Why Soundgarden stopped after Chris Cornell’s favorite album
(Credits: Far Out / Andreas Eldh)
Everyone in the music business has had to deal with some kind of drama, and inevitably there will be times when clashes with other artists end with some bruised egos. While many of the greatest bands of all time split up in dispute, Soundgarden’s breakup was different. When they Bottom on the topChris Cornell felt that together they had achieved everything they could.
Because if you look at their career, the Seattle legends never had the goal of becoming the biggest band in the world. If they were trying to become one of the most celebrated acts on the Seattle scene, they were already going about it in a crazy way, especially with the release of their debut Super Mega, which featured such surefire hits as a cover of the experimental piece “One Minute of Silence” by John Lennon and Yoko Ono.
In a pre-Nirvana world, this would never have charted, but that didn’t seem to matter. Each project was a new opportunity for the band, and if it only appealed to certain people, so what? They took risks when they wanted to, though, working with future famous metal producer Terry Date on the album, for example. Louder than love.
Even as the grunge scene slowly began to take over the world, Soundgarden were still an outsider. They were there from the beginning, and yet their big break came only after the death of Kurt Cobain, which arguably marked the end of the genre’s relevance in the mainstream.
Although Bottom on the top Half the time it felt like the sad decline of grunge, but Cornell was ready to call it a day after this record, saying Turn, “My favorite Soundgarden record is the last one. We weren’t a band that ended up strangling each other or fighting with lawyers. We had critical success, we had commercial success, we made records that I think are timeless, and we were together for a long time. I’m not so greedy that I want more of that.”
While the record was by no means intended as a last hurrah, it does contain some of the bolder songs they’ve ever written. A song like “Blow Up the Outside World” may sound a lot more arena-rock than the rest of their catalog, but can you really call a record “mainstream” when “Burden in My Hand” is the first single, complete with a strange open tuning and twisted meter?
Compared to the metallic side of their sound from earlier, this is what grunge would have sounded like if you listened to a lot of prog, and considering it marked a massive high point in their career, it was a good way to end it. Although the group had an unceremonious final show that saw bassist Ben Shepherd throw his bass in the air, it wasn’t like they hated each other when they left the stage.
They just needed to do different things, and considering where Cornell went with Audioslave, he seemed more than comfortable fitting into different artistic boxes. If anything, Soundgarden’s career trajectory is more reminiscent of a band like Led Zeppelin than anything else. The records were all classics, there was always a touch of experimentation, and it never stopped being interesting for a second.
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