Another survivor of the early Nineties fascination with all things
Seattle, Soundgarden was one of those other so-called grunge bands that
came to the fore earlier this decade in the wake of Nirvana, Pearl Jam,
L.A.'s Stone Temple Pilots, and their various imitators. Having been around
since 1984, Soundgarden were more than merely the grand-daddies of grunge,
but truly innovative fore-runners combining classic rock and heavy metal
with post-punk energy as a fitting reaction to insipid eighties glam rock.
Unquestionably, Soundgarden were no mere Poison or Cinderella wannabes,
but took their cues instead from seventies staples like The Stooges, Led
Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, and Ronnie James Dio, and ended up sounding largely
like an earnest amalgamation of them all. Despite their borrowed beats,
heavy rotation of their dark videos on MTV helped garner Soundgarden their
fifteen-plus minutes in the sun before their mutual break-up in 1997, and
A-Sides is a parting-shot collection of their most revered radio
hits.
Long-time fans will balk at the overemphasis on Soundgarden's last
two and most commercially successful albums, but truth be told, the band
did grow less derivative and more interesting, creative, and accessible
the longer they were around. Who could forget, for example, Superunknown's
"Spoonman" with its heretofore unheard of and inspired spoon-solo? Sadly,
that spirited song also shows another regretful facet of Soundgarden's
legacy: their aversion for God and the Christian faith. Most likely meant
as a celebration of music, Soundgarden nonsensically invokes the personification
of rhythm, or the Spoonman, as a purported means of salvation:
Feel the rhythm
with your hands
Steal the rhythm
while you can
Speak the rhythm
on your own
Speak the rhythm
all alone, Spoonman
Spoonman, come
together with your hands
Save me, I'm
together with your plan,
Save me.
Over the course of their six studio albums, Soundgarden have had
a lot to say about "God." In fact, Chris Cornell is among the growing movement
of Americans who might call themselves "recovered Catholics," who reject
God along with the rules and rituals the Catholic Church has often enforced
without fully, lovingly and meaningfully communicating their real value.
With that background, Cornell uses a lot of Christianized imagery in his
work, but the message is always the same: God and the Church are only for
the weak and misguided. Curiously, to them this is a fact for which they
repeatedly feel a need to remind themselves, and was never more clear than
in their song "Holy Water," which is not included in this collection:
Holy water
on the brain
And I'm
losing sleep
Holy bible
on the night stand
Next to
me
As I'm
raped by another
Monkey
circus freak
Trying
to take my
Indigence
away from me...
It's the
big lies
That are
more likely to be believed.
On the flip side, a song with a title like "Jesus Christ Pose" seems
ripe for more God-bashing, but in fact merely translates images of Jesus'
suffering into a doomed relationship. Regardless, Soundgarden's overall
central idea is not merely a mix of spiritual frustration and sexual bravado,
as it is an agitated statement from an angry group of people who have been
disappointed time and again by the Church's failure to offer unconditional
and universal love. Given the absence of pure spirituality in the lives
of these musicians, it is no wonder they plead apocalyptically "black hole
sun, won't you come, and wash away the rain" or lament their inability
to "blow up the outside world."
Soundgarden, having nothing to root them in this world or the next,
just suffer from interminable unhappiness. If, as a listener of music,
you want to hear the sound of unbridled disappointment and aggression or
idle boasts of superior sexual bravado swathed in silly euphemisms about
Chris Cornell's "snake," than Soundgarden may actually be of sustained
interest to you. Another perfectly pithy example of Soundgarden's fixation
with despondency and indignation is even immortalized in their ode to baseball
legend, "Ty Cobb":
Another motherf@#er
goes down the drain
Hard headed
f@#k you all
Just add it
up to the hot rod death toll.
Sick in the
head, sick in the mouth
And I can't
hear a word you say
Not a bit, and
I don't give a s*&t
I got the glass,
I got the steel
I got the love
to hate
All I need is
your head on a stake.
With disappointingly churlish lyrics like these, many Christian
listeners will be turned off and away from Soundgarden, despite some of
their more musically ambitious and clever moments in the sun. In the end,
Soundgarden became just an early Nineties flavor-of-the-month band with
angst and aggression aplenty. Their departure has merely cleared the way
for another wave of misguided souls that slipped through the Church's hands,
resulting in enraged bands flinging arrows of contention at the God who,
despite being the focus of their anger, still loves them all completely.
By Steven Stuart Baldwin (1/23/99)
