Black Hole Sun is a song by Soundgarden. The single album was released on May 13, 1994. The song was written by frontman Chris Cornell. Black Hole Sun was released in 1994 as the third single from the band’s fourth studio album, Superunknown (1994). Considered to be the band’s signature song, it topped the Billboard Album Rock Tracks chart, where it spent a total of seven weeks at number one. Despite peaking at number two on the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart, Black Hole Sun finished as the number one track of 1994 for that listing. Worldwide, the single reached the top 10 in Australia, Canada, France, and Ireland, while in Iceland, it reached number one.
Black Hole Sun was written by Chris Cornell. In 2014, Cornell explained the song’s origins to Uncut Magazine:
“I wrote it in my head driving home from Bear Creek Studio in Woodinville, a 35, 40 minute drive from Seattle. It sparked from something a news anchor said on TV and I heard wrong. I heard ‘blah blah blah black hole sun blah blah blah’. I thought that would make an amazing song title, but what would it sound like? It all came together, pretty much the whole arrangement including the guitar solo that’s played beneath the riff. I spent a lot of time spinning those melodies in my head so I wouldn’t forget them. I got home and whistled it into a Dictaphone. The next day I brought it into the real world, assigning a couple of key changes in the verse to make the melodies more interesting. Then I wrote the lyrics and that was similar, a stream of consciousness based on the feeling I got from the chorus and title”.
Cornell said that he wrote the song in about 15 minutes. He used a Gretsch guitar to write the song, and commented:
“I wrote the song thinking the band wouldn’t like it then it became the biggest hit of the summer.”
Cornell came up with the song while using a Leslie speaker. Guitarist Kim Thayil said that the Leslie model 16 speaker was perfect for the song as (it’s very Beatlesque and has a distinctive sound). It ended up changing the song completely. Thayil said that the song:
“Wasn’t safe as milk, but it wasn’t glass in someone’s eye either. It was the spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down. Now it’s the ‘Dream On’ of our set”.
The song was performed in a slightly sharp drop D tuning, similar to the tuning used on the band’s first single, “Hunted Down”. Drummer Matt Cameron called the song “a huge departure”. Credit is due to Michael Beinhorn and Brendan O’Brien, producer and recording engineer, respectively.
Tracklist:
- Black Hole Sun
- Like Suicide (acoustic)
- Kickstand (live) Recorded on August 20, 1993, at Jones Beach Amphitheater in Wantagh, New York.
The music video for Black Hole Sun was directed by British video director Howard Greenhalgh, produced by Megan Hollister for Why Not Films (London, England), shot by Ivan Bartos, and features post production work by 525 Post Production (Hollywood, California) and Soho 601 Effects (London). The video follows a suburban neighborhood and its vain inhabitants with comically exaggerated grins, which are eventually swallowed up when the Sun suddenly turns into a black hole, while the band performs the song somewhere in an open field. In the video, Cornell can be seen wearing a fork necklace given to him by Shannon Hoon of Blind Melon.
In an online chat, the band stated that the video:
“was entirely the director’s idea”, and added, “Our take on it was that at that point in making videos, we just wanted to pretend to play and not look that excited about it.” They said that the video was one of the few Soundgarden videos the band was satisfied with.
The video was released in June 1994. After several weeks of airplay on MTV, a second version of the video was substituted containing more elaborate visual effects than the original, including the addition of a computer generated black hole. The music video for “Black Hole Sun” became a hit on MTV and received the award for Best Metal/Hard Rock Video at the 1994 MTV Video Music Awards. In 1995, it received the Clio Award for Alternative Music Video. The video is available on the CD-ROM Alive in the Superunknown.
Chris Cornell (July 20, 1964 – May 18, 2017)
