How Soundgarden gifted us the coolest palindrome ever

Soundgarden, in true Soundgarden fashion, melded mischief and metal to give us the most badass palindrome ever when they named their limited edition 1992 EP (album) "Satanoscillatemymetallicsonatas".

Read this sentence carefully: "Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas." 

Now read it backwards, from the last letter to the first, sounding them out loud: 

S-AT-A-N-O-SC-I-L-L-AT-E-M-Y-M-E-T-A-L-L-I-C-S-O-NA-TA-S.

Notice anything?  

Yup, "Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas." is not just the name of a Soundgarden EP (a bonus disc that was part of a limited edition release of their double platinum album Badmotorfinger), but also a palindrome!

For those who may not be sure, a palindrome is simply a word, phrase or sequence that reads the same backwards and forwards. Like the word "civic", for example. Or the phrase, "Madam, I'm Adam". Now back to Soundgarden.

While Soundgarden may only have crossed over into mainstream popularity after their 1994 album Superunknown and its haunting single Black Hole Sun, (I've always thought of the song as their Nothing Else Matters. Just like Nothing Else Matters is the Metallica song known to most people who haven't listened to a lot of other Metallica songs, Black Hole Sun is the Soundgarden song known to most people who haven't checked out much other Soundgarden work. I suppose Guns N' Roses might say both songs are the respective bands' November Rain. Holy shit, I should do a whole article just on this topic!)... anyway, where were we?

Right. Though Superunknown was probably Soundgarden's Black Album (in commercial terms), Badmotorfinger to me was their most Soundgarden-ish album. It's heavy, it's artsy, it's brainy, it's raw yet extremely radio-friendly and it's even hilarious in parts. Just listen to the lyrics of its first single, Jesus Christ Pose, if you don't believe me. Then watch its video. The video literally starts with the words ""And God So Loved Soundgarden He Gave Them His Only Song" flashing across the screen. They paraphrased probably the most famous Biblical verse ever - John 3:16- before launching into a song about how too many people complain that they're being crucified just to get some sympathy! That's hilarious. And clever. At least we all thought so till the very same Biblical verse was wrangled into an era-defining tagline by that other poet laureate of the nineties, Stone Cold Steve Austin. Christ, what a time that decade was to be alive.

So anyway, back to Satanoscillatemymetallicsonatas.

Satanoscillatemymetallicsonatas, as we now know, class, was the name of the accompanying EP in a special edition 2-disc release of Badmotorfinger. (An EP, for those of you who have not been keeping up with your Music History, is a mini-album, usually about half an hour long and containing like 3-6 songs. A lot of bands used to put out EPs when they were starting out those days- probably to gauge audience response and more likely because every idiot with a microphone and an iPad couldn't just "release" music those days.)

So anyway, Satanoscillatemymetallicsonatas is definitely one of their ... ahem... superunknown albums (hehe), and consisted of just 5 songs, namely a politically charged cover of Into the Void by Black Sabbath, moderately interesting covers of Girl You Want and Stray Cat Blues by Devo and The Rolling Stones respectively, and 2 original songs. Now the covers have their own sort of novelty-appeal obviously, and the Sabbath cover especially is quite affecting because Soundgarden replaced its original lyrics with a speech by Chief Sealth who was a 19th century Native American chief and vocal advocate against the colonisation of his people's land by the white settlers. He's also the dude after whom the city of Seattle is named, by the way. Can you even imagine having a city (Seattle, the birthplace of grunge music) and a Soundgarden song in your honour? The Chief presumably had more pressing concerns during his lifetime, but still.

Getting back to the EP, it's the live version of Badmotorfinger track Slaves and Bulldozers that really does it for me. The other single, She's A Politician, is all punk rock energy and fun but it's no Black Hole Sun.

If you ask me, Satanoscillatemymetallicsonatas seems a lot like a record Soundgarden were forced to put together by their recording label or management or something so as to release the Badmotorfinger special edition album to drum up more interest (translation: money) from their upcoming Lollapalooza 1992 tour. Now keep that thought firmly in mind and contemplate if you will, the palindrome that is the name of this EP: "Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas". I know I'm really reaching here, but doesn't it sound a lot like a tongue-in-cheek plea by the band to their evil overlords (record label/management) or maybe to the devil himself to help them make music because they were simply too wiped from having just made the definitive album of their lives?

Or maybe they were just having fun with words. We'll never know now, will we, Chris?

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