jasonfranks

10 SONGS #9 "Limo Wreck" by Soundgarden, SUPERUNKNOWN,  1994

I really learned to love music during the Grunge era. I mean, I liked music before then, I played trumpet and guitar, but I really hadn't found anything to connect with--80's pop, new wave, and cock rock didn't do it for me, and heavy metal was a world beyond my ken. Grunge music and the 'Alternative Revolution' and Metallica finding such massive mainstream success changed all that. All these amazing, dark, whacked-out sounds were exactly what I wanted and needed after a decade of listening to frivolous rubbbish. It wad the first time contemporary music meant anything to me and I ate it up--the grunge bands, Metallica, Rage Against the Machine, Primus, Pantera, Mark of Cain, Nine Inch Nails--I didn't care where it came from as long as it was good. And there was plenty of it; even now I'm discovering new things from that era or those leading up to it.

The grunge scene is what really opened the gates for alternative music at that time and this list wouldn't be complete without a total grunge song--but which one?

Soungarden was alway smy favourite of the four heavyweights from that scene. I liked the weirdly-tuned guitars, I liked Chris Cornell's bagpipes voice, and I liked the surreal lyrics that he wrote a lot better than the teen angst the others made a staple. But choosing a song was difficult--SUPERUNKNOWN was a huge album for me, but BADMOTORFINGER is close, and DOWN ON THE UPSIDE shows a genuine and unexpected maturity. Hell, I even like LOUDER THAN LOVE, whic sounds distinctly immature in comparison.

I admit it, I almost went with "Outshined", if for no other reason than that earth-shaking chorus riff. One listen and to that and you are through puberty, boy.

But I listened to SUPERUNKNOWN end-to-end a million times over and I know it inside out; it had to be from that album. So I'm going with an outsider; a song that was never a single: "Limo Wreck".

Nihilistic even by Soundgarden's standards, "Limo Wreck" is a song that insists that not only will everything die, it will do so violently. Cornell counts the ways: it will fall, it will wash away, it will be blown to pieces. A downtempo song with droning vocals, the chorus mounts to explains that you will die in a sea of red lights, and that you deserve it, and that nobody will care. "I'm the wreck of you, I'm the death of you all," he sings, claiming responsibility--and then going on to predict a similar fate for himself.

But it's more than just those smacked-out guitars, those howling threats and that implacable drumbeat; the lyrics paint these visions of apocalypse with some very distinct images. It's not entirely clearly what all of them mean, but then I don't think it's supposed to be--prophecies of the end times are usually embellished with hallucinations and opaque symbolism. 

It also feels like this is a song about Los Angeles; with its references to towers and police lights and blinded windows;  its battle for gold and souls. This is the second song in this list of ten that wishes doom on the city of angels, and I may very cap the thing off with a third song that explicitly wishes for the same thing.

"Limo Wreck" is a song I still listen to when it feels like the whole shebang is about to come down around me; which is more and more frequently the further 1994 recedes into the past.

-- JF