When you hear a siren wail, it’s a warning. Something big is brewing. Chris Cornell was lucky enough to be born with a siren in his throat, and when it first pricked the nation’s eardrums in 1991, he was warning us that a new generation of hairy rock groups was about to reconquer the planet. And his band, Soundgarden, would be screaming in the center of it.
His voice signaled great urgency and tremendous physicality — which makes the 52-year-old singer’s suicide, mere hours after a high-spirited Soundgarden concert in Detroit May 17, such a surprise. Cornell was a physical rock singer all the way, dredging his best lyrics from the bottom of his being and blasting them out at the top of his lungs.
Like most of Soundgarden’s peers in the Seattle rock scene, the quartet was fluent in Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin. But it was the band’s ability to churn metal bombast, punk skepticism and pop smarts into radio hits that propelled it further than most. And while many of his contemporaries tried to express the disillusionment of the times in growls, Cornell was unafraid to steer his voice preposterously high, dangerously close to the uncool turf inhabited by Van Halen’s Sammy Hagar and other fading hair-metal types.
Cornell foregrounded the contrast in “Hunger Strike,” a 1991 duet with Eddie Vedder in the grunge supergroup Temple of the Dog. During the refrain, Vedder goes low while Cornell climbs upward, and together, they reaffirm the abiding magnetism of rock-and-roll: the bigger the sound, the more room there is for people to get into it.