released My War and Saint Vitus dropped its doom metal debut on SST Records. (Ahem.) If you need a refresher, play Nothing Left Inside, the first track on Side Two of My War. To most people it sounded like bad Black Sabbath. In Seattle, it sounded like the future. Beyond the Wheel appeared on Ultramega OK. Even though the band had major label offers in its back pocket, with a little guidance from Cornell’s girlfriend and band manager Susan Silver, Soundgarden signed with indie kingmaker SST. The rest, as they say, is history. The band never liked the way the album sounded and when they got the rights back they hired studio wizard Jack Endino to remix and remaster it, and it definitely deserves a spot in your record collection.
Black Hole Sun
Listening to Black Hole Sun is like watching Michael Jordan doing layup drills during a preseason game in Salt Lake City. It’s so effortless and restrained but still pure poetry. Cornell could be doing the equivalent of 360-degree dunks, but doesn’t. He basically repeats the words “black hole sun, won’t you come” over and over again. A couple times he revs up like he’s going to belt something out for the schlubs in the back row, but—psyche—he reigns it in, holds it together, stays true to the song’s doomy undercurrent. When a brilliant artist completes suicide there’s a tendency to view their work through the lens of that final act, but it’s hard not to listen to Black Hole Sun without coming away with the impression that the struggle was real and had been going on for longer than most of us realized. Rest in power.
Jim Ruland writes regularly for Razorcake fanzine and the Los Angeles Times and is the author of Corporate Rock Sucks: The Rise and Fall of SST Records, the novel Make It Stop, and the weekly newsletter Message from the Underworld.
Chris DeVille
5. Blow Up The Outside World
What a brilliant slow-build. For a while there this could pass for a (really great) Sparklehorse song, and then Cornell summons that piercing roar that you could never mistake for anyone else.
4. Outshined
This song contorts into so many different shapes without ever feeling wonky or unnatural. Cornell sounds just as comfortable letting it rip over the beefy power-chord riffs and the ultra-pretty pre-chorus. He’s in perfect synchronicity with Kim Thayil, the Page to his Plant.
Also: “I just looked in the mirror and things aren't looking so good. I'm looking California and feeling Minnesota.”
Pure comedy.
3. The Day I Tried To Live
Cornell’s anguished howls ripping across the collapsing and building chord progression: That’s the good stuff. A song that never stops feeling like it’s breaking down.
2. Pretty Noose
Given how things ended, it feels especially bleak in hindsight to name Pretty Noose one of your favorite Soundgarden songs. But damn. The band had this One Weird Trick of building up their songs into lumbering off-balance mecha-beasts and then leveling out into a catchy pop chorus. I will never forget seeing this performed on Saturday Night Live. (Jim Carrey hosted; go look up the sketch where he swims laps in a hot tub.)
1. Spoonman
I never thought this was my favorite Soundgarden song until I realized it’s what I play first every time I tune my guitar to drop D. Steal the rhythm while you can.
Chris DeVille is the managing editor of Stereogum.
David Klion
5. Doesn’t Remind Me
Critics never knew what to make of Audioslave, an attempted supergroup that was less than the sum of its considerable parts. Sure, Chris Cornell’s voice and Rage Against the Machine’s (minus Zack de la Rocha) instrumentals might have sounded great together, but the apolitical and essentially meaningless lyrics on the band’s self-titled debut album raised the question of who exactly asked for this. Doesn’t Remind Me, a single off their second album, is Audioslave’s most successful attempt to mean something. The music video portrays a kid taking out his grief over his father’s death in Iraq in a little league boxing match, which makes this a rare anti-war song from the Bush years, though whether radio listeners understood it that way is less clear. In any case, the lyrics—a sort of dark mirror version of My Favorite Things from The Sound of Music—list all sorts of random experiences a grieving child might dwell on to avoid thinking about what they’ve lost.
4. When I’m Down
Underneath it all, Chris Cornell was a poptimist. For all the acid-metal swagger of his biggest hits with Soundgarden, as a solo artist he seemed more inclined to cover the Beatles, Prince, or Michael Jackson than, say, Black Sabbath. When I’m Down, from his first solo album Euphoria Morning, is a stripped-down, piano-driven love song by way of depression. The instrumental minimalism means Cornell’s voice carries the whole track, and the guy everyone knows as a grunge rocker turns out to be just as compellingly miserable as a bluesy lounge singer.
3. Blow Up the Outside World
Back to the War on Terror, though: rock fans of a certain age will recall that in the immediate wake of the 9/11 attacks, Clear Channel, the evil conglomerate that controls everything you hear on the radio, issued a memorandum temporarily banning 165 songs they considered insensitive in the context of the new patriotism, including Rage Against the Machine’s entire catalog. Three Soundgarden songs got the ax too, including this one, which may sound like a terrorist’s manifesto to a dull-witted literalist but is actually a song about a subject closer to Cornell’s heart: suicidal depression. “Nothing seems to kill me no matter how hard I try,” is the jaw-dropping opening line, before the spooky quiet verse gives way to an explosive chorus that admittedly does sound loud enough to melt steel beams.
2. Hunger Strike
Look, I know this is the most obvious Temple of the Dog song, even more obvious than Say Hello 2 Heaven which I almost went with instead. I know that half of the song belongs to Eddie Vedder, and that it’s effectively his debut as a rock star. I know this is the needle drop you’d use if you wanted audiences to understand that this next scene takes place in Seattle in the early nineties. And I also may as well admit I’m a gourmand who has never once starved myself in solidarity with the less fortunate, which makes the song’s premise morally superior to my whole deal. So stipulated! But the simple, ethereal guitar riff and the duet of Vedder’s grumbly baritone and Cornell’s majestic shriek get me every time. The two friends would periodically reunite onstage for this one; the last performance of Hunger Strike featuring both Vedder and Cornell was at a benefit show in 2014, and we’ll never hear its like again.
1. The Day I Tried to Live
One of the less heavily rotated singles from Soundgarden’s defining album, Superunknown, The Day I Tried to Live is a showcase for everything that made the band so great. It has shifting time signatures, quiet parts and loud parts, and lyrics that really capture what it feels like to be a lonely, self-loathing teenage boy (not that I would know, of course, I’m just going by what other lonely, self-loathing teenage boys have told me). But at least there’s an element of defiance here, amid so many songs about futility. This is an album whose track listing includes Let Me Drown, Fell on Black Days, and Like Suicide, all of which, to be clear, rock. But if Chris Cornell only ever sang about despair, he’d be harder to love and to miss. The truth is he also sang about those little glimmers of hope, those days you try to live, and how one more time around might do it.
…yes of course I love “Black Hole Sun” and “Outshined” and “Burden in My Hand” at least as much as any of these, I’m normal.
David Klion writes for a bunch of places and is working on a book about the legacy of neoconservatism. Follow him at @DavidKlion if you're still on Twitter.
David Farrier
I came to discover music really late. This was partly thanks to coming from a young earther Creationist home, where as a teenager I mostly listened to DC Talk, Newsboys and Jars of Clay.
When I was 17 a guy in my class at Christian school handed me a sleeve of CDs and my musical world opened up. Among those albums was a bunch of Soundgarden. I was sold on that voice, and Chris Cornell quickly became one of my favorite artists. His voice was there with me as I left home and left religion and started to find out who I really was.
I feel almost self-conscious writing this list (it’s not the cool answers, you know?) because, like I said, I came to his music so late. My first time seeing Cornell perform live was with Audioslave at the Auckland Town Hall in New Zealand.
Seeing Soundgarden would come later, with me sweaty and hot and squished in a festival crowd. Years after that I took my older brother to see Cornell open for Linkin Park, something that went on to take on such a weirder, sadder weight.
And I’ve never made a better decision than leaving my own house party in 2015 to see him perform solo. I almost didn’t but I’m fucking glad I did. It was the last time I’d get to see him do his thing.
A top 5 is criminal but here we go.
The Day I Tried to Live
This whole list could be Soundgarden songs, easily. There are just so many great tracks. But since I discovered him later than most I listened to all of his music at once. It all hit me at the same time in my life (leaving school, going off to university etc.) emotionally, which is why different bands are scattered across my list. But when it comes to his first band I think this song is peak Soundgarden. The whole message I took away, about forcing yourself to stop being a fucking recluse and so go and live, was something important to me at the time. I can’t help but think Chris did so much fucking good living and left us with so much beautiful stuff.
Say Hello 2 Heaven
The idea of heaven really wrecked my brain, because when I moved away from religion the idea of heaven went with it, now I am just left with death. But this song and those fucking notes he hits makes me feel completely undone. I can only listen to this one in small doses.
Show Me How To Live
I remember hearing this at the show in New Zealand, the first time I’d ever seen Chris Cornell perform, and fuck man. This song kicks so much ass. That entire debut album is a banger, but this is the song I always want to play the loudest. Cornell is just so sleazy and smooth in the delivery here, and when he unleashes towards the end, ugh. Perfect.
While Cochise is a much better music video, he’s really hot in this one.
Follow My Way
This solo album is a big sop fest but I think it’s fucking beautiful and I am here for all of it. I get goosebumps at around 1:44 when “Follow my way when I am falling from your heart” kicks in. That fucking voice.
Bones Of Birds
I was so happy we got a new Soundgarden record. I thrashed it in the car and this was the song I kept putting on loop. I love this song. It’s the last Soundgarden record we'd ever hear and these lyrics fuck me up:
"Time is my friend till it ain't and runs out. And that is all that I have till it's gone.”
Sidebar: In my former life as an entertainment journalist for a small TV network in New Zealand, I got to interview Cornell once. It was in LA, not too long before that final NZ show I saw. It was a Sunday, and he drove to the hotel I was staying at to talk to some small time idiot from down under. His show in NZ had already sold out, he did not need to do press. But on his day off, he drove to me, he sat down, and he gave me so much time and kindness. A stone cold legend.
David Farrier is the writer of the culture newsletter Webworm, host of the weekly Flightless Bird podcast, and documentary maker behind Tickled, Mister Organ and Dark Tourist.
Eoin Higgins
Outshined
“Show me the power child, I’d like to say, that I’m down on my knees today.” A great track that really works—as I’ll say of a number of the songs here—because Cornell’s range allows him to mimic and dance along the guitar work. The verses go up and down with the chords, giving the percussive chorus repetition of “Outshined, outshined, outshined” more weight.
Like Suicide
Psychedelic and a mix of grunge, country, and a kind of sitar sound, Like Suicide is one of Soundgarden’s best songs, a seven minute drone that only works as well as it does because of Cornell’s vocals leading the way. Like the other Soundgarden songs in this list (all but one) the way Cornell’s voice and guitarist Kim Thayil’s notes duet is the key.
Fell On Black Days
One of Cornell’s greatest talents is how he descends into his octave range. Fell On Black Days allows him to really go all in on this skill—specifically when he sings, “How would I know?” each note ascending with Matt Cameron’s drum hits before he brings it back down with “That this would be my fate.”
Like A Stone
I’m not a huge Audioslave fan. They’re incredibly skilled in a technical sense but their music lacks the heart that Soundgarden has. Still, Like A Stone is probably Cornell’s best work from a pure vocals standpoint. It allows him to stretch out in the chorus like a cat with all the melancholy that was always behind his voice.
Slaves and Bulldozers
Is this one of Cornell’s five best vocal performances? Probably not. Is it one of my favorite grunge tracks? Absolutely. I still remember as a stoner teenager getting high, putting this track on my headphones, and lying down to let Cornell’s repetition and the grinding bassline wash over me. Good times.
Eoin Higgins is a writer and reporter whose first book, Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left, is now available for pre-order.
A.J. Daulerio
Cochise
I wasn’t surprised when reports of Soundgarden's tension within the group were heavily reported in all the rock magazines that would write about such things. Chris Cornell had clearly outgrown them, although it was tough to articulate why. “Creative differences” are always murky—who in the group stopped caring or became a problem is never fully revealed because it’s no longer the point: in 1998, Soundgarden had broken up.
Fast-forward to 2000 and Rage Against the Machine was also embroiled in its own creative differences. The whole rap-rock movement championing Korn and Limp Bizkit had rendered RATM in a weird space. Tom Morello’s Terminator X guitars and Zack De La Rocha’s Howard Zinn bit weren’t hitting the way they used to—not when Nookie was on the Billboard charts.
When it was announced that Cornell and the musical wing from RATM (Morello, drummer Brad Wilk, and bassist Tim Commerford) had formed their own band I was excited by the prospect but skeptical. Then came the video for Cochise with all its weird dark industrial imagery and a suped-up Bronco riding the shirtless and protein-powdered members of RATM into a construction site inside maybe an airplane hangar or some other weird dark industrial muscle palace, and I was like, man, they’re trying wayyy too hard here. Then the first bars of the song popped off, and I was like, “Okay, cool, Rage is back.” Then Cornell opens his mouth, and fireworks explode behind them, and it’s like, “Ohhhhh shit.” Mindblowing.
All Night Thing
I didn’t want to do Say Hello 2 Heaven, or Hunger Strike, so I chose this one because this was the first song where I heard Cornell sound soulful and restrained. It sounds like a b-side from another album and maybe even a Prince song. It's definitely not "grunge."
No Attention
Chuck Klosterman did this bit in Esquire called Me, On Shuffle, where he decided to get very specific about his musical tastes by highlighting chunks of different songs instead of genres. I’m gonna plug No Attention from Down on the Upside into this formula. In the first two and a half minutes, we’re presented with a very good panic-paced metal song that might be more of a filler track, only memorable to album completists or perhaps Chuck Klosterman. But then, from 2:42 to 4:10, the tempo slows down to more of a groove and becomes what I consider the last perfect rock song to ever be recorded. It’s as if Cornell became the lead singer of Social Distortion.
Thunder Road
I’m probably the only middle-aged white man in America who has always been “Eh, he’s fine” about Bruce Springsteen, but when I saw Cornell perform Thunder Road live, I became partially converted.
Rhinosaur
Other than soulful Cornell, my favorite version is Sabbath Cornell—how he vocalizes over the top of big, big dumb power chord songs is what separates Chris Cornell from, say, Chad Kroeger. There are probably better examples of Cornell’s wizardry than this song, but this is the one that’s been in my head since I took on this assignment.
A.J. Daulerio runs the newsletter The Small Bow.
Jason Gruber
1. Like A Stone
When I was 9 years old my mom printed out the lyrics to Like A Stone so she could belt it in her car. I remember reading the folded up paper in her center console and wondering if this man was okay. These powerful declarations of love and darkness felt way more sincere than the radio pop I was used to and tried liking for peer acceptance. This was stuff kids picked on you for expressing. But I’ve been terminally romantic as long as I can remember. I definitely swooned at the idea of someone waiting so long for me, or someone inspiring me to beg to gods and angels like a pagan (a word Chris Cornell taught me). I had a long way to go before learning what love felt like, but like my mom I had those lyrics folded up in my heart to sing when I was alone.
2. Karaoke
A deep cut that never deserved to be shuttered away as long as it was. The song covers every base of Chris’s style, from the hurricane bookends, the ominous verses, and perfectly Beatles bridges. What a perfectly snide way to brush off media concerns that the label “grunge” foisted on him could get hijacked and improved by an outsider opportunist. “You can have it for your own. It may not miss you when you’re gone.”
3. Follow My Way
Laura Veirs said of her 2020 album My Echo “My songs knew I was getting divorced before I did,” and I can’t help but feel that Euphoria Mourning was Chris’s self-fulfilling divorce record. Euphoria Mourning is twelve songs of begging your loved ones to realize you are a condemned building of a human: Empty and so eaten away inside that you are a breeze away from falling apart and crushing anyone you let in. Other songs may explore the rot deeper, but Follow My Way stews in the tragedy of knowing someone is making the mistake of loving you just as you are, and the cruelty of letting them love you.
4. 4th of July
How much trouble will I get in among fans for saying this is the sexiest Soundgarden song? I might be wrong morally but I dare you to tell me I’m incorrect. That Cmaj11-tuned crunch feels like being consensually choked by hands bigger than your face, and the riff doesn’t so much chug as it throbs. I don’t know if Chris ever wrote a lyric more grim than “Down in a hole, Jesus tries to crack a smile beneath another shovel load.”
5. Gun
Soundgarden’s ultimate you’re going to die in the pit song. After only one note I want to throw a chair so hard it shatters. I want to drag my knuckles on the floor like my ancestors. I want to jump off of a stage and spin kick some punk’s head in on the way down, frantically forcing out an apology before the riff drains my ability to language good. Chris shouts “fuck it up” and I say “how hard?” Sludge to hardcore whiplashing back to the sludge I crawled out of. I am a caveman eating mud and Chris Cornell’s F5 blast is my 2001 monolith, as cold, blunt, and to the point as the three-word title: Gun.
Jason Gruber is a record store clerk and amateur Chris Cornellogist based in Seattle, WA. He writes zines as Searchlight Soul Press.
Luke O'Neil
I'm going to cheat here and share what I wrote back when he died because I don't think I can do any better than this. Also I'm lazy.
Oh and for the record Audioslave is good. I don't care. I could have added Cochise, Be Yourself, Show Me How to Live, or Like a Stone to my list as well.
1. Outshined
2. Jesus Christ Pose
3. Birth Ritual
4. Slaves & Bulldozers
5. Rusty Cage
Chris Cornell and the band he rode to fame, Soundgarden, were always something of a dichotomy. Birthed from the Seattle punk scene, but clothed in the trappings of metal ambition, they never quite fit squarely into the grunge marketing push they found themselves in by accident of geography and acquaintance. Strangely, in his passing, Cornell has further cemented that tenuous connection: the ones who left us too soon.
The early 90s were a confusing time for young music fans. It's hard to understand what the big deal was today, when our every interaction is buried under five concentric layers of irony poisoning, but the ascendant slacker ethos at the time and the cultural wave of ennui was enough to level an impressionable mind. There was the half-assed slipshod aesthetic of Nirvana, the swooning chaotic doom of Alice in Chains, and the last vestiges of hair metal's glittery corpse haunting everything from beyond the grave.
Among it all, Soundgarden and Cornell stood out, specifically because of their unapologetic musicianship and their willingness to experiment—but also because Cornell in particular was triumphantly earnest. What else do you call a longhair striding into a cornfield to deliver the most impassioned belting you've ever heard in your life in a song about inequality in a band formed as a tribute to a dead friend? You couldn't get away with that sort of thing today, and you certainly didn't see much of it back then. But when you did, you sat up and listened. You inched a little closer to the TV. You wanted to climb into that cornfield yourself.
Musicianship itself—mastery of your instrument—goes in and out of favor with each era, but there was a particularly uneasy relationship with it at the time Soundgarden started showing up on MTV. Someone who was that good at their instrument somehow seemed untrustworthy. Shredding had gone out of fashion.
But among Soundgarden's lineup of heavy hitters, among the entire scene at large, there was perhaps no one who had such a mastery of his instrument as Cornell. When you can sing like that, it would be criminal not to. It sounds like the casual murmurings of a stoned guy in the crowd to say it in writing, but man, Cornell could shred.
"I think, and this is now with some distance in listening to the records, but on the outside looking in with all earnestness I think Soundgarden made the best records out of that scene," Cornell said in an interview a few years back. "I think we were the most daring and experimental and genre-pushing really, and I'm really proud of it."
So, he wandered into the cornfield, and he wailed, and those of us still having our cultural identities shaped sat in front of the television transfixed.
While it was Temple of the Dog's Hunger Strike that first did it for me, Cornell's catalogue is filthy with such displays of power and precision, from his solo work to his time with Audioslave, to this recent, heartrending cover of Nothing Compares 2 U.
The latter work with Audioslave never quite amounted to cool, but nothing can be cool forever. What it remained throughout was the epitome of earnest. When you can sing like that, it would be impossible not to.
A voice like his doesn't let you tune it out. It is a force that grabs you. It gets inside of you. Listen to Outshined or Slaves & Bulldozers from their 1991 breakthrough Badmotorfinger now. Seriously, go do it now. The human body shouldn't be able to do that sort of thing. But when it can, it would be a shame for it not to.
Luke O’Neil runs this newsletter. His most recent book A Creature Wanting Form is good.
Mike Sparks
Mailman
1994. I am 13 years old. I moved in with my father earlier that year. I told my mother I needed a change. Scorching Sacramento summer, and I swim with Igor. He’s the child of Nadezhda, a married woman sleeping with my father. We swim for hours, and I make my way back to the apartment. Still damp, I cover myself with a blanket, turn the swamp cooler to ten, and put on headphones. The riff in Mailman is so excruciatingly heavy. It pulses and crawls. Cornell is a flagellating demon dragging me down through the floor. I want to go lower.
The Day I Tried to Live
I am 14 years old. I wake up with an inflamed, pus-filled spider bite on my eyelid. Good. I don’t have to fake sick today, so I don’t have to go to school. I lock myself in my room, The Day I Tried to Live, on repeat while I draw a huge fucking picture of Spawn. The guitars are baroque. The drums are circular. The words feel like someone is singing my thoughts. I start to understand what depression is.
My Wave
I am 19 years old. The acid starts to kick in while Brian and I are in the backyard, and I need music right now. First Let Me Drown, and then My Wave. The song is a perfect machine, expanding and contracting with perpetual motion. Cornell is a snake charmer commanding some gigantic metal monster. I’m not ok if we aren’t listening to My Wave. I can’t be ok if we aren’t listening to My Wave. Later, I forget how to speak.
Outshined
I am 30 years old, and I live in Seattle. I play in bands now, and I’m serious about it. It’s Christmas, and I’m houseless, so I have dinner with John and Amber. Tad Doyle comes over the next morning, and we have coffee. I’m so nervous, and he’s so nice. I listen to Badmotorfinger every day but mainly Outshined. I walk around Seattle, inventing memories. Cornell is singing to me now.
Bootcamp
I am 35 years old and in the back of the van in Texas. I am hungover. John says Chris Cornell is dead. Some of my friends joke about dead grunge singers.
A few years prior, I wanted to be dead. I never said it out loud. One night, I walked out to Golden Gardens around dusk. It was raining, and I was alone. I listened to Bootcamp again and again. Cornell is a compass. Vulnerable and empty, he whispered in my ear. There must be something good, far away from here.
Mike Sparks is a musician, composer, and writer. He is a guitarist/vocalist in Reader and creates solo experimental music as Noonmoon. He lives in Seattle with his wife, Lauren Lavin.