Spoonman

The percussion is the architecture here — Artis the Spoonman's found-sound rhythm work giving the track a tribal, handmade physicality that no drum machine could replicate, something rattling and alive at the center of the song. The guitars pile on in ways that feel almost chaotic but hold together through sheer force of groove, Kim Thayil's riff ungainly and hypnotic in equal measure. Cornell is more physical here than cerebral, his delivery almost chanted in places, riding the rhythm rather than soaring above it. The song is a celebration of a real Seattle street performer and, by extension, of the idea that art made with unlikely materials in unlikely places has its own integrity — that the underground scene nurturing these bands was itself a kind of spoonman, making something extraordinary out of scraps. There's a joy in this that Soundgarden didn't always permit themselves, a looseness that sits at the edge of chaos without falling in. It's a record about community disguised as a record about percussion. Seattle's early-nineties scene had deep roots in exactly this kind of cross-pollination between art forms and communities, and this song documents that. Play it when you need music that feels handmade and irreverent, something that reminds you that the best things often come from people with nothing to prove.