RANK IN 2014: -
FIRST SONG: Like A Stone (2003)
FAVORITE SONG: Black Hole Sun (1994)
FAVORITE MEMORY: Christ almighty where do I begin?! Definitely all the Book Club episodes, especially Superunknown and Louder Than Love. Also when
Unkie and I saw their concert movie in 2019.
WHAT MAY HAVE AFFECTED CHANGE IN RANK: To this day, there is no artist who has had a bigger impact on me since starting the Book Club than Chris Cornell. Going deeper into his catalog – especially with Soundgarden – made me go VERY quickly from a casual fan to a hardcore one.
ADDITIONAL COMMENTS: Oh man… I think you guys may have to do that drinking game again. Oh wait, OF COURSE you will have to do that drinking game again - there is no other celebrity I have a bigger crush on than Chris Cornell. f*ck was that man sexy or what?!?! What I would give to go back in time and fu—- okay let’s try to keep this PG-13 Jess.
I’m just warning y’all, if you thought my Jerry write-up was an essay, to quote an overrated Bachman-Turner Overdrive song, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet…
I was first introduced to Cutie Chris in the summer of 2003. That was the last year I watched VH1 and MTV religiously, and back then I always flipped between those channels to see who was playing Madonna. I’ll be honest, back then, if an artist came on who I never heard of, I usually changed the channel. When a band called Audioslave came on MTV with their video for a song called “Like A Stone”, I was going to change the channel, but two things prevented me from doing this: 1) I liked the way the song sounded from the little bit I heard so far, which was unusual for me at the time since I mostly listened to pop and R&B back then, and 2) even back then at 10 years old, I thought Chris was VERY easy on the eyes.
I am still kicking myself for not charting that song. To this day I don’t know what I was thinking.
Fast forward to 2005, Chris gets back on my radar a little bit. I liked “Be Yourself” and “Doesn’t Remind Me”, but not enough to chart (again, I was a dummy mummy). And then one day on a Launch station (it may have been
FreakyFlyBry’s), I heard a band I never heard of before called Soundgarden. The song? “Black Hole Sun”. I loved how dark and haunting it sounded and it just had such a unique sound to it. I also loved the singer’s voice, and when I found out who it was, I thought to myself - I kid you not - “Wait, the guy from Audioslave was in another band?”
My dummy mumminess continued as despite being obsessed with “Black Hole Sun” and constantly playing it on my MP3 player
when my parents thought I was studying, I never went and checked out the rest of Soundgarden’s music. I did come across two other songs of theirs on Launch - “Spoonman” and “Outshined” - but at the time I thought those were just okay, and they didn’t grab me the way “Black Hole Sun” did (I love both of those now). At this time, I was more interested in checking out Nirvana and Pearl Jam’s catalogs.
Over the years I’ve heard other Chris songs, whether it be Soundgarden, Audioslave, solo, or Temple Of The Dog, but I always remained a casual fan. Then the morning of May 18, 2017, I went on Facebook for a bit before I left for Cosmetology school, and when I saw the headline, “Chris Cornell of Soundgarden dies”, I was in complete shock. So shocked that I shouted in my apartment at 7:50 in the morning, “WHAT THE f*ck!” It really sucks that it had to take him dying for me to finally go more in depth with his catalog, but the following week I did an episode of the Book Club that focused on both Soundgarden and Audioslave. I enjoyed the episode at the time, but truthfully, my mind wasn’t all there when I did it - May and June were by far the most stressful months during my tenure in Cosmetology school, and between all the studying, the stress and lack of confidence I was feeling about my work, and the bullshit drama involving an assistant teacher who bullied me (and who I eventually ended up reporting a few months later for some insanely homophobic comments), it was not the greatest time for me. Soundgarden were not declared core artists in that episode, despite so many great songs getting played like “Rusty Cage” and “Cochise”, I can’t say I revisited those songs very often after that episode. Fast forward to October 2018…
As someone who has been into grunge music since I was 12-13 years old, it should come as no surprise that I’ve always wanted to visit Seattle.
Unkie and I finally went there in October 2018, and we absolutely loved it. A week before we flew there, I did a grunge-themed episode of the Book Club that to this day is still one of my favorite episodes I’ve done. I discovered two more Chris songs that night that I liked a lot - Soundgarden’s “Limo Wreck” and Temple Of The Dog’s “Call Me A Dog”. We went on an amazing tour called “Stalking Seattle” that showed all these different grunge landmarks like Kurt Cobain’s house, the Central Saloon (where a lot of grunge bands hung out and Nirvana played their first gig), among many others. If you guys are ever in the Seattle area, I STRONGLY recommend you guys do this tour! But after the experience in Seattle and doing that Book Club episode, I started becoming interested in grunge again. Fast forward to January 2019…
In my commentary for the Cranberries, I mentioned that I had to do inventory early in the morning at the retail job I was working at during this time. That was in 2018. In 2019, management decided to do something different – close the store early on a Sunday and we would do inventory that evening. This conflicted with the Book Club’s Sunday at 8PM Eastern time slot, a time slot that I planned on purpose so if I ever had to work on a Sunday, I could still do the show because the store closed at 6PM Eastern on Sundays. Instead of not doing a show at all that week, I decided to air it two days earlier on Friday night instead, but it had to be an episode I could whip up very quickly. Album-themed episodes are the easiest and quickest for me to produce, so I was trying to think of an album that I really wanted to check out. The Seattle trip was still very fresh in my mind, so I thought of Soundgarden’s 1994 album, Superunknown. I never listened to a Soundgarden album in it’s entirety, but I constantly heard good things about this album and I was a fan of all the singles. I went into this episode expecting a solid 7 or 8/10 rock album. Let’s put it this way – Superunknown has since become my second favorite album of all-time, just behind Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill. EVERY song from start to finish (well, except for “Half”
) is excellent. “Let Me Drown”? “Mailman”? “4TH OF JULY”
? ABSOLUTE PERFECTION. After discovering Superunknown, I was hungry for more – I bought Badmotorfinger on vinyl a few months earlier when
Unkie and I visited California and really wanted to Book Club that album next, but I was worried it would be too soon after the Superunknown episode, so I waited a few months. But before that, in April, I did a three-year anniversary episode of the Book Club where I did a countdown of my favorite songs I discovered during the show’s first three years, and everyone – including myself – was surprised at how many Soundgarden and Audioslave songs appeared. Now let’s fast forward to late May 2019…
I finally decided enough time had passed since the Superunknown episode, and I scheduled the Badmotorfinger episode for June 16, 2019. Two weeks earlier, I was preparing for my very first meet-up with
Pipa. One day, I had the day off of work and figured I’d take advantage of this opportunity to catch up on some things before
Pipa came to Florida. I figured I’d get a head start on the episode and play my Badmotorfinger vinyl while doing some cleaning around the apartment. When the song “Slaves & Bulldozers” came on, I had to STOP EVERYTHING I WAS DOING and had to just listen to the song. Honestly, that song is one of if not Chris’ best vocal performance ever. CHRIST. AL. MIGHTY. I became absolutely obsessed with this song. And you know what really sucked? I had NO CHOICE but to be quiet about it because the episode wasn’t supposed to air for another two weeks!!! I called it the two weeks of painful silence. Wow, that really makes me sound like a drama queen.
It wasn’t just that song though – the rest of Badmotorfinger was excellent! That one has also since become one of my favorite albums.
The fact that Soundgarden were two for two for me was unbelievable, especially since I am VERY picky when it comes to albums. After that, I decided that was enough and I had to listen to the rest of their discography. The other two albums of theirs I was really wanting to check out, Louder Than Love and Down On The Upside, were Book Clubbed two weeks after Badmotorfinger in a special two-episode event on June 30, 2019 that I called “The Soundgarden Club.” TO THIS DAY, that special is my all-time favorite moment on the Book Club, especially the ending when I changed my final verdict from 2017 and declared Chris Cornell a core artist. The two Soundgarden albums that didn’t get the Book Club treatment – Ultramega OK and King Animal – I discovered off the air and were also very good albums. I was seriously kicking myself for sleeping on their music for so long. And of course I also eventually checked out all the Audioslave and Chris solo albums, and the Temple Of The Dog album. When I say I was a Cornellaholic, I mean I WAS A CORNELLAHOLIC.
You also best f*cking believe I started buying all his records and I was binging all the music videos, interviews, and concert footage (EXCEPT the last show in Detroit, I refuse to watch that because I know if I do I will cry). I absolutely loved not just Cutie Chris’ voice, but also his gracious personality in interviews (as well as his sense of humor – the 1992 Holiday Inn interview, 1994 Headbanger’s Ball bowling interview, and 1996 “Frowngarden” interview with Alain and Natasha from Eleven all remain iconic). AND DID I ALSO MENTION HOW SEXY HE WAS?!??!! The “Outshined” video. Actually, I take that back – the “Outshined” VIDEOS. As if he wasn’t sexy enough in the original, Canada got a freaking ALTERNATE video where he’s even HOTTER! Listen, I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, I don’t listen to music with my eyes. Last time I checked, my birth certificate did not say “Bill Jupiter”. But I call them like I see them, Chris was a f*cking BABE from the beginning of his career up to end. I don’t care that “Big Dumb Sex” was recorded as a joke to make fun of hair bands – Chris sounds sexy as hell on that song and that is a hill I am more than willing to die on.
Unfortunately, I never got to see Chris in concert, but in August 2019,
Unkie and I saw Soundgarden’s concert movie, Live From The Artist’s Den, at an IMAX theater in Davenport, Florida. AND IT WAS INCREDIBLE!!!!!!! His posthumous releases have also been huge moments for me, his cover of Guns N’ Roses’ “Patience” was a huge #1 on my chart in 2020, and the No One Sings Like You Anymore was a huge moment for me and between that and the new job I just started a few days before that album came out, it was a positive end to what was otherwise the year from hell (well, other than 2011).
Chris’ music also got me through some shitty things that happened to me over the last few years – from July 2019 to February 2020, I worked at a major spa chain, and during my time there I was bullied, gaslit, and verbally and emotionally abused by co-workers and management to the point where I started self-doubting myself and questioning my character. In the summer of 2020, I had two friendship breakups that ended VERY badly in the same week – Slutoris, and the person I alluded to in my Alice In Chains commentary who made me feel bad for liking Chris. That’s another thing, I know it sounds so f*cking stupid now, but this person made me feel like shit all the time for liking Chris just because HE didn’t like him, which was ridiculous. I f*cking hate Ariana Grande.
Cao Bin – who has ALWAYS been one of my favorite people on here – loves her. I cannot even THINK about intentionally making him feel bad for liking her. This same person also got irritated that I would post photos, videos, and GIFs of Chris in our group chat. He HATED that I had a crush on him and seemed to take personal offense to it, which again just boggles my mind because it had nothing to do with this person. Going back to what I said about
Cao Bin and Ariana, I am not a fan of Tate McRae’s music at all. To be honest, I feel about her the way I feel about Miley Cyrus – I’d like a lot of her songs if she wasn’t such a shit singer. But
FreakyFlyBry (another one whose always been one of my favorite people on here) finds her attractive (and truthfully I do too, I just think her voice sucks lol). If
FreakyFlyBry woke up one day and decided he was a Tatey stan and started posting GIFs of her in the group chat, I wouldn’t get pissed off and take offense. I don’t care if you’re into Chris Cornell or Ariana Grande or Tate McRae or the f*cking Wiggles for all I care – as long as you enjoy that person and they make you happy, post as many f*cking GIFs or random facts about them as you want! The other thing I was called out for by this person was crushing on him even though he is no longer with us – my Dad TO THIS DAY talks about how beautiful Donna Summer was (and side note: he’s not wrong). It sucks that to this day I still feel like I need to defend my love of Chris, who is arguably one of the most unproblematic rockers ever (the guy who directed the “Hunger Strike” video said that Chris was one of the nicest people he ever worked with), but I guess that’s what happens when I apparently ruin friendships “over a celebrity fantasy.”
Chris, I love you and your music, and you are missed very, very much.