In 1993, at the peak of the Seattle grunge wave, the release of the video game Doom would break PC gaming into the entertainment mainstream and give the music industry a run for its money. Designed by the independent games developer id Software, as video game enthusiasts will know, Doom has had an incalculable impact on gaming – its nightmarish levels were built upon an innovative graphics engine designed in-house at id Software.
The game’s networked playability encouraged many players to learn about computer hardware. When its source code was released in 1997, it inspired a generation of software developers and ensured that the game remains relevant to the present, establishing video games as a dominant force in popular culture.
The sheer popularity of Doom could be compared to that of Nirvana and Nevermind, but the game’s multifaceted impact has no obvious precedent in popular music. At the time of Doom’s release, independent game development reflected the independent music scene, with game creators sharing their games in computing magazines just as fanzines had spread the word of punk through the American underground. Doom arrived at a time when hip-hop and techno were rivaling rock music for innovation and acclaim. The subcultures of sampling and remixing in popular music ran parallel to the hacking subculture of gaming, and rock music was also adapting to opportunities opened by novel art forms.
Doom featured an immersive synthesized soundtrack composed by Bobby Prince, inspired by the alternative and heavy rock music of the 1980s and early 1990s. The game’s opening theme music was designed to exhilarate gamers with a driving thrash metal guitar riff said to have been inspired by Metallica‘s “Master of Puppets”. Deeper within the game, its dank and doomy tracks drew from the gothic rock of Joy Division, the Cure, and Siouxsie and the Banshees, interspersed with further foreboding accents inspired by the heavy metal of Slayer, Pantera, and Alice in Chains.
Unused music released in 2007 included chiptune renditions of the Soundgarden songs “Outshined”, “Rusty Cage”, and “Slaves and Bulldozers”, from the group’s Badmotorfinger album, which would have breached licensing restrictions had they been used in the game. The transposition of Soundgarden’s heavy guitar riffs into MIDI mood music was fitting for a band whose early sound was characterized by tense and temperamental twists as much as catchy riffs or melodic hooks.
Hunted Down
“Hunted Down” set the scene for Soundgarden’s first EP, Screaming Life, with guitarist Kim Thayil channeling Jimi Hendrix’s “Voodoo Chile”, using feedback to mimic a fighter plane roaring overhead before his main riff establishes the song as the most conventional punkish onslaught on the album. It was Soundgarden’s first single and continued to be played in concerts beyond the band’s 2010 reunion.
Distorted guitar harmonics fly like fireworks around Thayil’s riffs. Cornell’s vocals are at their most muscular of Soundgarden’s early days, as his paranoid tale of hostile pursuit foreshadows “Rusty Cage”. The song closes on a frenetic coda concocted by drummer Matt Cameron before fading out into darkness.
Artists don’t generally like to be labeled when all is said and done. Musical mavericks would prefer that their music be met on its terms rather than lumped in with any passing trend and be free to roam wherever their muse might take them. Yet among musicians and fans alike, no label might be more often refuted than grunge.
The genre emerged between a rock and a hard place, fusing punk and metal, and broke alternative rock into the pop mainstream, but ultimately faced being shot by all sides. Many metal fans resented the upstart attitude that several grunge bands had borrowed from the indie underground, even as many indie scenesters regarded them as a sellout, and both fandoms were suspicious that the label was nothing more than manufactured hype contrived by the media and the music business.
Grunge became a catch-all label for dress-down fashions like flannel shirts, anti-establishment values, and even stylized fonts. It is an evocative term, like rock and metal, labels which imply that this is challenging music. Grunge, meaning dirt, identifies an earthy aesthetic born of necessity in a world of small recording budgets and limited facilities, and one which contrasts with the clean, tight, and occasionally sterile standard that major label bands would understandably strive for.
Being associated with dirt as a performer or listener might not be particularly flattering. However, sludge metal, an alternative term for the scene’s heavier bands, is hardly more favorable. It’s not a sound that an ambitious group would want to stick with for long.
Yet when alternative rock went mainstream at the outset of the 1990s, its breakthrough album, Nirvana’s Nevermind, was a grunge record. The sloppy power chords which opened “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, the squalling guitar solo on “In Bloom”, and the slippery flange effects which permeated “Come as You Are” showed Kurt Cobain’s knack for complementing melodic hooks with radio-unfriendly sounds.
Badmotorfinger, Soundgarden’s breakthrough album, was also a grunge record. The downtuned guitars on “Rusty Cage”, the downbeat pacing and rhythm of “Outshined”, and the downright weird choice of single “Jesus Christ Pose” were the hallmarks of a band who had circumvented convention since their debut EP, Screaming Life.
Entering (a million miles of covered ground)
Following the fade out of “Hunted Down”, “Entering” emerges, opened with a choppy, bass drum-propelled Matt Cameron beat noticeably similar to the gothic rock band Bauhaus’ “Bela Lugosi’s Ghost”. Cameron’s rattling hi-hats and Jack Endino’s reverberating production invoke Led Zeppelin’s “When the Levee Breaks”.
Kim Thayil’s sparse guitar lines shed no light, while Hiro Yamamoto’s pulsing on his bass hints at something sinister about to unfold. Chris Cornell’s vocals enter with wild abandon, though his lyrics betray an escapist fantasy, and Cameron dominates, thrusting the song with a flurry of snares towards a pummelling third act. At close, the song drives to a sudden conclusion, but with hardly a moment to catch a breath.
To this day, the starting point of grunge is still framed by many as “that magic moment when Nirvana and Nevermind’ forever changed Seattle”, which demonstrates the continuing clout of the major record labels who at the end of the 1980s were tentatively regarding the commercial potential of indie rock. On the other hand, the appeal of a self-contained musical movement emerging fully formed at a specific time and place, an appeal which the mythologizing capability of the internet has amplified, means that many fans will be overfamiliar with the bigger picture of grunge’s origins.
For those who aren’t, here’s an overview. Most importantly, the grunge label wasn’t coined by the big, bad media beast. It was previously used by Mudhoney’s singer Mark Arm to describe the Stoogesesque cacophony of his previous band Mr. Epp.
The origins of Mudhoney, Nirvana, and Soundgarden were in the Pacific Northwest indie scene of the 1980s. It was a satellite of the American Underground, an independent network of bands and record labels who frequently promoted their work through touring campuses and getting their records played on college radio, hence the origins of the labels indie rock and college rock.
At the turn of the decade, alternative rock groups were coalescing in California and signing major label record deals, but up the coast, Seattle was not yet on the music industry radar, and there was an opportunity to extend the college rock network. Soundgarden members Kim Thayil, Hiro Yamamoto, and Sub Pop fanzine founder Bruce Pavitt traveled from Illinois to attend college in Washington state. They found that many other musicians in the city shared their love of indie rock, including Chris Cornell and Kurt Cobain.
Soundgarden’s debut EP, Screaming Life, was released in October 1987 on Seattle’s fabled Sub Pop record label. It was not the first grunge album, and neither was it the first recording from Team Sub Pop – that was Green River’s Dry as a Bone released early in 1987, featuring Mudhoney’s Mark Arm and Steve Turner, and Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament of Pearl Jam fame. Screaming Life was not even the first Soundgarden recording.
In 1986, the C/Z record label, run by the team who owned the Reciprocal Recording studio where Team Sub Pop would record a legendary run of albums, had put together a compilation called Deep Six. It featured Soundgarden, then comprised of Cornell, Thayil, and Yamamoto accompanied by drummer Scott Sundquist. It also featured the band Skin Yard, which included Jack Endino on guitar and Matt Cameron on drums.
Tears to Forget (these tears do forget you)
“Tears to Forget” picks up even more quickly than “Entering” leaves off. Clocking in at two minutes, the song is as basic as Soundgarden ever got, a full-on terrifying grunge assault.
Label founders Bruce Pavitt and Jonathan Poneman made sure that Sub Pop was a brand, and their promotional savvy convinced every major label scout in town that they needed to sign their own “grunge” band. However, the synergy of Team Sub Pop crafted an authentic grunge sound. Sub Pop’s raw recordings were produced cheaply and without frills by an electrical engineering graduate and self-taught audio engineer, Jack Endino. Meanwhile, its stark look was captured in monochrome by photographer Charles Peterson.
Soundgarden were the rough diamond in Sub Pop’s crown. On Screaming Life, the group’s guitarist Kim Thayil was their dominant voice, brandishing his “color guitar”, which forsook conventional technique in favor of all manner of weird and wonderful sound effects. The record resounded with Chris Cornell’s lacerating vocals, Kim Thayil’s disorientating guitar, Hiro Yamamoto’s palpitating bass, and Matt Cameron’s orchestrating drums. Its gritty, grungy recording was produced by Jack Endino, and its scuzzy, sweaty cover photo was taken by Charles Peterson.
Charles Peterson’s black and white photographs contrasted not only with those of the glossy glam metal bands but also the colorful, ramshackle artworks that adorned many indie rock albums, which chimed with indie fanzine culture. His hazy yet spirited images from Seattle’s dingy punk rock clubs captured bands and audiences in full flow.
On the cover of Screaming Life, however, it is all but impossible not to be drawn to the flowing mane and exposed physique of Chris Cornell. For an American rock ‘n’ roll fan who regularly watched MTV, the sight of Cornell might have been a raw and powerful counterpoint to the preening frontmen of the hair metal groups, but to an indie rock fan, he was dangerously reminiscent of a young Robert Plant. For a British fan who was in thrall to the Smiths and shambling C86 jangle-pop, Cornell could have seemed primal and debased.
You never get a second chance to make a first impression, and no matter how deeply Cornell’s lyrics bore his soul, perhaps too many people couldn’t understand how someone so beautiful could have a care in the world.
What ultimately carried grunge onto the major labels and to the masses was its voice, embodied by Cornell, Kurt Cobain, Layne Staley, and Eddie Vedder, singers with the irrepressible power to tear down walls. On Screaming Life, Cornell was still finding his voice, experimenting with a range of vocal approaches that demonstrated his versatility. Lyrically, his escapist fantasies and broodings of genuine despair were fully formed.
Nothing to Say (nothing but the one thing)
How do you follow “Tears to Forget” and its two minutes of relentless death metal? By evoking Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs” with a creeping, smothering fug of Kim Thayil’s suffocatingly heavy guitar and with Chris Cornell crooning coldly in its midst.
When Matt Cameron finally arrives to pull “Nothing to Say” to the swamp’s surface, Cornell unleashes a chilling banshee wail. His elegiac telling of when words fail provides an anthem for the introverted, and at the bridge, in the same manner as with the “ritual” of “Birth Ritual”, he stutters the word “nothing” with such strained venom that his pitch appears to rise with every utterance, after which the song disintegrates into a haze of feedback.
1987 was a watershed year for heavy rock. On Geffen Records, Guns ‘N Roses‘ polarizing debut Appetite for Destruction exposed the sordid underbelly of the Los Angeles glam rock scene, and its dark and dangerous sound opened the space that grunge would fill in mainstream hard rock. Sonic Youth’s Sister, their final album for indie imprint SST Records, brought structure to their chaotic experiments with alternate tunings and feedback, making noise acceptable in rock ‘n’ roll. While Sonic Youth were hugely influential on the sound of 1990s indie rock, fellow SST act Dinosaur Jr presaged their attitude with You’re Living All Over Me, turning punk inward with the moody, introspective songs and wayward guitar chops of J. Mascis.
The Screaming Life sound, equal parts Dinosaur Jr., Sonic Youth, and Guns ‘n Roses, would enjoin Soundgarden to alternative metal, a label that must have bemused fans of thrash, whose complex music was already an alternative to the hair bands that dominated MTV. While Los Angeles glam metal bands pushed the macho posturing of 1970s hard rock to one extreme, and Bay Area thrash metal bands took the obsession with virtuosity to the other extreme, the early alternative metal bands up and down the West Coast were making heavy music that was altogether freer and more experimental, drawing the power of 1970s hard rock into a melting pot of influences. In Los Angeles, Jane’s Addiction played up to the grandiosity of heavy metal and gothic rock, while in the Bay Area, Faith No More blended the gut punch of hard rock and funk.
Beyond Nirvana’s 1991 breakthrough, alternative rock was now mainstream, so what could it have been an alternative to? In the 1990s, alternative metal ran with the anti-establishment attitude of the American Underground, but its sound was increasingly indebted to classic rock. The funky, rolling rap metal of Rage Against the Machine updated the polemical rock of the Clash for the hip-hop era.
The synthesized industrial metal of Nine Inch Nails updated the epic moodiness of Pink Floyd for the age of techno. Soundgarden’s developing fascination with unusual guitar tunings and irregular time signatures, which made them a fan in the form of Jimmy Page, updated Led Zeppelin for the video game generation.
Little Joe (run for the border)
Following the formless feedback that closes “Nothing to Say”, “Little Joe” springs to action with another of Matt Cameron’s distinctive drumbeats in standard time but with a disorientating syncopation. For the first minute, Kim Thayil overlays a wash of pelagic shoegazing guitar, with Hiro Yamamoto’s undulating bass steering the ship. Little Joe is caught in a conflict, literal, or figurative. The song’s tribal rhythms and Chris Cornell’s stiff, strained yowl, which many listeners thought was an attempt at rap, could have been Soundgarden’s warped take on Californian funk metal. The song closes instrumentally as it begins, Thayil’s guitar ringing out before Cameron provides a final flourish. “Little Joe” is, hand on heart, my favourite Soundgarden song.
By 1987, rock was not only vying for relevance in pop music, but it was also competing for attention with new forms of entertainment. The year was an understated milestone in the development of video games with the advent of several defining game franchises, many of them developed in Japan. The first Final Fantasy console game was released by Square in 1987, spawning a role-playing universe that continues to expand. The first console game in the Metal Gear series was released by Konami, which forsook action and combat and became the original stealth game. The first Street Fighter arcade game was released by Capcom in 1987, and its more successful 1991 sequel, Street Fighter II, established many of the conventions of arcade fighting games.
Street Fighter featured an international group of mixed martial arts mercenaries from Asia, Europe, and the Americas, matched by vividly drawn street scene backdrops and an equally varied chiptune soundtrack composed by the classically trained pianist Yoko Shimomura, which added multicultural flourishes to energetic themes which would not have been out of place in guitar-driven heavy metal. The game provided a fun geography lesson for a video gamer, even though its designers initially chose to name its Russian wrestler Vodka, whose name was later changed to Zangief. The clash of cultures depicted in its rather basic storyline contrasted with the segregated world of pop music, where hip hop was very black, and rock music was very white.
Growing up, I had no interest in pop music. Like with TV and movies, pop music was entertainment for extroverts. Instead, I chose video games as entertainment for introverts. Video game music stimulates the senses not with big riffs, catchy hooks, or danceable beats but with minor key mood changes, modulating tempos, and musical motifs drawn from faraway places. When I came around to the charms of overdriven guitars, my expectations were formed by playing as Dhalsim or Ryu in Street Fighter II. Multiethnic bands like Rage Against the Machine, Slayer, and Soundgarden seemed like totally natural representations of what awe-inspiring rock bands should be.
Hand of God (lays high above me)
Following on the perverted psychedelic funk of “Little Joe”, “Hand of God” is pushed by Kim Thayil’s percussive scratching on his guitar and pulled by Matt Cameron’s equally persistent snare shots in an epic boss fight. A found recording of a preacher’s sermon picked up at a garage sale by producer Jack Endino interlocks with Thayil’s chugging rap metal riffs before morphing almost imperceptibly into Cornell’s mock oratory.
Further foreshadowing the irreverence of “Jesus Chris Pose”, Chris Cornell exorcises the demons of his upbringing by evoking a God whose ring is “the size of Texas”. The song and Screaming Life, the album end abruptly with one final, grungy push of Thayil’s supersized whammy bar.
In 1994, at the height of Soundgarden’s Superunknown-induced popularity, Electronic Arts released Road Rash, a frenetic motorcycle racing game, one of the earliest video games to license major label rock bands for its soundtrack. It was Soundgarden’s music that its developers initially wanted. “Outshined”, “Rusty Cage”, “Kickstand”, and “Superunknown” bore some of Soundgarden’s most epic riffs, as well as plenty of their offbeat energy.
The band members were keen on the game and being included on its soundtrack, leading to an exclusive licensing deal between the band’s record label A&M and Electronic Arts that led to other A&M bands, including Jawbox, Monster Magnet, Paw, Swervedriver, and Therapy? appearing on the soundtrack.
In 1995, Kim Thayil created ambient page-turner music for the Microsoft Encarta digital encyclopedia, a precursor to Wikipedia. Microsoft would then include the Screaming Life song “Nothing to Say” as a representative sample in the Encarta article about rock music, a niche little preservation of Soundgarden’s status in the canon of popular music and digital culture.
My aforementioned conversion to rock didn’t come from the radio or music videos. It came from reading Encarta and hearing the heavy, gothic atmosphere of “Nothing to Say” juxtaposed with the bright hooks of David Bowie’s “Changes” and the rollicking riffs of “Pump It Up” by Elvis Costello and the Attractions. I bought the Soundgarden A-Sides compilation album soon after discovering Soundgarden on Encarta. It was hard to fathom that “Nothing to Say”, “Black Hole Sun”, and “Fell on Black Days” were the work of the same band.
After listening to all of Screaming Life, Soundgarden’s journey made not a whole lot, but a little bit more sense. In terms of outright similarities, there were Chris Cornell’s unremittingly bleak lyrics. Kim Thayil’s flourishes of color guitar enlivened the band’s most straightforward songs. There was an adventurous quality to their earliest work that foreshadowed Superunknown’s heightened sophistication like I was getting to see the group grow right in front of me and that they were doing it on their terms.
On the face of it, Soundgarden’s music appeared to have nothing to do with hip-hop, techno, video games, or anything much on the cutting edge. They rarely used keyboards of any kind. Their most prominent features at their peak were Chris Cornell’s big Led Zeppelinesque vocals and Kim Thayil’s big, Black Sabbathesque riffs. However, the group have been defined by their relentless experimentation with unorthodox guitar tunings and time signatures.
These elements immersed my attention, like atmospheric level design, and had to be unpicked gradually like a knotty video game puzzle. Necessity being the mother of invention, this experimentation grew out of Kim Thayil’s fascination with the drop-D guitar tuning, a way to make a big noise on a small indie budget. It also grew out of Chris Cornell becoming the group’s rhythm guitarist on the fly, having been initially its drummer. It all grew out of Screaming Life, my favorite Soundgarden record.
