Soundgarden "Badmotorfinger" [1991]

You can't spell "Badmotorfinger" without "bong," nor "Soundgarden" without "dude." This album has the musical appeal for most women that setting your farts on fire does. Drop-tuned trailer guitar and bass playing, screech-metal 80s-style Sammy Hagar singing, ham-fisted prog-rock time-signature switcheroos and a Seattle-centric lyrical landscape of waste and depression were what A&M thought were going to break through in the marketplace for this foul group of stoner lumberjacks. That they may have partially succeeded is to lay much of the blame of the glum 90s Gen-X attitude directly before their scuffed-up Doc Martens. Sluggish and pulverizing, Soundgarden set out to make Tool sound like Milli Vanilli on "Badmotorfinger," which helpfully illustrates the album as a classic case of reverse-reaction overkill. It's no wonder music fans were still clinging to Madonna at the time; they didn't want to be trapped in this jockstrap-reeking locker room one second longer than they had to. They clearly learned how to play their instruments listening to Aerosmith 45s at 33 1/3, knowing that smackheads could care less if anything was being played at a danceable tempo, just so long as the low-end was loud enough to turn your vital organs into mush. Between Nirvana and Soundgarden, the next five-plus years of indie rock were set in stone: it was to be a miserable, bleak, rainy place even though the economy was on solid ground and Americans were prospering. Hmm -- perhaps the Seattle grunge movement was a big conspiratorial set-up by the political wing of the Republican party.