Initially, Black Hole Sun didn’t compute. It was slow and weird, and its lyrics didn’t make sense. That’s my oldest memory of Soundgarden. The year was 1994, and Kurt Cobain still had a month or two to live. I didn’t know who Kurt Cobain was. During grocery runs to Reno with my mom, my big sister would ride shotgun and tune the FM dial to the “alternative rock” stations that didn’t quite have the power to penetrate the bald, granite mountains lining the hour-long drive between there and my hometown. Those jagged guitar sounds emanating from the family Buick’s speakers were already sinking their claws into my spongy, pubescent brain.
Black Hole Sun was in heavy rotation at the time, and the radio’s grinding repetition eventually compelled me to ask my Mom for a stop at the CD store so I could buy a copy of Superunknown. Years later, I came to recognize my own cycle of coming to appreciate the songs I loved most; I usually met them with a combination of dislike and curiosity. If Soundgarden sounds dated today, it’s only because those radio stations followed up with a sludge of forgettable imitators. It isn’t new information anymore. But in 1994, Superunkown was as fresh and new and different as a newborn alien baby with vampire teeth. And that’s why Soundgarden still matters.
I’ll concede that the cycle of popular music history doesn’t favor Soundgarden right now. It doesn’t help that they got buried in a landslide of hypermasculine rubbish that FM stations with names like “Rock 104: The Edge″ still play. The winds of culture never stop changing direction, and I don’t think it a bad thing that airwaves dominated by white men like Chris Cornell have been supplanted by the diversity today’s Internet offers. I only recently rediscovered Soundgarden, while my copies of their CDs have gathered dust for years. A Pitchfork review of Superunknown’s reissue rekindled my interest. “Thanks to its still-formidable high-wire balance of hooks and heft,” Pitchfork’s Stuart Berman writes, “the album nonetheless represents, some 20 years later, the platonic ideal of what a mainstream hard rock record should be.”
In the midst of this rediscovery, the news of Cornell’s suicide felt like a kick in the chest. It was the last thing I expected from a successful middle-aged rock star whom I would have expected to eventually settle into a comfortable retirement.
In hindsight, perhaps there was something self-destructive in Black Hole Sun’s cosmic ruminations. As modern physics tells us, that which falls into a black hole leaves our universe and never returns. If Chris Cornell were to dive into one of sufficient size that its tidal forces wouldn’t tear him to atoms, we would watch him approach the event horizon asymptotically, never crossing it but never returning, for billions upon billions of years. From his perspective, He could turn around and watch the entire future of the cosmos pass in an instant, possibly crossing over into a different universe, or perhaps to nowhere and oblivion. Just like death, we don’t know what, if anything, lies on the other side of the singularity.
I don’t know if everyone has experienced the desire to disappear. I have. Many times. It’s hard to talk about. Even now, I’m reticent to admit to my friends and family that it has even once crossed my mind to break their hearts like that. Perhaps if we learn to talk about it, fewer people will feel so alone as to commit the unthinkable.
Each of us must form our own relationship with death, like it or not. It is part of what makes us human. We do not mourn for the dead; the dead do not suffer. We mourn for ourselves, for those we’ve lost.
I still have my copy of Superunknown. I also still have a Badmotorfinger CD that my friend Aaron handed me unsolicited during a middle-school computer class, saying, “Here, you can borrow this” (Thanks, Aaron; maybe you’ll get it back eventually). Once, I got to see Chris sing with Audioslave. It was during the height of George W. Bush and the Iraq war, and the giant peace sign flag that unfurled above the stage during their set was a much needed beacon of hope.
Godspeed, Chris. Wherever, if anywhere, your are, a part of you will always be with us.
And finally, a message for those of us still among the living: You're not alone. Confidential help is available for free. You may call the National Suicide lifeline 24/7 at 1-800-273-8255.
