My classic rock: Goodbye, Chris Cornell

This song was already too much, but with today's news it feels even more so. How bittersweet to find, via my colleague Alexis Sottile's remarkable new interview with Cameron Crowe, that it was inspired by an inside joke of sorts, the mythology of Singles' hapless protagonist and Citizen Dick leader Cliff Poncier.

Chris Cornell was very obviously a musical titan. An almost scarily mighty wielder-of-voice, a true rock god in an era where that concept was under attack. And a master songwriter. Superunknown is probably my favorite Soundgarden moment, with "Fell on Black Days," "The Day I Tried to Live" and all the rest. They were a gloriously loud, weird, over-the-top band, in many ways the antithesis of the sardonic reluctance that Cobain and Co. embodied. There was nothing apologetic or shrinking about Soundgarden. Cornell wailed, literally, and the band did the same. They were prog and punk and heavy metal and pop. (I can think of few hit singles that check all those boxes the way "Outshined" does.) Maximal and insane and fun, in their own brutish, caustic way.

I'm not a Cornell completist. Beyond "Seasons," I don't know the solo material well — though this a.m., I had a great time combing through his sizable backlog of covers, which play like a roadmap of his musical DNA, from Zeppelin to Whitney Houston — and as much as I adore both Soundgarden and Rage Against the Machine, I can't say I really warmed to Audioslave beyond their titanic introductory single "Cochise." (I should also add that while I'm often the guy who can be found going to the mat for allegedly indefensible releases, judging by what I've heard of Scream, Cornell's infamous Timbaland collaboration, the album seems to generally deserve the scorn that's been heaped upon it.) But the Soundgarden back catalog is absolutely a part of my musical pantheon — like Cornell himself, now, those records are immortal.

It seems to me that the rock music of my youth is now generally appraised in a mocking way: all that '90s flannel and angst is often condescended to retroactively in much the same way the output and milieu of the '80s "hair" bands are. (And let's not even get started on a band like Stone Temple Pilots, a phenomenally talented group that never seemed to transcend punchline status in the eyes of the tastemakers, whose idea of taste somehow always seems so abhorrent and antithetical to my own passions and interests, especially as far as rock music is concerned.) But make no mistake: This rock was classic. Have you listened, really listened, to a song like "Would?" lately, or one like "State of Love and Trust" — I guess it's no coincidence that my go-to examples for many of these bands all appear on the Singles soundtrack, which was such a treasured object to me at a young age, maybe even my favorite multi-artist compilation of all time — or "Limo Wreck"? This was intensely high-stakes music, virtuosically composed and performed. Music that, as much as I love contemporary quasi-mainstream rock bands from Queens of the Stone Age to the Mars Volta to Mastodon, attains a grandeur and sturdiness and scope that really hasn't been heard in this medium since.

All I can say is, I'm glad I lived through it, and I'm sad to hear that Chris Cornell could not enjoy the kind of late-career contendedness that, say, his newly Rock and Roll Hall of Fame–inducted peers in Pearl Jam seem to be rightfully basking in. Whatever he was going through, I think it's fair to say he deserved better.

Best of 2013: index, etc.

To recap, here are:

My 10 favorite albums of 2013, all genres in play.

My 10 favorite jazz albums of 2013, plus one honorable mention and a list of fave live shows.

My 10 favorite metal albums of 2013, plus three honorable mentions and a list of fave live shows.

Here, via Pitchfork, is a Year in Music post, which puts a personal spin on some of the above, and also includes a list of my 10 favorite tracks of 2013, plus a shout-out re: a new-to-me old album that blew my mind this year. Originally, I had more Haim, RVIVR and Diarrhea Planet on the songs countdown, but I decided to limit myself to one track per band so as to yield a broader assortment and rep for some names I didn't include on the albums list. My No. 11, incidentally, would undoubtedly be Drake's "Hold On, We're Going Home." Just heard that for the umpteenth time while out and about earlier this week, and found its smoothness newly undeniable.

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There was one band not featured in any of the above reckonings that was nevertheless a big part of my musical year, and that band is Pearl Jam. I think Lightning Bolt is a very good album. If the second half were as good as the first half, and did not—in my opinion—nosedive into tepid meandering, it would be a great album and very likely would've made my overall top 10. As I wrote in TONY, this LP is not going to change anyone's mind about Pearl Jam, but for lapsed fans such as myself—I love albums 1 through 5 pretty much unequivocally but have only heard bits and pieces of the four full-lengths in between those and Lightning Bolt—this is a great place to get back on board. I'd say that at least four of the songs in the playlist below are insta-canonical PJ, with the other two lagging only slightly behind. My favorites are probably "My Father's Son" and "Sirens." If the latter doesn't move you, even just a little, we probably have pretty different tastes. Eddie Vedder is in roaring form on all these. Again, if you can't at least admit to that—well, you know the rest.




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One other thing: The Fleetwood Mac show at MSG in April was excellent. Anyone who cares about the coexistence of raw performance intensity and widely accessible songs needs to see Lindsey Buckingham live. The 2011 solo show I saw was outstanding; it was totally different, and equally spellbinding, to hear him in the company of what he's dubbed the Big Machine.