A Tear Falling To The Ground

Temple of the Dog “All Night Thing”

Grunge wasn’t a very sexy genre. This was somewhat by design, since the major artists involved were deliberately distancing themselves from the casual sexism and corny bro antics of the previous generation of mainstream hard rock acts. And besides that, these guys were all way more interested in singing about depression, trauma, grief, discontent with society, and general existential dread than anything else.

The major exception is Temple of the Dog’s “All Night Thing,” which stands as the sexiest and most romantic song in the grunge canon. It’s only grunge by default; there’s no guitars at all and it’s much closer in sound and sentiment to a Prince ballad than anything you’d reasonably associate with early ‘90s Seattle. Chris Cornell’s voice is the center of the song from the very start, as he opens with this perfectly vivid line – “she motioned to me that she wanted to leave” – that has him spinning off into various scenarios of what’s about to go down. The entire song is in a liminal space, and even if it’s fairly obvious that Cornell is about to hook up with this woman, he sings each line with such commitment that the anxiety and anticipation feels entirely authentic. The timbre of his voice is very post-metal, but the nuances of his performance comes closer to the hyper-emotive R&B of Otis Redding. This is part of what makes the song feel so romantic – it’s hard to imagine he’d be singing with this much feeling if he was just trying to get laid. “All Night Thing” sounds like the beginning of something special.

It’s worth nothing that “All Night Thing” is, in its low-key way, a song about consent. The entire drama of the song hinges on what she wants to do, and being totally OK with whatever she decides. You don’t get a lot of that these days.

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