Soundgarden frontman Chris Cornell isn’t sweating the current EDM-leaning music-culture trends, comparing modern dance music to disco in a new interview with Howard Stern this week (June 18).
Cornell had a silver-lining outlook on rock’s relatively quiet presence in the face of the EDM revolution, while acknowledging the DJ-domination of the modern era.
“I actually heard somebody quoting a percentage the other day that 70 percent of people polled nowadays, and it must be young people, are into electronic dance music, and that that goes up every year,” the singer said. “I don’t know how much more it can go up. The only thing I can say is that tends to be the beginning of a really great new movement in rock, which is the same thing that kind of happened when disco was dominating.
“All of a sudden then you had punk rock, that came as a reaction to it where everyone said, you know, this sucks. So maybe that will happen now. They’ll look at each other at the rave, and their E will kick in, and they’ll go, ‘this sucks.’”
In other words, Cornell has never tried ecstasy. It’s precisely the reason for the tectonic shift of value for performance authenticity in music, encouraged and accelerated by a new generation of evolved recreational chemicals.
“This is the scary part, really, Howard,” Cornell continued. “When you have a new generation of kids, and when I say kids I mean like, you know, 10- to 15-year-olds where that’s what they’re exposed to. To them, (EDM) is kind of a comfort music and it’s hard to really relate to that, but that’s where it gets scary. But I don’t think it’s beyond a reaction to it. Electronic dance music is something that’s very social. You have to be around a lot of people, and go sort of participate in it with people. When I was a kid growing up, I did a lot of listening to records in my bedroom alone, and it was very personal thing, and that’s what got me into wanting to be a musician. And I know that there’s just a lot of other people out there like that and there’s a lot of young people out there like that. So you’ll hear inspired rock music, it’ll happen.”
Listen to Cornell and Stern talk EDM around 13:30 below.
