‘60 Songs That Explain the ’90s’: “Black Hole Sun,” Soundgarden

60 Songs That Explain the ’90s is back for its final stretch run. (And a brand-new book!) Join The Ringer’s Rob Harvilla as he treks through the soundtrack of his youth, one song (and embarrassing anecdote) at a time. Follow and listen for free on Spotify. In Episode 104 of 60 Songs That Explain the ’90s—yep, you read that right—we’re covering Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun.” Read an excerpt below. And if you’re in Los Angeles on November 16, check out the 60 Songs and Bandsplain crossover event celebrating Rob’s new book.

“Black Hole Sun” is Soundgarden’s moderately destabilizing 1994 viral video and long-awaited super-breakout hit: It topped Billboard’s Mainstream Rock Airplay for seven weeks back in 1994, when that specific chart basically ruled my life. Also, according to Nielsen, “Black Hole Sun” was the ninth-most popular song of the decade on mainstream rock radio from 2010 to 2019. I believe we have discussed, previously, that the 10 most popular songs on mainstream rock radio in the 2010s, from Alice in Chains to Nirvana to the Offspring to Soundgarden, were all released between 1990 and 1994, but let me say once again that that is bizarre. But that’s great news for this show, and also pretty cool for me personally, because this song gently kicks ass as well, albeit a little less gently.

I didn’t know this—I didn’t find out about this until literally just now—but Chris Cornell is wearing a bent-up fork as a necklace in the 1994-viral “Black Hole Sun” video, and it turns out that Chris received that fork necklace as a gift from Blind Melon frontman Shannon Hoon. Once again my long and baffling digressions are unexpectedly validated after the fact. Big news for me. During a fan Q&A in Kerrang magazine in 1997, Chris says, “It was given to me by the late Shannon Hoon, who fashioned it out of a fork he got in Denny’s on the first tour Blind Melon ever did, which was opening for us.” Kerrang is a British magazine, so they feel compelled to clarify parenthetically that Denny’s is “a U.S. fast-food chain,” which is very funny to me. I’d say Denny’s is more fast casual, but it’s still funny. Chris goes on about the fork necklace. He says, “I really liked it, but I stopped wearing it after he died. Because the other thing I wore was this ring that belonged to Andy Wood, who died. It’s like, ‘I don’t wanna wear these fucking things from people who died.’”

Chris is referring, of course, to his dear friend and former roommate Andy Wood, frontman for the major proto-grunge Seattle rock bands Malfunkshun and Mother Love Bone; Andy died of a heroin overdose on March 19, 1990, shortly before the release of Mother Love Bone’s debut album, Apple. He was 24. Andy’s death hit Chris extraordinarily hard. And actually, let’s start here, because this very morning, while bumbling around my house watching my 2-year-old daughter, I put on the Temple of the Dog record, from 1991, Temple of the Dog being the Seattle supergroup Chris convened in Andy Wood’s honor. And that record starts with Chris crooning and moaning and wailing and howling a song he wrote for Andy called “Say Hello 2 Heaven,” and holy shit, man, Chris Cornell’s voice.

The Temple of the Dog record, of course, has Chris and drummer Matt Cameron from Soundgarden, along with Mike McCready and Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament, who were Andy’s bandmates in Mother Love Bone and are on the cusp of starting Pearl Jam with Eddie Vedder. And we’ve discussed the all-time Temple of the Dog karaoke jam “Hunger Strike” at length on this program, and “Hunger Strike” is still pretty dope, but returning to this whole record now, this whole record clearly peaks with Track 1, with “Say Hello 2 Heaven,” and specifically with these extremely rad wailed lines from “Say Hello 2 Heaven.”

We’re getting too heavy too fast, actually. This is superficial, and also subjective, but not really: I feel like you can tell, just by listening to Chris Cornell sing, that he is (a) the best pure singer and rock star to emerge from the fabled Seattle scene, and he is also (b) the hottest. Right? Soundgarden formed in Seattle in 1984, and once he switched from drummer to frontman, the first five years or so of the Cornell live experience are defined, in retrospect, by lascivious tales of his shirtlessness. In the author Mark Yarm’s fantastic 2011 book, Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge, Cornell’s early shirtlessness is discussed at some length. A guy named James Burdyshaw, who played guitar in the fantastically named Seattle band Cat Butt, says, “I remember one Soundgarden show where this girl was so enthralled with Chris that she was dancing like crazy and rubbin’ her rear end against me, all while staring at him. Did she know who she was rubbing up against? Probably not. I might as well have been a pole to her.”

And then, immediately thereafter, Mark Arm (no relation), frontman for beloved Seattle scuzz-rock band Mudhoney, says, “This might be coming from a place of jealousy, but the shirtlessness seemed contrived. Chris would wear tear-away shirts—clearly someone had done some damage to the seams before he would go onstage, because he would grab the shirt right in the middle and then pull it straight off him. I think I might have respected it more if he just came out onstage without a shirt at all.”

Contrived shirtlessness. I love it. The usual move, the standard comparison, is to place Cornell in the fabled armadillo-trousered lineage of ’60s and ’70s sex-god-type rock ’n’ roll frontmen. Robert Plant and Roger Daltrey and so forth. And just because that comparison is somewhat of a cliché doesn’t make it not true. Tell me this guy wouldn’t have kicked metric tons of ass in the ’70s.

Ah, this is heavy, man. Cornell died by suicide on May 18, 2017. He was 52. He had survived so much. He had mourned so many of his fellow rock stars. Andy Wood. Kurt Cobain. Layne Staley. Jeff Buckley. (Way more spiritual crossover with Chris than you might think.) Scott Weiland (him too). And then Chris, too, was gone. When he died, Soundgarden was on tour. Soundgarden’s next show was in Columbus, Ohio. I had tickets. I’d somehow never seen Soundgarden live. I was so excited. And then, suddenly, I was crushed. I was doubly, triply, quadruply crushed. And now I can’t stop myself from hearing “Say Hello 2 Heaven,” a song Chris wrote 30-plus years ago about grieving his friend Andy, as a painfully cathartic song about grieving Chris. I am hell-bent on keeping this from getting too heavy. You cannot imagine the baffling and digressive lengths I will go to to keep this from getting too heavy.

Songs That Explain the ’90s, the Book

If you’ve ever listened to 60 Songs That Explain the ’90s and thought, “I wish this podcast were a book,” do we have some news for you. Songs That Explain the ’90s is out now on Twelve Books. Order here.

Do you ever just sit around and think about band names? How strange, how ridiculous most band names are, and how, often, band names get stranger and more ridiculous the more famous the bands are. But the band’s fame and the blunt-force repetition of hearing the famous band’s ridiculous name 2 million times somehow trick you into thinking that the band name isn’t that ridiculous? So far today, we have discussed bands named Smash Mouth, Sugar Ray, Blind Melon, Soundgarden, Temple of the Dog, Pearl Jam, and, indeed, Cat Butt. I submit to you that all of those band names are fuckin’ ridiculous. Cat Butt, of course, is most ridiculous; Soundgarden, actually, is the least ridiculous. (Soundgarden was named after a Seattle art installation called A Sound Garden—a dozen 21-foot poles that swayed with the wind and made a cool noise. It is very funny to me to imagine oblivious people showing up to early Soundgarden gigs assuming that the band called Soundgarden was gonna sound like Yanni or Vangelis or Enya or something, and then they’re confronted by the super-heaviness and contrived shirtlessness of a wailing Cornell.)

Soundgarden’s band name, while quite misleading, was ultimately quite effective in conveying the spiritually pummeling, sonically overwhelming, earthy, and yet supernatural grandeur of Soundgarden’s music. Soundgarden put out its debut EP in 1987. It’s called Screaming Life, and the best song is called “Nothing to Say.”

Cornell was born in Seattle in 1964. In 2020, on Facebook, Chris’s brother Peter wrote, “My father was a tyrannical alcoholic and physically abusive man—he beat the shit out of me and my brothers. He wasn’t kind. He didn’t show love.” Cornell is actually Chris’s mother’s maiden name. All the kids took it after she divorced Chris’s father.

Cornell’s favorite Beatle was John Lennon, but his favorite Beatles song was “Hey Jude.” He was in grade school the first time he realized his voice could startle people. In 2015 he told Rolling Stone, “I think that’s when the switch was thrown, the first time I had a music teacher play a scale on piano and ask me to sing it, cause she wanted to see if I had an ear or not. I remember singing the scale and she almost jumped off the stool and looked at me. I remember it because that’s the first time that had happened. No one had ever looked at me like that.” He learns drums. He joins bands. He plays drums and sings for a while, until he decides he can knock more people off of stools with his voice if he doesn’t have to play drums while he’s singing.

To hear the full episode, click here. Subscribe here and check back every Wednesday for new episodes. And to preorder Rob’s new book, Songs That Explain the ’90s, visit the Hachette Book Group website.