Diamonds amidst the grunge: Chris Cornell and his music
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How should the frontman and solo musician be remembered?
While I tend to focus on the music when I write rather than the musician, I thought I’d look at both in this article. I never knew the man personally, and never met him or knowingly stood within ten miles of the man. But Chris Cornell death has hit me quite hard considering those facts. I wouldn’t say I was devastated, but I was saddened, shocked and even grieving.
As well as loving many of the songs by Cornell and his bands, I reviewed Soundgarden’s album Superunknown in 2014 for Muso’s Guide, giving it – if memory serves me well – what was for some time the highest rating I’d ever given an album: 9/10. That is a rating now joint-second place amongst all that I have reviewed along with The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s debut, just behind Foo Fighters’ The Colour and the Shape. So you could say I’m a pretty big fan of Chris Cornell’s work, even though I have not heard enough of his songs. I have failed to listen to a large quantity of them even once. But it is clear that his music was not all great. Some of it was just filler.
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One song did not define his entire career or life. One thing – the ending of his life – should not overshadow or cover all of that, and neither should all the great music he made somehow make him infallible in our eyes. Every band Cornell was in was, to quote a song by spoken word artist Scroobius Pip, “just a band”, and musicians are just people. They make mistakes with bad consequences and they do brilliant things. They sometimes succumb to illness and sometimes overcome it. Unfortunately Cornell, for whatever reason, is no longer with us. Let’s be sad about that, yes, but also celebrate the good he brought to the world without letting anything – whether positive or negative — get in the way of our assessment of the man, his bands or their music unjustly.
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