The Love Hate Society: Soundgarden's "Big Dumb Sex" vs. Irony

This is the latest installment of "The Love Hate Society" from Brian A. Boone, our occasional summer contributor. Boone's musings on music and pop culture can be seen on his website the Love Hate Society; his first book, I Love Music/I Hate Music, is due out from Penguin Perigree in winter 2011. With the recent news that Soundgarden is releasing a "retrospective" album and DVD in September, today we're looking back on their early days.

In the early Nineties, exactly two things made an otherwise hard rock band a "grunge" band: if they were from Seattle, and if they had at least a slight sense of "us vs. them" humor. One example of this is Nirvana's sarcastic screaming of the lyrics of the hippie anthem "Get Together" at the beginning of "Territorial Pissings" off Nevermind.

Another is Soundgarden's 1989 Louder Than Love cut "Big Dumb Sex," a thorough skewering of the rape-tastic, sex-obsessed cheesy hard rock--basically Guns N’ Roses--popular at the time that bands like Soundgarden would eventually render passé. Sample lyrics: "don’t you, don’t you want to thrill me / don’t you be afraid to tell me," and "I’m gonna fuck fuck fuck fuck you, fuck you."

Guns N' Roses did not quite get the joke. In 1993, Axl, Slash, Duff, and the other guys with names befitting American Gladiators covered "Big Dumb Sex" in a medley with T. Rex's "Buick Mackane" on its 1993 album The Spaghetti Incident? Meta? No, just big dumb obliviousness.