A SPECIAL GUEST INSTALLMENT OF SONGS OF PRAISE WITH MARK PALM OF SUPERCRUSH!
Photo by: Mike Jurek
In an effort to provide you with more content than my weak little brain can muster in this age of boofing Lysol, I have reached out to cool dude Mark Palm from dream-pop band Supercrush to provide me with an entry for the Songs of Praise series. Groping into the depth of his youth, Palm delivers a loving ode to a Soundgarden deep cut “4th Of July” that’ll make even the most snewtiest of music snobs weep in appreciation. Read it and..oh you know the rest…
As a pre-teen, in the year or two prior to getting deeply into punk, hardcore, and underground music, I was a fan of the “alternative” and “grunge” bands that were ubiquitous at the time. This was ’93/94. I used to sit in my room and scan through the radio dial on a small boombox in search of anything cool sounding, at which point I’d stop spinning the dial and try to absorb whatever song it was that caught my attention. I have a very distinct memory from earlier in my childhood of settling on “Love Me Two Times” by The Doors in this fashion as part of an early attempt to discover what rock music was. At any rate, it was in this way that I first heard “Black Hole Sun” by Soundgarden, which inspired me to buy a cassette copy of their Superunknown album. I spent countless hours listening to that tape on my bright yellow Sony Walkman (if you were sentient during that era you know the one I’m talking about) and Superunknown quickly became my favorite album and Soundgarden my favorite band, both of which remain true to this day. As a young drummer, I really focused in on what Matt Cameron was playing and was in awe of his chops, groove, power, and style - basically his whole deal. And although I loved the singing I think I was too young and inexperienced to fully comprehend the otherworldly vocal talent of Chris Cornell, may his soul, if such a thing exists, rest in peace. In fact, there’s a lot about this record that I was too young to fully grasp. In retrospect, it’s a pretty bizarre candidate to be chosen as a hit by a young person with limited musical experience, and likewise by mainstream rock radio. Sure there are hooks and melody, but they exist within a sludgy morass of odd time signatures, strange riffs, unorthodox guitar tunings, and lengthy arrangements. In many ways, it’s kind of an unapproachable album by traditional commercial standards. Anyway… although it was “Black Hole Sun” that first caught my ear, the song that has made the biggest impression on me over the years is a track called “4th Of July”. However, buried as it is near the end of an almost impossibly dense album that clocks in at well over an hour, “4th Of July” kind of escaped my attention during those pre-teen years. Soon enough I became absorbed by punk and then hardcore and swore off all my prior musical tastes, getting rid of my small collection of alternative rock and grunge tapes and CDs in favor of faster fare.
Fast forward a decade or so and I found myself living in a punk house in East Vancouver. Among the various debris and detritus that cluttered the house was a milk crate of old cassette tapes, one of which was a coverless copy of Superunknown. One day on a whim I decided to put it in the deck and revisit my old favorite. I kind of put it on as a bit of a lark. Like “punk rocker with superior subcultural taste in underground music ironically listens to mainstream corporate rock album for a chuckle.” Pretty pretentious stuff. But I didn’t chuckle long because Superunknown blew my mind all over again, and this time around it was “4th Of July” especially that dropped my jaw. I declared it to be the heaviest song of all time to anyone who would listen. By this time in my journey through the aggressive music underground, I had become a fan of bands like Eyehategod and Damnation AD. Although emerging from polar opposite scenes in terms of their attitudes towards illicit substances, both bands explored a down-tuned, sludgy approach to sonic excess that really appealed to me. But “4th Of July” somehow trumped both of them on the heaviness scale. It was astounding. How could a multi-platinum, mainstream arena rock act produce something so goddamn heavy? The opening riff is one for the ages. Like the sound of plates shifting deep within the earth or an audio manifestation of the wearing down of a mountain into sand by the unending force of the elements. A riff of tectonic proportions. A riff of geologic magnitude… Ok, I’m really off on one now, but you get what I’m trying to say: it is a slow, down-tuned dirge of palm-muted chords trudging into the void. Unlike the aforementioned underground acts, “4th Of July” employs melodic vocals, and yet that somehow only adds to the heaviness of the track. Haunting is the best way I can describe Chris Cornell’s performance on the song. The vocals are eerily double-tracked in different octaves while the delay tails echo off into the abyss. Like a man on a precipice singing into a chasm, the bottom of which is too far below to be visible. Strange, now that I think of it, that a multi-layered vocal arrangement could create such a lonely and desolate feeling. I suppose an echo of one’s own voice is not a companion, just a reminder of one’s isolation.
Although I have yet to make sense of the lyrics in any kind of concrete way, they are so evocative and rich with imagery that they function on an almost cinematic level, conjuring apocalyptic scenes of a world so dark as to be lit only by the sparks of Roman candles held in the outstretched hands of the poor souls condemned to exist in such a forsaken realm.
Down in the hole
Jesus tries to crack a smile
Beneath another shovel load
Goddamn if that isn’t the heaviest tercet I’ve ever encountered. Again, it can be interpreted countless different ways and I can’t claim to know exactly what it means, but I do know that it conveys an atmosphere that is nauseatingly dark. As someone keenly aware of, and disgusted by, the inescapable force of Christianity, it’s the disturbing biblical references and allusions to Christian themes set against images of armageddon in the lyrics of “4th Of July” that make it especially unsettling and therefore powerful to me.
In my late twenties, I went on to play in a band of my own that had the DNA of “4th Of July” as a key component of its genetic code. The slow, down-tuned riffs, the lyrical preoccupation with religious themes - the elements were there (minus the incredible singing voice). Of course, they were not as masterfully synergized as they were in the genuine article, but it was clear, the influence had been absorbed and integrated into my own expression.
I don’t listen to Soundgarden often these days, and especially not “4th Of July”. I don’t want to blunt its power through overexposure. I save it for specific moments. Until today, I don’t think I’ve listened to the song once since the day Chris Cornell died. Of course, I didn’t know Cornell personally so I can’t attest to his qualities as a human, but as an artist, he's had a profound impact on my life. As soon as I heard of his passing I immediately put on “4th Of July” and read over the lyrics once more. As if the song couldn’t get any heavier than it already was, at that moment and perhaps forevermore, it was imbued with additional weight and sense of foreboding that is unmatched by any other song I’ve ever come across.