Soundgarden - Rusty Cage

Escape Velocity

1. The urge, the need to escape comes to everyone over the arc of their lives. It exists in the need to escape an abusive relationship, to escape overspecialization, a cursed job, a monotonous lifestyle, or an addiction… Irony has an escape hatch called spirituality. The first 40 seconds of Rusty Cage arrive with all the jagged lightning and bottomless heavy required to accelerate frontman Chris Cornell to escape velocity. As much as I know that shirtless rock god, through sheer force of will, is going to break his cage and run, this Houdini act needs top-tier talent and group precision. On second thought, Rusty Cage isn’t an act of defiance. It’s an act of survival.

   Like God’s eyes in my headlights.

   - Soundgarden, Rusty Cage

2. “The challenge for me was, ‘How can I write a visceral, up-tempo, aggressive, post-punk rock song with screechy vocals, but that’s not a heavy metal song or a retro hard rock song?’” Cornell said in 2011 for an oral history of the song in Spin. Visceral… yeeeaaaaah… that part. “Like God’s eyes in my headlights,” “It’s raining icepicks on your steel shore,” and “I’m burning diesel, burning dinosaur bones,” are lyrics that would appear in a Black Sabbath/Tom Waits alliance. My GOD! That’s it. That’s what Rusty Cage is, and what the entire album it appears on, Badmotorfinger, is - a paranoid and fierce child of Sabbath and Waits that is far more interesting than Metallica and Lou Reed could ever manage. Listen to guitarist Kim Thayil encode the fury of ancient gods in riff after volcanic riff on the album, beginning with the opening track, Rusty Cage. Bassist Ben Shepherd utterly disregards whimsy, tunes down, and mines the molten ore that spins inside the Earth. Again, bottomless heavy. All of this couples with the urges inside Cornell’s head as he seeks and demands escape. Force still equals mass times acceleration.

3. The reality of self-innovation lies not what in one is escaping from, but rather, in what one is escaping to.

   The price of self-destiny is never cheap, and in certain situations it is unthinkable. But to achieve the marvelous, it is precisely the unthinkable that must be thought.

   - Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume

   The damnable misery is we now know there was never an actual escape for Cornell that could keep him alive. It wasn’t the sun that melted wings, but rather the inferno inside Icarus. His was a failed attempt at an ordinary life because he was trying for something spectacular and he succeeded in that regard. The seesaw simply could not be balanced. Rusty Cage remains an example of aggressive liberation because we cannot apply the personal endgame of the art’s creator to the art itself. At that moment, in early October 1991, Soundgarden achieved escape velocity, and those of us who were interested in such things would be forever inspired.

   No one sings like you anymore.

   -Soundgarden, Black Hole Sun