(If you somehow missed the double entendre the first time around, the band’s signature track is “Touch Me I’m Dick.”) Cornell makes a cameo, as do the members of Pearl Jam and Alice in Chains. In the movie, the fictional embodiment of grunge is Cliff Poncier (Matt Dillon), a very beautiful meathead who wears excellent clothes and leads a loud, boring band called Citizen Dick.
Intentionally or not, this was how grunge music was depicted in Singles, which, by eerie coincidence, celebrated its 25th anniversary the same week Cornell died with a deluxe reissue of the soundtrack featuring rarities by Cornell and others. Perhaps grunge was always the exclusive domain of a certain kind of man, one who is now out of date. One grows more relevant with time while the other gets staler.
And yet they are walled off from each other in our historical memory. The two scenes overlapped in myriad ways, so much so that the title of Nirvana’s first hit single, “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” was actually coined by Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna. And while grunge’s four great frontmen-Cornell, Kurt Cobain, Eddie Vedder, and Layne Staley-always struck me as avatars of a ferocious masculinity, looking back it is remarkable how pretty and delicate-boned they were in their youth, more David Bowie than Ozzy Osbourne.Īnd what about the frontwomen? Riot grrrl, the other great musical movement to come out of the Pacific Northwest in the early 1990s, didn’t get nearly as much mainstream attention as grunge, but it has endured-musically, stylistically, culturally. The scene was infused with a strong punk sensibility, particularly in its rejection of the trappings of rock stardom the word “grunge” itself came caked in mud, sweat, and blood. There are chic neighborhoods from New York to Tokyo where hipsters with stringy hair are clad in Docs and flannel and military fatigues. Grunge’s main cultural influence may have been aesthetic. When I was playing Badmotorfinger on the morning after Cornell’s death, my wife, who is the same age as me but passed on grunge in her teens, made a sour face at the muddy riffs flowing from our computer and said, “What are we listening to?” My younger and cooler colleagues were similarly mystified by all the fuss one had nothing to say about Cornell except that: “My friend did text me the other day that he saw, and I quote, ‘a fat old man’ in a Temple of the Dog t-shirt.” And, admittedly, I myself haven’t seriously listened to Soundgarden or Temple of the Dog since the 1990s, and skipped Audioslave, which debuted in 2001, altogether. Is it even possible for a critic to distinguish between the two?
#Singles soundtrack chris cornell movie
The recent reissue of the soundtrack for Cameron Crowe’s Singles, the seminal movie of the early 1990s Seattle music scene, only heightens the tension between artistic merit and the fog of lived experience. There are bands from that time that transcend it, that exert a pull beyond nostalgia they can pass muster with a generation that wasn’t steeped in the great soup of entertainment in which we lived.
To have much feeling for Cornell, who also fronted the groups Temple of the Dog and Audioslave, it would appear that you had to have lived in a certain era at a certain age.įor those of us who grew up listening to Cornell, and who were introduced to grunge music when it was the definition of what was new, it is a bit disconcerting to return to the video for, say, “ Rusty Cage” and discover him haloed in a vintage fuzz. Now in their thirties and early forties, they are mostly men who experienced Soundgarden at a formative moment, around the age of 11 or 12 or 13-that larval stage of life when the adult world begins to gleam and beckon, casting a withering light on childish things. The people who mourned Chris Cornell’s suicide last week-in real life, on Twitter, in the media-almost all belong to a very specific demographic.