YMMV / Soundgarden

• Award Snub: They have yet to enter the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, where Nirvana and Pearl Jam were inducted as soon as they were eligible, and yet Soundgarden only entered the ballots in 2020, a few years after their dissolution.
• Awesome Music: Just listen to the Greatest Hits Albums A-Sides or Telephantasm for a starting point. For regular albums, Superunknown and Badmotorfinger are considered their best.
• Epic Riff: Many, but some notable examples are: "Jesus Christ Pose", "Holy Water", "4th of July", "Like Suicide", "Beyond the Wheel", "Outshined", "Let Me Drown"...oh, we could go on.
• Funny Moments: Rarely in their music, but the band had plenty in their heyday.
  • Kim Thayil and Billy Corgan drunkenly arguing.
    (paraphrased)
    Billy Corgan: You're argumentative because you're a Virgo.
    Kim Thayil: Damn right, I'm argumentative! I've been arguing with you for the last half hour!
    Billy Corgan: See, I'm a Pisces. We pick up on that sort of thing.
  • While opening for Guns N' Roses, Chris noted that Axl Rose was always having a meltdown about something. One day, before a stadium show, he passed by Axl arguing with their tour manager, saying he wanted the Goodyear blimp to fly overhead while GNR played. Chris casually mentioned that the Fuji blimp is technically bigger, leading to Axl immediately demanding that instead.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • "Black Saturday" is about asking for a Mercy Kill instead of being a decayed old man. Five years later, Chris Cornell died suddenly at 52, way before he would need such a treatment.
  • "Blow Up the Outside World" opens right away with the protagonist mentioning that he attempted suicide and failed.
  • "Like Suicide" and especially "Pretty Noose" counts as well, especially given Cornell's death was later confirmed to be a suicide by hanging. The band also covered an early 70s metal song called "Homicidal Suicidal" by the band Budgie.
  • So many of the band's songs, really:
    • "No one sings like you anymore" ("Black Hole Sun"), which has since become the fandom's way of offering their condolences and saying "We wish you were here, Chris." Tellingly, it became the title of a posthumous compilation of Chris's work.
    • "There must be something else/There must be something good/Far away" ("Boot Camp")
    • "I'm thinking of your highness/And crying hard upon the loss I've found/And on the plus and minus/Zero chance of ever turning this around/They say if you look hard/You'll find your way back home/Born without a friend/And bound to die alone" ("Zero Chance")
  • The sheer fact that the last song Cornell performed on stage was a cover of "In My Time of Dying" is very unsettling.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The album cover◊ for Superunknown, which featured "Black Hole Sun", was a distorted photo of the bandmembers above an upside-down burning forest. On April 10, 2019, astronomers presented the first-ever picture of a black hole, and it looked incredibly similar to the cover. Even Soundgarden's Twitter account noted this.
• Iron Woobie: Ben Shepherd. He's the youngest member of the band, and has talked about how he was effectively still growing up and maturing when he first joined, barely aged twenty-two, and took the band's dissolution the hardest. He ended up struggling with years of drug and alcohol abuse and, to top it all off, he lost all of his gear in 2008 after the warehouse that Soundgarden's gear was being stored in was sold. He was so despondent he quit music altogether until he was coaxed back to record his solo album, shortly after which Soundgarden reunited. Yet despite everything he's been through, post-reunion interviews show him as just being grateful that he gets to play music and earn a living.
• It's Popular, Now It Sucks!: Some of their oldest fans feel that the song the band created for The Avengers, "Live to Rise," sounds too mainstream.
• Misaimed Fandom: "Big Dumb Sex" is a parody of 1980s glam metal and the related sexist lyrics. Many fans (and even hair metal bands) missed the humor (even though the title should have been a clue).
• Nightmare Fuel: The intro to "Searching With My Good Eye Closed". An overly cheery narrator says seemingly random things with animal noises... and then...
  "This is my good eye! Do you hear a cow? *moooooo* A rooster says: *cuck-oooo* Here is a pig! *pig squeal* The Devil says... *whooshing followed by two horrifying Metal Screams*
  • While nightmare fuel may have been the intent, some see this as pure Narm more than anything else, considering how out of place it is.
  • "Applebite" is very unsettling, due in part to its strange melody, Cornell's haunted and heavily processed vocals, and its bizarre arrangement. There is something that feels slightly off about the song.
  • "Room A Thousand Years Wide" may qualify. Three chords, an incessant beat, and some of the most nightmarish vocal layering from Chris. The song is so hypnotic it sounds like Chinese water torture put to music. Not to mention during the end during the breakdown it sounds like the world is about to come apart.
  • "4th of July" is possibly the heaviest song the band ever recorded, and it has a suffocating atmosphere throughout.
  • The music video for "Black Hole Sun". It takes place in what on the surface seems like a normal, pleasant suburb. What looks like preachers from different faiths arrive, holding a sign that says "The End is Nigh" and "Faith Saves". The residents are shown engaging in odd and subtly disturbing behaviors, such as a woman who obsessively applies layers and layers of lipstick on her face, and a girl who calmly eats ice cream while in front of her a Barbie doll is melting on a barbecue. Most of the people have unsettling wide grins on their faces constantly, and sometimes their expressions are manipulated by image editing just enough to become creepy. By the end of the video, the sun has collapsed into a black hole and sucks in the entire neighborhood.
  • "Jesus Christ Pose" is a six-minute burst of insanity, capped off by Chris' spine-chilling Careful with That Axe moment at the end.
• Signature Song: "Black Hole Sun" and "Spoonman" To a lesser extent, "Pretty Noose", "Jesus Christ Pose" and "Black Rain".
• So Bad, It's Good: "Circle of Power" from Ultramega OK, due to Hiro Yamamoto's hilariously awful singing.

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