A couple of weeks after Kurt Cobain’s suicide, a strange, sombre piece of American heavy rock hit the charts. With its moody refrain, hypnotic melody and gorgeous arpeggios, Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun” seemed to chime with the spirit of the times. It was also the song that brought Soundgarden a level of success that was long overdue. Soundgarden were the first band from the late-’80s Seattle scene to sign to a major label, although having dutifully polished their craft opening for the likes of Guns N’ Roses, the colossal success enjoyed by Pacific Northwest peers like Nirvana and Pearl Jam had so far eluded them: “the sound of the underground going overground,” as bassist Ben Shepherd puts it.
But “Black Hole Sun” was a grimy psychedelic behemoth, inescapable on radio and especially on MTV, thanks to what songwriter Chris Cornell calls a “comically interesting video”. Nevertheless, the band had initially been wary of the song’s huge commercial potential – for a while afterwards some of them would refuse to play it live – but Cornell notes that the song’s innate strangeness meant that “‘Black Hole Sun’ didn’t seem to corner us or create a problem, it provided a moment when a lot of eyes and ears were on us. We didn’t have to recreate ‘Black Hole Sun’, we never felt that need.”
“Black Hole Sun” – and its stunningly successful parent album Superunknown – ushered in multi-platinum success and a Grammy for the band. Soundgarden split in 1997, reforming in 2010. During that time, “Black Hole Sun” enjoyed a life of its own, covered and reinvented by everybody from Paul Anka to Anastacia. “You can spend an hour looking at different versions on YouTube and they are all very different,” says Cornell. “The last one was a group called Strings Attached which starts normally and then completely freaks out with flute and violin. People send me links all the time and they seem to get weirder and weirder.”
Posted from: https://www.uncut.co.uk/features/chris-cornell-soundgarden-remember-black-hole-sun-understand-even-less-now-100365/
