#119, “Black Hole Sun,” Soundgarden (1994)

I didn’t love music until I was thirteen or so. My friend Jim, who I’ve known since I was in middle school, records a podcast and once a year, he’ll have me and our friend Jason on, and we’ll go through our favorite records from thirty years earlier, when we were all kids who just met. A couple years ago, we did 1992 (a great year for music), and I realized that if I were being honest about what I actually listened to that year, it was mostly just Weird Al and the Aladdin soundtrack. (In my defense, both have multiple bangers!) Then one magic summer went by and suddenly music was the most important thing in the world to me, the thing I cared about most in the whole world, the reason I got up in the morning.

There wasn’t a specific song or artist that cemented that for me—I liked “alternative,” which was, in hindsight, just a broad label to apply to any rock music half a degree to the left of Guns N Roses—but I spent a lot of time listening to Q101, the Chicago alt radio station that played Nirvana and Smashing Pumpkins and Liz Phair and The Cure and Nine Inch Nails. We didn’t have much money, and the world was still a good five years off from being able to pirate music from the Internet, so I spent a lot of time with my fingers hovering over the buttons of a portable boombox, ready to tape my favorite songs as soon as they started. And I remember very clearly trying and failing to get “Black Hole Sun” from the beginning, from the very first notes of the guitar before the drums come in.

The feeling of the song, which is one of the most enduring to come out of that era of music*, was really tied to that intro. I was just beginning to understand that music could capture feelings, could create an atmosphere that colored my inner world, could fire my imagination and change the way I felt by giving my a yearning for something intangible and ineffable, that would make me want to live a different way so that it matched the way I felt when I listened to the song. “Black Hole Sun” was one of those songs that gave me all of that.

It’s a power ballad, kind of. The guitar line during the verse is discordant and unsettling, which matches Chris Cornell’s stream-of-conscious lyrics, but the drums are big and thumping, and that hook is so big you can hollow it out and build a house inside of it. It doesn’t really mean anything—Cornell started with the title, which he misheard from talk radio, and was struck by how evocative the idea of a “Black Hole Sun” was. I don’t know why a “Black Hole Sun” would wash away the rain, or how rain would get washed away in the first place, but that’s not the point at all. The point is that it sounds vaguely apocalyptic and Cornell sings about “snakes” a few times and drops lines like “times are gone for honest men” to give you just enough to imagine a whole world beyond the song’s surface.

I would sit up in bed to record it, always starting two or three seconds too late, before I realized that the library had music, too, and then I eventually checked out a copy of Superunknown and dubbed it on that same little boombox, so I had my own tape I could listen to whenever I wanted. And I remember that summer, waiting to start high school, and tripping on the parts of myself that music had begun to open up, listening to “Black Hole Sun” and thinking, “I can’t believe that listening to this is free.” The song felt so big and important, and I had spent so much time playing the radio and waiting for it to come back on, that the idea that I could just press play and hear it whenever I wanted to felt like it should be illegal, like I was getting away with something.

A few years later, grabbing whatever song you wanted for free to play whenever you wanted was easier, and also actually was illegal, more or less, at least for a while. I don’t know if a kid today can have that same experience now. It’s certainly possible to fall in love with a song and want to hear it all the time, but it’s also much easier to just do that, to indulge every brief obsession and then move on to the next one. Does a thirteen year old today think to themself “I can’t believe I can listen to ‘Lavender Haze’ anytime I want to” when all music has been free and available their entire life? I don’t know. I know that the scarcity that accompanied music when I was first discovering it made it feel precious, though, and it remains that way for me today. I’m grateful for that relationship to something I care so much about. There’s still a part of me, thirty years later, that still feels impossibly lucky every time I play “Black Hole Sun,” that I can just do that whenever I want. It feels like a gift.

*”Black Hole Sun” has become something of an unlikely standard over the past few decades, which I find fascinating. There are jazz versions from Paul Anka, Norah Jones, and Brad Mehldau. (Anka’s is terrible; Jones’s is great and sounds exactly like you expect; Mehldau’s is a 23-minute instrumental deconstruction that’s also great.) Brandi Carlile does a version of it that abandons country and shreds harder than Soundgarden’s; if you want to hear it country-fried, Leftover Salmon has you covered. Other rocker dudes love it, of course—Peter Frampton recorded his own version, with Mike McCready and Matt Cameron (who also played drums on the original recording) from Pearl Jam accompanying him. Frampton plays it as an instrumental. It sounds pretty good.)