ARSE-HOLE SUN
It has occured to me that in my spot-on skewering of the excrable Puddle Of Mudd on the sword of being Soundgarden copyists, that I haven’t really had an in depth discussion on why exactly Soundgarden were so so very very bad. I guess I kind of assumed that you – dear reader – would know. However I suppose there may be youngsters out there who have had the good fortune never to come across any of their chuntering tunes and therefore need proper warning. You see Soundgarden were heavy metals answer to Grunge.
It was the wrong answer. The correct answer to grunge (as it is to all music) is napalm.
You see when Kurt Cobain sung a song about underarm deoderant in 1990 little did he know he was going to change the world of rock forever. Little did he know that he had consigned the poodle rockers into the dustbin that they should have always been in. So far the man sounds like a genius yes? Well no because in the process he legitimised people wearing plaid shirts with lank hair playing a music so turgid it was named after a word which literally means “filth, dirt” (cf Chambers English Dictionary). However this left most heavy metal bands in a quandry. A quandry solved quickly by the manager of Soundgarden who took his hard rockers and swopped their leather jackets for plaid, and straightened their hair. “Write a nihilistic song about being miserable” he added – and Black Hole Sun was born.
Black Hole Sun is a metal tune. It has clunking cranking guitars and is very, very silly lyrically. “Black hole sun, won’t you come, and blow me away” shows a complete misunderstanding of what a black hole actually is. For it would not blow you away as it is an absolute gravity well. Instead of blowing, it sucks. A black hole sucks more than anything else in the universe. With the possible exception of Soundgarden themselves – who on this evidence are the suckiest thing in the many worlds theory of the universe. So sucky indeed that Kurt Cobain – having seen what he wrought – blew the back of his head out.
Soundgarden clomped along for a few more years, spawning themselves their own copyists like Alice In Chains, and they they were found out by the general public what – in an unusual fit of taste – stopped buying their records. So the last thing we need now is the nati-Soundgarden, a grunge band trying to be nu-metal like Puddle Of Mudd. AH the bitter irony.