One of my favorite albums ever is Soundgarden’s Badmotorfinger.  Musically, quite excellent.  Some of the B sides are fairly B sides-ish, but the majority of the album lives up to the band’s name.  It creates a garden of sounds that carry you emotionally exactly where you want to be.  Break your rusty cages and run, little grungers.

I don’t want to piss on Chris Cornell’s grave.  From what little I know of him, he seemed like a lovely guy.  I hope any people who feel suicidal find some way out from under it and don’t follow after the late lamented grunge icons.  Please take this critical look at his music in the same way you would if he was still with us – just art criticism, not an attempt to besmirch anyone’s character.

There is a politically conservative streak in this album that I don’t love, and it’s hard to know without deeper research into the man’s life whether or not it was even intended.  If it was intended, that sucks.  I hate finding out some art I enjoyed was the bellicosity of my political opposites.  If it was not intended, it was a failure of artistic aim.

This album predates our polarized times.  The ’90s were kinda polarized, just nothing on where we are now.  Call it the halfway point; getting the strong impression from where we stand now that Reagan was the real “beginning of the end” for liberty in the US.  Back in the ’90s, conservative jokes about political correctness were laughed at by most liberals.  Feminists were dismissed as too shrill, but with a chuckle instead of a two hour youtube diatribe and gun polishing.  Causes of social progress were not in better shape than they are now, in terms of their acceptance by society at large (obviously it’s worse in the halls of power now, and increased awareness of the existence of trans people means increased hostility to us from haters).  If Chris Cornell had any conservative inclinations, he also had lyrics sympathetic to class struggle, native rights, and environmentalism.  There would not have been an obvious contradiction in that, to the average thoughtless amurrican joe circa 1991.

A common feature in the genre of grunge was nonsense lyrics, meant to evoke a feeling more than to say anything real.  It’s possible then that any political meaning to the words was “vibes” and not a well-considered expression of intent, though that read gets pretty dubious on some tracks.  Nonetheless, it would be right to say there is a lot grunge nonsense on the album.  What is Rusty Cage even about?  A jailbreak?  A revolution?  Atheism?  I dunno, but I do like “god’s eyes in my headlights.”

The big questionable tracks are Slaves & Bulldozers and Jesus Christ Pose.  The former is the better song – truly one of the all-time greatest tracks in the history of heavy rock – and the more overtly problematic.  What does Cornell mean when he invokes slavery, as he does on other tracks and other albums?  What does he think about black people?  I don’t know.  The refrain of this song is that the singer feels he is being mocked, manipulated, and exploited by those who are seeking sympathy, culminating with “bleed your heart out / there’s no more rides for free / bleed your heart out / I said what’s in it for me?”  Remember the phrase “bleeding heart liberals”?  Talk about moochers on social programs?  Welfare queens?

If he’s expressing a conservative feeling in earnest, how far does it go?  Does he think tha blacks have gotten too uppity?  That welfare and food stamps are reparations for slavery that are undeserved?  If he isn’t expressing a conservative feeling, is he doing a character?  Is he writing from the imagined viewpoint of a conservative, to illustrate how they are bad dudes?  If so, the problem is that the song is too fucking good!  The singer is lofting with righteous fury, tearing the world down with his voice.  Giving that quality to the performance ennobles the words that are being sung, which means that if he was doing a character, this was fundamentally bad art.

Cornell defeated his own point.  You don’t listen to Kill the Poor by The Dead Kennedys and wonder if Jello Biafra really wants to kill the poor.  That’s good art.  It communicates itself.  You don’t listen to Gin and Juice and wonder if Snoop Dogg is actually satirizing the gangster lifestyle.  He likes that shit and is letting you know.

That is assuming he wasn’t earnestly banging on about how the real problem is poor people, which is a contradiction to Limo Wreck on the next album.  That album has a song called The Day I Tried to Live which seems to be about doing all the wrong things sociopolitically and realizing you suck, again, through a heavy filter of grunge nonsense.  Back to Slaves & Bulldozers tho, tl;dr:  bad beliefs or bad art, on a good song.  That’s a shame.

Jesus Christ Pose is more broadly problematic.  There Cornell describes somebody loudly pretending to be a victim, and how he doesn’t care and wants to see them gone.  My husband says it sounds a lot like he’s complaining about an ex-girlfriend.  True, but how much political conservativism is just a reaction to hating “bitches”?  Women are not mentioned, so you could see this as a stretch, but it is a very common complaint from the “male” side of bad relationships.

The song isn’t wrong about this – some people do moan loudly about their struggles in order to manipulate, even abuse others.  See complaining about people at work to your nine year old child, see convincing your lady you couldn’t help but hit her because you have it sooo bad.  But this is very comparable to a concept in Laveyan Satanism of the “psychic vampire” who must be violently repudiated and shut down.  As spelled out in The Satanic Bible, you can see that point of view.  You know people who take and take with their bitching and moaning, slowly draining your emotional resources and never giving anything back.  However.  It is no coincidence that large parts of the book were copied almost verbatim from an antisemitic, eugenicist, white supremacist screed called Might is Right.

Even if some people are bottomless holes of need and will never be able to give back to the world what they take from it, those people did not ask to be born.  They were forced into the world by the recklessness of breeders, and don’t deserve to die in misery because of it.  And most needy people are not like that at all!  Here is the sleight of hand pulled by The Satanic Bible in making that point of view seem reasonable – say that it’s cool to help people in need as you can, dismiss people who need a lot as psychic vampires, and then allow you, the reader, to decide how much help is too much.  If you’re a callous greedy shit, anything at all is too much.

Jesus Christ Pose is about somebody whining they are being martyred, and about how they can fuck off with that shit.  Maybe it is inspired by the kind of person who really should fuck off with that shit, but who’s to say?  Legitimate beefs have been written off with such attitudes, especially by conservatives.

Anyway, call this a nitpick.  I’m going to lean into the idea it’s grunge nonsense and doesn’t mean anything while I continue to listen to the album, but this does take it down a notch for me.  Off topic, some of my fave songs on there are Face Pollution and Drawing Flies.  That’s all.

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