Black Hole Sun

Chris Cornell wrote it in roughly fifteen minutes, in his head, driving home from the studio, after mishearing a television news anchor say something that sounded like “black hole sun.” That origin — a phrase that means nothing, assembled by accident — is the most honest account anyone has given of the song, and it has never stopped people from explaining it to each other.

What makes it durable isn’t the lyric. It’s that the melody is genuinely, unironically pretty, and it is carrying a request for the sun to come and wash the rain away along with everything else. The verses drift. The chorus opens up like a hymn. Cornell sings most of it in a controlled, almost gentle middle register and only lets the full instrument out at the end, which is remarkable restraint from a singer with that much available. Underneath, the guitar is treated so it wobbles in and out of pitch, seasick, never quite settling. It’s a pleasant song that is deeply unwell, and it works precisely because it refuses to signal which of those it means.

Superunknown arrived in March 1994, weeks before Kurt Cobain’s death, and this was the single that carried Soundgarden — a band that had been grinding since 1984 and was never really a grunge band in the first place — into daytime rotation. It won Best Hard Rock Performance at the 1995 Grammys. Howard Greenhalgh’s video, with its melting suburban grins, sealed the association: sunshine as a symptom.

Cornell died in 2017, and the song’s refusal to explain itself has aged into something harder to sit with since.

Greatest of All Time. The genre’s biggest crossover hit is a lullaby with something wrong underneath it, and nobody has managed the trick twice.

Hero image: Chris Cornell performing with Soundgarden, by Pedro Mora, licensed under CC BY 3.0.