Soundgarden - Black Hole Sun

Sunday, time for a classic.

"Black Hole Sun" is a song by US rock band SOUNDGARDEN. Written by frontman Chris Cornell (R.I.P.), the song was released in 1994 as the third single from the band's fourth studio album Superunknown (1994). It is arguably the band's most recognizable and most popular song, and remains a well known song from the 1990s. The song topped the Billboard Mainstream Rock Tracks chart, where it spent a total of seven weeks at number one. Despite peaking at number two on the Modern Rock Tracks, "Black Hole Sun" still finished as the number-one track of 1994 for that chart. It failed to hit the Billboard Hot 100 chart due to the rules of a physical/commercial release of the single at the time, but it still peaked at number 24 on the Hot 100 Airplay chart and number nine on the Mainstream Top 40 chart. The song was included on SOUNDGARDENs 1997 greatest hits album A-Sides and appeared again on the 2010 compilation album Telephantasm.

Cornell said that he wrote the song in about 15 minutes. He used a Gretsch guitar to write the song, and commented, "I wrote the song thinking the band wouldn't like it—then it became the biggest hit of the summer." Cornell came up with the song while using a Leslie speaker. Guitarist Kim Thayil said that the Leslie speaker was perfect for the song as "it's very Beatlesque and has a distinctive sound. It ended up changing the song completely." Thayil said that the song "wasn't safe as milk, but it wasn't glass in someone's eye either. It was the spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down. Now it's the 'Dream On' of our set." The song was performed in drop D tuning. Drummer Matt Cameron called the song "a huge departure". Credit is due to Michael Beinhorn and Brendan O'Brien, producer and recording engineer, respectively.

Regarding "Black Hole Sun", Cornell stated, "It's just sort of a surreal dreamscape, a weird, play-with-the-title kind of song." He also said that "lyrically it's probably the closest to me just playing with words for words' sake, of anything I've written. I guess it worked for a lot of people who heard it, but I have no idea how you'd begin to take that one literally." In another interview he elaborated further, stating, "It's funny because hits are usually sort of congruent, sort of an identifiable lyric idea, and that song pretty much had none. The chorus lyric is kind of beautiful and easy to remember. Other than that, I sure didn't have an understanding of it after I wrote it. I was just sucked in by the music and I was painting a picture with the lyrics. There was no real idea to get across." Commenting upon how the song was misinterpreted as being positive, Cornell said, "No one seems to get this, but 'Black Hole Sun' is sad. But because the melody is really pretty, everyone thinks it's almost chipper, which is ridiculous." When asked about the line, "Times are gone for honest men", Cornell said:

It's really difficult for a person to create their own life and their own freedom. It's going to become more and more difficult, and it's going to create more and more disillusioned people who become dishonest and angry and are willing to fuck the next guy to get what they want. There's so much stepping on the backs of other people in our profession. We've been so lucky that we've never had to do that. Part of it was because of our own tenacity, and part of it was because we were lucky.

Chris Cornell stated in a 2014 interview with Entertainment Weekly that the title came from something he heard on the news - he thought the anchor said "black hole sun," but he really was saying something else. Cornell started thinking about the phrase and decided to write a song around it, as he felt it was a thought-provoking title. He wrote the lyrics first, then composed the music based on the images he came up with.

Today's tune have the surreal and apocalyptic music video for "Black Hole Sun" was directed by Howard Greenhalgh, produced by Megan Hollister for Why Not Films (London, England), shot by Ivan Bartos, and features post-production work by 525 Post Production (Hollywood, California) and Soho 601 Effects (London). The video follows a suburban neighborhood and its vain inhabitants with comically exaggerated grins, which are eventually swallowed up when the Sun suddenly turns into a black hole, while the band performs the song somewhere in an open field. In the video, Cornell can be seen wearing a fork necklace given to him by Shannon Hoon of Blind Melon. In an online chat, the band stated that the video "was entirely the director's idea", and added, "Our take on it was that at that point in making videos, we just wanted to pretend to play and not look that excited about it." Thayil said that the video was one of the few SOUNDGARDEN videos the band was satisfied with.

The video was released in June 1994. After several weeks of airplay on MTV, a second version of the video was substituted containing more elaborate visual effects than the original, including the addition of a computer-generated black hole. The music video for "Black Hole Sun" became a hit on MTV and received the award for Best Metal/Hard Rock Video at the 1994 MTV Video Music Awards. In 1995, it received the Clio Award for Alternative Music Video. The video is available on the CD-ROM Alive in the Superunknown.

In 1999, British alternative rock band SKUNK ANANSIE did a homage of the video for their single "Lately". The video was also directed by Greenhalgh.



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