Book Review: Soundgarden: New Metal Crown

Written in 1995, Chris Nickson writes a very informative work documenting the experiences of Soundgarden.

You get the background of the band members before the formation of Soundgarden, and also get a good feel of the experiences that they endured during it's formative years.

Soundgarden has always sounded different, and taken a unique approach to it's music. They never strictly fit into to any one scene of label, defying those who wish to pigeonhole them. The members of the band themselves discuss this, and the general feel is that they are a mix of metal, punk, and psychedelic music.

Nickson takes parts of interviews of band members at different points in their career to allow a better feel for the band, their approach and thought process throughout their meteoric rise.

I attended an Iron Maiden concert once in New York. Can't remember the date, although I think 1997, or 1999, probably sounds about right. Surely, it was the late nineties, in any case. Anyway, Bruce Dickinson called out certain bands that passed themselves off as something other than metal, but which sounded exactly like metal. Most specifically, he named Soundgarden, specifically, and claimed that if you put on one of their albums, it sounded like a bad Ozzy record.

Never a fan of such petty rivalries about something so trivial, limited, and limiting as quarreling over labels, I think the turnoff for bands such as Soundgarden was not so much the sound, as the attitude and image behind it. the stereotypes that so many metal bands and fans all too readily and unquestioningly accepted, with dark, often medieval imagery and allusions to Satanism on one side, which became so commonplace that it betrayed what was actually a lack of imagination, and the overly glam, all ego rockers like Axl Rose, who's appetite for women and excess of all sorts became legendary, and who's self-absorption knew no boundaries. Or a James Hetfield, who seemed to lose his edge and became a parody of what he and his band had once strictly made fun of -  a big, huge band full of ego and wealth. It could be argued that guys like those were more businessman than anything else. They could create good, solid music, but their personalities got in the way of focusing more exclusively on music.

The metal genre had become a parody of itself and, at it's core, had grown actually quite conservative and, yes, boring. It might not have been overly obvious, because it hid behind aggressive, deafening music and seemingly rebellious attitudes and imagery. But, in fact, it had become a brand of sorts, and thus, overly critical of any deviation from these norms. Soundgarden being lumped in with metal was thus a bit of a paradox, and perhaps even a small quandary for a band that was struggling with it's identity, in some ways. Nickson writes:

"If they were going to be a metal band....they were going to be one of the more intelligent ones, less concerned with women and partying than with documenting the conflicts of inner landscapes." (Loc 1179-1187 35%)

Soundgarden always sounded different. Despite the best attempts of some (such as the aforementioned Bruce Dickinson) to disparage them, Soundgarden's music still stands on it's own. I reviewed their most recent album, King Animal, on March 6th, and I have to say, that when I was wrapping it up and moving on to the next album, there was a bit of sadness, like I was saying goodbye to an old friend. Music can change your mood, and you can feel that a particular album had a personality. That is the way that I felt about it, as well as with Soundgarden overall. Reading this book enhanced that a bit as well. Plus, I will be seeing them for only the second time in May (the first time was for Lollapalooza in 1996).

Overall, the book is very readable and informative. You really do get a good picture of how Soundgarden got to be the band that they came to be (at least in the nineties, and not taking into account the obvious changes following the breakup, and their more recent reunification).

I would definitely recommend this book to any fan of the band or of the nineties "Seattle sound", if you will. One criticism that I would make, however, is Nickson's all too easily stated declarations of the band's greatness, and his self-assuredness that Soundgarden would be "the next big thing". At the time that he wrote this, Soundgarden was already huge, and they were also still relatively "new" to the widespread public, and that newness that often carries a band's momentum was already wearing off. there was no way that the author could have known or foreseen the breakup of the band. Yet, he seems almost to worship the band's music, and although he does address some of the criticisms that the band has been exposed to over the years, Nickson himself seems almost to closely sided with the band to truly give voice to these. That was not a problem with some other books on bands that I have read (and in some cases, reviewed). It is still a well-written work, and is rather informative nonetheless.