Black Hole Sun (found early version of Soundgarden music video; 1994)

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Black Hole Sun.jpg

The single cover for Black Hole Sun

Status: Found

Date found: 26 Jun 2019

Found by: MuchMusic, UltRadios

Soundgarden was an American rock band that was formed by singer and drummer Chris Cornell, lead guitarist Kim Thayil and bassist Hiro Yamamoto in 1984. The band would go through many lineup changes throughout the 1980s until landing on the lineup of Cornell on rhythm guitar and vocals, Thayil on lead guitar, future Pearl Jam member Matt Cameron on drums and Ben Shepard on bass in 1990. The band would be best known for their alter version of rock called grunge (preceding other well-known grunge bands like Nirvana, Alice In Chains & Pearl Jam) and would be very successful throughout the genre's heyday in the 1990s with hits like Jesus Christ Pose, Outshined, Rusty Cage and Black Hole Sun. The band would break up in 1997[1] following a show in Honolulu[2], but would reform thirteen years later before breaking up again in 2018, following the death of Cornell[3].

Music Video

The album Superunknown would be the group's highest-charting and most successful release of their career with the single Black Hole Sun being released two months after the album was released. It charted at #1 on the Mainstream Rock Charts[4], #2 on the Alternative Airplay Charts[5], #9 on the Mainstream Top 40 Charts[6] and #24 on the US Radio Songs Charts[7] and went gold in the UK[8], Australia[9] and Italy[10] and became the band's most recognizable song. A video for the song was made and would be just as famous as the song. The band was up to making a video for the song, stating in a 1995 Interview with Spin Magazine "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." and that the video "was entirely the director's (Howard Greenhalgh) idea"[11]. The video depicts the band playing in a open field while a suburban neighborhood with comically exaggerated looks and get swallowed by the sun that turns into a black hole.

Availability

Two versions of the video exist, the first version is more low budget and the neighborhood isn't seen getting sucked in the black hole and various shots in the video have unfinished visual effects and the final shot of the video would be a zoom-in on the blue screen. This version aired on MTV in June 1994[12] and would be played for several weeks until a second version of the video was made with shots of the neighborhood getting sucked into the black hole and various shots with the unfinished effects would be fixed to include the missing effects and now the final shot of the video is of the black hole[13]. This version would eventually air on MTV and would win the band an MTV Video Music Award for Best Metal/Hard Rock Video[14] and an Clio Award for Alternative Music Video[15]. Because of the second version of the video looking more finished, the early version of the video was very hard to come by, especially when the music video for the song was uploaded to the band's YouTube channel in 2010, the second version of the video was used. In 2017, the Canadian music channel MuchMusic premiered a block called "Much Retro Lunch" that is dedicated to music videos from the 1970s to the late-2000s. Soundgarden was among the artists shown on the block and the early version of the Black Hole Sun video aired on the block and a high-quality recording of the video was uploaded to the Internet Archive on June 26th, 2019, by user UltRadios among other videos shown on the block. An Australian recording of the video has also been found.

Gallery

The second version of the music video.

The early version of the music video.

External Links

References