How the blog was won

“You know that feeling you get when somebody embarrasses themselves so badly YOU feel uncomfortable? Heard Chris Cornell’s record? Jesus,” Trent Reznor on Twitter, 11th March 2009

I started to write a blog inspired by this quote when it was first posted but being me I was too lazy to finish it until a year later.

I love Chris Cornell. In my opinion he is without doubt the greatest singer of all time and I would regularly tell people that I thought he could sing any genre of music and it would be amazing. Well he released an album last year called Scream and it was produced by the talentless fool Timbaland and it sounded like a Justin Timbalake LP. There were good moments on it, but it had no instruments and although the voice is still there, you’re distracted by the shitty computer-generated noise going on at the same time.

I want to like Scream because of who made the album. This is the man who gave the world Bad Motor Finger, Superunknown and Down on the Upside when he was the frontman for Soundgarden. He then made one of my all time top ten albums ever with Temple of the Dog, a tribute album to his friend Andrew Wood who died of a drug overdose. The album is vocally Cornell’s finest hour. He then made a very underrated solo album, Euphoria Morning that proved that he wasn’t just a generic rock singer, like anybody ever thought that anyway. Then he went on to form Rage Against The Garden (it’s Audioslave but I feel they missed a trick by not calling themselves Rage Against The Garden) and released 3 great albums, their debut being one of the albums I have listened to most in the past decade.

In support of their second album, Out of Exile, Rage Against The Garden played Brixton Academy and I got tickets to see Chris Cornell live. I love Tom Morello too and I was happy to see him play too, but for me it was all about Cornell. There had been a lot of hit and miss reviews about his vocals live but on this night he was on fire. I saw him play a solo set while supporting Aerosmith at Hyde Park and he stole the show on a very rainy summer’s day. To put that day in perspective he outshined the ultimate Rock & Roll frontman, Steven Tyler. That’s impressive even for my favourite singer of all time.

A year ago he released Scream to bad reviews. In the blog I was hoping that this low point in his career would bear fruit to the rumours of a Soundgarden reunion. 2010 started off with the amazing news from the man himself on twitter “The 12 year break is over & school is back in session. Sign up now. Knights of the Soundtable ride again!”

This is not the only reason to be excited about Chris Cornell. He is one of the friends on Slash’s solo album and his song Promise is fucking amazing. The good times are back with the greatest fucking singer on the planet back doing what he does best!