Post by ktfan on Jul 7, 2020 22:09:51 GMT
I'm starting to feel embarrassed about posting so much, so I'll make this my last post for a while and then go 
.
TLDR: This is just a personal reminiscence about how when I first discovered Soundgarden, I loved that they had two really exotic looking band members. For me, it was the most metal thing I had ever seen.
I first discovered Soundgarden when I was about 12 or 13 years old, but that was already several years after they'd first split up. I heard a sample of one of their early songs from the 1980s, and it blew me away.
This was before Chris's voice had fully developed, didn't really have any low-end to speak of, despite him performing Beyond the Wheel around this time. It sounded like a banshee's wail. That and the combination of Kim's icy, droning guitar gave me a very weird perception of what I assumed was heavy metal.
So the second thing I did was to buy the A-Sides compilation, and I loved the first 5 tracks (from Screaming Life through Louder than Love), loved Outshined, and curiously enough loved Fell on Black Days, but the rest of the material didn't appeal to me at all at first, being, with the exception of Jesus Christ Pose, more akin to muscular alternative rock than what I was anticipating.
Which of course was heavy metal. When I first heard Soundgarden, my musical horizons were very limited. I knew a few names of different styles of music, including grunge, and heavy metal, but I didn't know exactly where Seattle was, and I didn't have hardly any clue about punk or alternative rock.
The "word" soundgarden made me think of Germany, and I was aware of bands like Motorhead and their penchant for using umlauts. Aside from that, heavy metal to my young British mind conjured up imagery of lots of very pale faces, lank hair and surprisingly scrawny bodies, partly because in my ignorance I also conflated goth music, which was the only style of punk/alternative I knew anything about, and heavy metal, and partly because a lot of actual British heavy metal musicians were in fact pale, scrawny and had lanky hair.
So really I was thinking of Soundgarden purely as a heavy metal band, having no idea about their connection to any punk or alternative music scenes. But what actually solidified this impression was some of the photographs included in the A-Sides booklet.
Most of the magazine and YouTube commentary about the visuals of the band focus squarely on one thing- Chris, with his effortlessly handsome face and his frequent shirtless performances. But for me, it was the photographs of Kim Thayil and Hiro Yamamoto that caught my imagination. Just by being of Indian and Japanese heritage, they were both exotic, and then they both had naturally black hair which suited their complexion. And Kim in particular... I don't know how that guy managed to lose much of his hair and yet have what remained stay looking so thick and fiendish.
So yeah, Soundgarden were the first American band I paid deep attention to, so that visual impression made me re-evaluate trans-Atlantic heavy metal as exotic and adventurous, and it helped that a lot of the flourishes that Kim added to his early songs, like blowing on the guitar strings for Flower, or adding extensive washes of droning, overdriven guitar to the intro and coda of Hands All Over, sounded like they had been influenced by traditional Asian string instruments.
I could have felt similarly if the first heavy metal band I'd seen was Slayer, or Metallica, but for me their music, for all its virtues, wasn't as colourful or mysterious,, and therefore exotic, as early Soundgarden.
.TLDR: This is just a personal reminiscence about how when I first discovered Soundgarden, I loved that they had two really exotic looking band members. For me, it was the most metal thing I had ever seen.
I first discovered Soundgarden when I was about 12 or 13 years old, but that was already several years after they'd first split up. I heard a sample of one of their early songs from the 1980s, and it blew me away.
This was before Chris's voice had fully developed, didn't really have any low-end to speak of, despite him performing Beyond the Wheel around this time. It sounded like a banshee's wail. That and the combination of Kim's icy, droning guitar gave me a very weird perception of what I assumed was heavy metal.
So the second thing I did was to buy the A-Sides compilation, and I loved the first 5 tracks (from Screaming Life through Louder than Love), loved Outshined, and curiously enough loved Fell on Black Days, but the rest of the material didn't appeal to me at all at first, being, with the exception of Jesus Christ Pose, more akin to muscular alternative rock than what I was anticipating.
Which of course was heavy metal. When I first heard Soundgarden, my musical horizons were very limited. I knew a few names of different styles of music, including grunge, and heavy metal, but I didn't know exactly where Seattle was, and I didn't have hardly any clue about punk or alternative rock.
The "word" soundgarden made me think of Germany, and I was aware of bands like Motorhead and their penchant for using umlauts. Aside from that, heavy metal to my young British mind conjured up imagery of lots of very pale faces, lank hair and surprisingly scrawny bodies, partly because in my ignorance I also conflated goth music, which was the only style of punk/alternative I knew anything about, and heavy metal, and partly because a lot of actual British heavy metal musicians were in fact pale, scrawny and had lanky hair.
So really I was thinking of Soundgarden purely as a heavy metal band, having no idea about their connection to any punk or alternative music scenes. But what actually solidified this impression was some of the photographs included in the A-Sides booklet.
Most of the magazine and YouTube commentary about the visuals of the band focus squarely on one thing- Chris, with his effortlessly handsome face and his frequent shirtless performances. But for me, it was the photographs of Kim Thayil and Hiro Yamamoto that caught my imagination. Just by being of Indian and Japanese heritage, they were both exotic, and then they both had naturally black hair which suited their complexion. And Kim in particular... I don't know how that guy managed to lose much of his hair and yet have what remained stay looking so thick and fiendish.
So yeah, Soundgarden were the first American band I paid deep attention to, so that visual impression made me re-evaluate trans-Atlantic heavy metal as exotic and adventurous, and it helped that a lot of the flourishes that Kim added to his early songs, like blowing on the guitar strings for Flower, or adding extensive washes of droning, overdriven guitar to the intro and coda of Hands All Over, sounded like they had been influenced by traditional Asian string instruments.
I could have felt similarly if the first heavy metal band I'd seen was Slayer, or Metallica, but for me their music, for all its virtues, wasn't as colourful or mysterious,, and therefore exotic, as early Soundgarden.