Ned's Atomic Link Bin

Writer's note: Greetings! My name’s Ned Raggett, occasional music writer for a variety of spots. The Cream approached me to talk a bit about interesting music news, think pieces, longreads and more from the previous week. And some actual music too, strangely enough. You can thank a huge range of friends for suggesting things to their own circles as much as anyone else. Maybe I just like to be my own aggregator. Welcome to the column, and hope you enjoy!

Strictly speaking, the most important recent musical news was one of the most awful incidents period: the bombing at an Ariana Grande show in Manchester, U.K. As this column was filed soon after the tragedy, more pieces will follow in a future Link Bin — one, or rather a two-for-one, is included here as a conclusion — but this time around, the focus is on a separate and singular death: Chris Cornell’s sudden passing, apparently at his own hands, but believed by the family to be an accidental circumstance caused by a mistake involving his prescription. It was a shocking incident no matter what, and has resulted in many wonderful essays that should never have had to been written.

Off The Record: How Studios Subliminally Silence Women

In The Quietus, UK musician/producer Grace Banks wrote about persistent pressures and structures in the industry, specifically recording spaces, that don’t so much welcome in musicians as put half of them in a perceived place.

The difference between feeling that I belong or am an impostor, of feeling supported or undermined – these affect my performances, whether I choose to voice opinions and the quality of my work, whether as musician, sound engineer or music producer. Environmental factors leading to such feelings can be unquantifiable and subliminal but they are, nevertheless, there. It was one studio, in particular, that made me realise this.

By the front door hung a picture several feet high of Roman Polanski, near to which was a similarly imposing image of Woody Allen. It struck me that these men had something in common; they had been in the news in relation to sexual abuse. Was it a strange coincidence? Or perhaps this juxtaposition manifested something more significant.

An array of typical icons were displayed, Jimi Hendrix, Chuck Berry, Jack Kerouac... Then finally: a picture of a woman. She was the first thing you saw when you walked into the main recording room, she was gazing at you when you were in the control room listening to the musicians. She was anonymous and she was naked. This is a place for men, she stated. The studio had a theme: this is a place for men to be comfortable, to be wonderful; where men may abuse people, even, and still be lauded. Ultimately, this is a place for men.

When the news of Chris Cornell’s death hit, feelings were raw and intense among many for some days. Maura Johnston’s remembrance in Pitchfork aimed to do him full justice, well beyond his most well-known role, while also taking into account what he did beyond the obvious in that role.

When I think of Cornell and Soundgarden, I think of doors being thrown open, and at times disintegrating. Seeing them open for Guns N’ Roses during the L.A. rock kings’ imperial Use Your Illusion period, learning about Sub Pop bands like the Fastbacks and Beat Happening because of my fandom growing to obsessive compilation-collecting levels, figuring out what other musicians’ catalogs they were borrowing from—Soundgarden facilitated all of these ‘aha’ moments.

 Combing over their cover choices was like thumbing through a well-worn record collection, complete with slight warps that rendered the platters unique. Their version of Devo’s 1980 freakout ‘Girl U Want’ slows the track down almost imperceptibly, Cornell’s devil-on-the-shoulder vocal adding a last-call gravitas to the new wavers’ depiction of boiling-over lust. On their remake of the Ohio Players’ wordplay-heavy groove ‘Fopp,’ Cornell remains faithful to the growl-to-howl trajectory of the original’s vocals, adding a sinewy soulfulness to his bandmates’ slightly chunkier take on the funk legends’ throwdown.

Also at Pitchfork, a group of writers tackled their own favorite examples of his remarkable vocal range throughout his career, a suitably broad-minded salute.

Caryn Rose: ‘Birth Ritual,’ the Badmotorfinger outtake that was one of Soundgarden’s two contributions to Cameron Crowe’s Singles soundtrack, finds Cornell diving in at full power from the very first line. At the chorus, he effortlessly modulates up to a higher range and intensity, then doubles his efforts within the same passage, intoning ‘ritualllllllll….’ and taking the last syllable of the word up into the heavens—except in the last verse, when he shoots it straight into the stratosphere and chases it with howls as operatic as they are primal. What’s astounding here is the amount of control Cornell manifests over every single line: the intensity is careful, measured, but abso-fucking-lutely turbocharged.

 At The New Yorker, Amanda Petrusich focused on Cornell’s range and topical approach, not merely on the level of technical performance but in resonant meaning — especially in how, for much of his time, he found himself honoring or compared to contemporaries who had passed.

 Cornell’s legacy already feels boundless. Anyone who came of age in America in the early nineteen-nineties can, via some mix of muscle memory and deeply embedded nostalgia, probably still bellow all or part of ‘Hunger Strike,’ a single from Temple of the Dog’s first and only album, released in 1991. The band itself was an unlikely and fleeting ensemble, built by Cornell in pure and earnest homage to Andy Wood, a Seattle musician who had recently died, at twenty-four, of a heroin overdose. The idea was to get a bunch of Wood’s friends and former bandmates together—including Mike McCready, Stone Gossard, and Jeff Ament, of Pearl Jam; and Matt Cameron, then of Soundgarden and now also of Pearl Jam—to write and perform a batch of rock songs that weren’t explicitly about Wood (though two, ‘Reach Down’ and ‘Say Hello 2 Heaven,’ address his death directly) but might instead offer the band a comfortable way to collectively grieve. I can’t speak authoritatively on the complicated ways in which young men mourn, but this still strikes me as a generous and humane idea. Let’s metabolize this pain. Let’s externalize it. Let’s share it somehow.

Ashley Zlatopolsky ended up in an utterly unenviable situation for the Detroit Free Press — suddenly having to shift from simply reviewing a Soundgarden concert to accounting for what had happened shortly afterward. Honestly, I’m not sure anyone could have done something like this justice, especially given how much was unclear in terms of the ultimate cause at the time, so credit to her for going through with it.

Then there was Cornell’s irritability. His vocals were often lagging, not in sync with the music. At times, he stopped singing completely and gave up for several seconds before catching back on with his bandmates.

At the time, I chalked it up to being late in the tour, thinking that his voice might be shot. Maybe he was exhausted. After all, Cornell, who was known for his four-octave vocal range and having one of the most versatile voices in rock ’n’ roll, would spend the majority of his time screaming into the mic — naturally, that will take a toll.

Several times throughout the night, he gave brief backstories to songs, regaling the band's work with record label Sub Pop. For ‘My Wave,’ he emphasized the importance of doing your own thing, as long as you don’t harm anyone in the process.

But then things took a dark turn before the song began. ‘You can burn crosses on your lawn, I don’t give a (profanity). You can burn your house down,’ he said. ‘Who cares? I don’t. As long as you don’t catch someone else’s house on fire.’ 

Stephen Cohen wrote for Seattle PI on the direct impact Cornell’s passing had in his hometown, with mourners considering not only his impact on their lives but also comparing the day to other sad musical moments in their and the city’s past.

While many of the fans publicly mourning Cobain's death in 1994 were flannel-clad teenagers, some of the hundreds who gathered at KEXP Thursday night brought their children, a testament to Cornell's decades-long career in rock and roll. Still, Clapper couldn't help but hearken back to her younger self.

‘Today has brought out the young teen,’ she said. ‘That's how it feels. It's brought me back to that age of growing up and learning who you are in the world.’

The grief on Thursday felt more mature, if no less painful. Josh Russell of Ballard, who moved to Seattle from Florida in large part because of his love of grunge music, said decades of life experience has helped him engage with Cornell's loss on a different level.

‘Back when it was Kurt, at our age we couldn't understand his suffering and what he was going through. So it just seemed like there was that anger, that selfishness from us at that age back then,’ Russell said. ‘And now, everybody's had shitty days. I think you can process the lyrics a lot more at our age. It's definitely a different feel. More of an understanding and more of a celebration thing rather than being pissed off at everything.’

Cohen also interviewed the inspiration for said song, one of Cornell and Soundgarden’s most famous, Artis the Spoonman, the Seattle performance artist who became by default a known figure worldwide.

‘(Cornell) introduced me to the whole freaking planet,’ Artis said. ‘It was years after I started, and I'd already done a lot of things. I'd recored with Zappa by then and did the Letterman show and a lot of national TV shows in other countries — Japan, England and such. But nothing like that of course, really. Who gets that?’

A nod to Artis' pure passion for performance, the song would go on to peak at No. 3 on Billboard's mainstream rock chart and win a Grammy for best metal performance in 1995. Suddenly, Artis' self-styled moniker made him instantly recognizable worldwide and people started traveling from around the globe to watch him perform.

‘This is like a hugely celebrated multi-platinum record throughout the world,’ Artis said. ‘Everywhere I go, if I say something, if I even mention that that's who I am -- boom, they know.’

Beyond the queasy feeling of considering Cornell’s inadvertant farewell to the stage, Rob Harvilla wrote for the Ringer further about how, even if the band had settled into a comfortably nostalgic place, they could still promise something that was now horribly snatched away.

Soundgarden were scheduled to play the three-day Rock on the Range festival in Columbus, Ohio, this Friday night, and I personally was extremely excited. Moreover, I fully expected them to be both the best and, their age notwithstanding, the most forward-looking band on the bill, a wild mixture of fellow ’90s giants and much younger contenders. From the first glimpse, from the first sound out of Cornell’s mouth, he evoked the best parts of rock ’n’ roll’s past and made you optimistic for rock ’n’ roll’s future, no matter how dark and desolate his songs got. Listening to those darker songs today is not a very pleasant experience. It hurts. But it’s also the only thing that helps.

In another Seattle paper, The Stranger, musician Nabil Ayers summed up Cornell with a series of memories, anecdotes and recognitions about what Cornell had meant to him over time, concluding on a lovely, telling story.

They introduced me to and embodied what it meant to be a huge band without the bullshit that huge bands carried before them. Iconic musicians who sat on top of the world, and at the same time, normal guys who continued to frequent the same Seattle record stores and bars that my friends and I did.

Running into Chris Cornell and striking up a conversation felt like the most normal thing in the world. In 1990 on Halloween eve, Faith No More opened for Billy Idol at the Seattle Center Coliseum. My freshman roommate Luke Miller and I went to see Faith No More and as we were leaving, soon after their short set, we ran into Chris and Kim. Luke immediately struck up a conversation with Chris.

‘Are you guys here to see Faith No More!?’ I stood behind Luke, in awe, the four of us the only people outside the arena while Billy Idol began his set.

‘Yeah,’ Chris said calmly. ‘What are you guys up to?’

The deluxe rerelease of the Singles soundtrack, associated as it was with Seattle’s music from the start, gave Eric Harvey at Pitchfork a chance not merely to consider again Cornell’s sudden loss, but the many wider currents that fed into an inadvertent cultural moment of lightning in a bottle, now endlessly referenced back to.

By definition, by stressing authenticity within the bounds of mainstream commerce, rock music has to die and be periodically resurrected. What made grunge—rock’s final mainstream ‘rebirth’—so potent and problematic was how it intertwined artistic tensions (selling out vs. staying true, community vs. commerce) with the musicians’ own deep-seated personal anxieties, fears, and sicknesses. That’s what made it feel real, what allowed for individuals to identify with it, and ultimately, what made it so commercially valuable. The music was often great, but more importantly, it was cast as the organic cultural product of a single city in the corner of a country, that, for many, marked an organic ‘victory’ after years of post-punk indie rock bands slogging it out on college radio and vanning it between small clubs. For locals, on the other hand, grunge was an absolute hype nightmare that had little to do with music or community and everything to do with vulture-like industry encroachment and outsider social positioning.

Meanwhile, Fyre Festival wasn’t going to die anytime soon — or at least coverage wasn’t. Joe Coscarelli, Melena Ryzik and Ben Sisario’s joint New York Times story provided both a new comprehensive overview and a few more gruesome details courtesy of supposed mastermind Billy McFarland.

Still, residents who had seen Fyre’s ostentatious marketing pitch worried about its distance from reality. ‘Something like this, it could build Exuma and it could break Exuma,’ said Ian Nicholson, a carpenter working for the festival.

About three weeks out, Richard Hooban, a Brooklyn DJ booker, toured the site. He saw a craggy beach and a gravel-strewn plot where the main stage would be. ‘This is going to take a lot of money or time to transform,’ he recalled thinking.

Mr. McFarland seemed flush enough. ‘He always had a few thousand dollars cash in his swimsuit,’ said Luca Sabatini, an owner of Unreal-Systems, which built the festival stages and supplied the high-caliber sound systems and lighting. If someone needed extra cash, Mr. McFarland would dole it out — ‘$500, crumpled up, a little humid because he went jet skiing with it,’ Mr. Sabatini observed. 

 Another all-hands-on effort at Pitchfork delved into what, presumably, will be the endless subject of what live performances are best where and how.  (I perhaps oversimplify.)

Ariella Stok: Defying the peak of primal Dead, the gutbucket blues of ‘Turn on Your Love Light’ dominated set lists during the Dead’s most psychedelic era. Usually upwards of 20 minutes (and sometimes over 40), the band vamped between innuendo-filled raps by frontman Pigpen aimed at pairing off members of the audience. While conducting the band’s deft on-the-fly arrangements, Pig would spike the Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland original’s sweetness into something more libidinal and fetishistic. ‘Well she’s got box back nitties/Great big noble thighs/Working undercover with her boar hog eye,’ Pig sang, a bit of mojo jive that one scholar has spent ample time decoding.

By September 1970, the Summer of Love had given way to the Autumn of Fuck. Doing some crowd work, Pig whips the audience into a frenzy, perhaps creating the sort of ‘weird atmosphere’ that led one feminist reviewer to feel alienated by the ‘hippie stag party’ later that fall. After the band strikes the final beat, Pigpen screams ‘Fuck!’—issued as both punctuation and command. This ‘Love Light’ scores 5 fucks—one for each time the word is uttered by the band.

Mickey Rapkin’s very entertaining Billboard piece has a bit of self-congratulation at work — okay, a lot — courtesy of the various industry types and producers fighting over credit still and so forth.  End result: Celine’s the most relaxed and approachable sounding of the bunch, which only seems right.

Dion: I think I was numb. Michael Kors did this dress for me. Everybody goes for chiffon dresses and décolletage, and I really wanted a turtleneck dress. He said, ‘A turtleneck?!’ Yes. Long-sleeve. Very tight. Just navy blue, like the water, but very deep down, like the ocean. I had about a $200 million dollar necklace around my neck. I had six ­bodyguards on the red carpet. I thought it was for me, but it was not for me. It was for the necklace. When I sang the song, I hit my chest.

Doelp: People used to call that “the Céline salute.”

Dion: I forgot that I was wearing it. I could feel the bodyguards engaging, like, Man down! They did not give me the ­necklace, unfortunately.

August Brown’s L.A. Times feature took a hard look at the persistent issues present in such gatherings and events, noting both tentative steps forward as well as clear feelings that it’s simply not enough yet.

Many activists believe that nothing will truly change until festivals themselves become more diverse. They see putting more women and members of the LGBTQ community onstage and behind the scenes, and including them in the best-practices rules of law enforcement, as the best solution.‘It’s like at a tailgate or any other party where it’s all men. It just has this ... feeling,’ said Marea Stamper, a DJ and producer who performs as the Black Madonna and has played at major festivals like Coachella and FYF Fest. ‘When you have women in leadership, it changes the dynamic of an event.’‘Venues and promoters must work harder to demolish this notion of the dance floor as just a place for hooking up and treating women as objects of desire,’ said Cay Horiuchi, an activist and educator with C.A.R.E.S., a Portland, Ore.-based group that holds workshops on creating safer festival environments.

Finally, Alexis Petridis’ piece in The Guardian, discussing said pop gig experience as noted, also included a crucial quote from a post by Ann Powers on social media. Both are essential.

But mostly it was the way it gave [my daughter] a first glimpse of a world that was previously outside her experience, a more adult, or at least more mature world than the one she knew, a world that would one day be her own, and how excited she was to see it, how – as she put it – grown-up it made her feel. She experienced something that transcended her pretty fickle and changeable musical allegiances. Jessie J has long been replaced in her affections – by, among others, Ariana Grande. The selfie she took that night is still on her bedroom wall. If that was true of a seven-year-old being chaperoned by her father, how much more true was it for the kids that were just old enough to be there without their parents, the ones who had relegated their mums and dads to waiting in the foyer or outside in the car? 

Almost no music is as widely reviled as pop aimed at tweenage and teenage girls. It is sneered at as vacuous and bland, pap for an undemanding audience incapable of telling good from bad. Sometimes it deserves to be reviled – when the people behind it are audibly as cynical and patronising as the people who sneer at it, when the grim stench of ‘will this do?’ permeates the whole enterprise. But it also has a function that overrides any criticism you might want to throw at it. Live, it can provide the kind of indelible, empowering experience that was so beautifully described by the American rock critic Ann Powers on social media in the aftermath of the Manchester attack: ‘Telling your mom it’s OK and you’ll meet her right after the show, running toward the front hand in hand with your best friend like you don’t even have a mom right now, flirting with the kid who sells you a soda, dancing experimentally, looking at the woman onstage and thinking maybe one day you’ll be sexy and confident like her, realising that right this moment you are sexy and confident like her, matching your voice to the sound, loving the sound, falling into the sound.’ 

And may we all fall in.