chris cornell

If you grew up in the late 80s/early 90s the mu­sic you lis­tened to had no choice but to ex­ist with­in the shad­ow of the 60s and 70s, a win­dow that in­clud­ed every­thing from bub­blegum to postpunk. 

As the 1980s was the decade of Boomers deal­ing with the hang­over of their 70s avarice of end­less­ly deca­dent sex and drugs by im­pos­ing aus­ter­i­ty on the rest of us, it was cou­pled with their own aged navel­gaz­ing and recontextualizing/lionizing of their own past. Prob­a­bly more than any oth­er era, this was a coun­try hav­ing a midlife cri­sis en masse. Thus, The Who was­n’t mere­ly an amaz­ing pop group, they were Puc­ci­ni in flared jeans. Zep­pelin was­n’t just fan­tas­tic groin-pro­pelled hon­key blues (and man is it ever, to its cred­it) but mor­so it was Im­por­tant Epic Po­et­ry, a rune­stone for all time. 

Here’s why this mat­tered: Every­thing seemed post-his­to­ry and si­mul­ta­ne­ous­ly in­debt­ed to that his­to­ry. We were giv­en the past with the im­plic­it un­der­stand­ing that every­thing Im­por­tant al­ready was, and what­ev­er we would con­tribute would only ex­ist with­in that sphere. Of course any time you con­tain peo­ple to that box they start rig­ging parts to­geth­er to make a rope out of it. As it was with hip hop, so it was with the new heavy alt (nee Grunge) in the late 80s. 

What if we want­ed the cat­er­waul of acid rock with­out the sexism?
What if we’d heard too many Ra­mones records to let a song dick around for too long?
What if equal af­fec­tion for Boston and Wire could make us bend this thing a new way?

That’s what Chris Cor­nell gave us. Be­fore every­one else, Cor­nell and Soundgar­den gave us all the white meat of mus­cu­lar, diesel-soaked, heavy 70s rock, sor­ry Rock, with­out all the bull­shit. And that was huge. It was an an­gle into a pow­er­ful form that we could own with­out em­bar­rass­ment, and it *mat­tered*. Ab­solute­ly.

Nowa­days in our remix cul­ture we have the pow­er to take the al­lure of the past, slough off the rust and bar­na­cles of bad ideas and mo­ti­va­tions and make it our own new prism of those things. That’s important. 

I re­mem­ber a Rolling Stone in­ter­view with Cor­nell around 89 or so where the Zep com­par­i­son was ad­dressed and he dead­panned that ‘our songs aren’t about swords and wiz­ards and shit’ (para­phrased).

There’s noth­ing at all wrong about that sub­ject mat­ter, but be­ing free of it gave Cor­nell and Soundgar­den free reign to take this sound some­where else. And the lens they in­ter­pret­ed it through al­lowed them to take it some­where demon­stra­bly bet­ter. And in that they were stan­dard bear­ers for the best in­stincts about what alt rock in the turn of the 90s was meant to be, be­fore the Can­dle­box op­por­tunists wiped off the glam make­up and crashed the party. 

What Chris did around that time was pure. It was us rein­ter­pret­ing our own past, tak­ing the best parts and fit­ting them with bet­ter parts to make them new. And it’s a mas­sive loss to see that cre­ative line end. Plus, have you *heard* Bad­mo­torfin­ger? It’s a fuck­ing beast.

RIP.
 
 

—ja­son malmberg

Flom­mist Ja­son Malm­berg is a sim­ple man who be­lieves in brown liquor and small dogs. He also makes art some­times. Copy­right © 2017 Ja­son Malmberg.

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