Soundgarden Recalls Bizarre Critic Descriptions of Their Music

3 hours ago7 min read2 comments

Grunge was an unusual genre for critics to wrap their heads around in the early 1990s, a sonic earthquake emanating from Seattle's damp basements and dive bars that defied the polished hair-metal and synth-pop dominating the airwaves. Soundgarden, with their odd-time signatures, Chris Cornell's four-octave vocal range, and a sound that welded Black Sabbath's sludgy riffs to Led Zeppelin's mystic blues, proved particularly baffling for the critical establishment.The band themselves have recalled music journalists resorting to some truly 'bizarre' descriptors in a futile attempt to categorize their un-categorizable sound. Imagine a critic, perhaps more accustomed to dissecting a Springsteen ballad or a Madonna single, trying to parse the psychedelic sludge of 'Jesus Christ Pose' or the chromatic dread of 'Black Hole Sun'; the result was a lexicon of confusion.One can picture the scribbled notes in the margins of a notepad: 'like a bear wrestling a chainsaw in a cathedral,' or 'a beautiful nightmare set to a waltz from hell. ' These weren't just failed metaphors; they were symptoms of a broader cultural disconnect.The rock critic's traditional toolkit, built on the foundations of Dylan's lyricism or the Stones' swagger, was utterly useless against the raw, unvarnished angst of the grunge movement. For Soundgarden—Kim Thayil with his anarchic guitar solos, Matt Cameron's thunderous, jazz-inflected drumming, Ben Shepherd's unpredictable basslines, and Cornell's primal scream—this critical befuddlement was a backhanded compliment.It signified they were creating something genuinely new, something that broke the mold so completely that the old language no longer applied. This phenomenon wasn't entirely unprecedented; think of the initial, dismissive reviews of The Velvet Underground's feedback-drenched experiments or the moral panic that greeted the raw sexuality of early rock 'n' roll. The true legacy of those 'bizarre' descriptions is that they highlight a pivotal moment in music history when the gatekeepers of taste were momentarily rendered speechless, forced to confront the fact that the future of rock wasn't going to sound like its past, and that the kids in flannel shirts were writing a new, far more interesting rulebook altogether.

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