{"id":684,"date":"2026-06-16T11:54:02","date_gmt":"2026-06-16T11:54:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sportprocess.co.uk\/?p=684"},"modified":"2026-06-16T11:54:02","modified_gmt":"2026-06-16T11:54:02","slug":"so-sad-the-lead-guitarist-of-the-seattle-based-rock-band-soundgarden-kim-thayil-has-been-suspended-to-music-industry-due-to","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sportprocess.co.uk\/?p=684","title":{"rendered":"SO SAD: the lead guitarist of the Seattle-based rock band Soundgarden, Kim Thayil has been suspended to music industry due to\u2026."},"content":{"rendered":"
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Kim Thayil has always felt like an outsider. For example: the Soundgarden guitarist has lived in Seattle, a city infamously addicted to coffee, for more than four decades, but only started drinking the stuff himself during lockdown. \u201cI was pretty against-the-grain to my Seattle friends, who always wanted to meet up at coffee shops,\u201d he grins, cradling a freshly brewed cup of java in his kitchen. \u201cMy girlfriend in the 80s and 90s even worked at the original branch of Starbucks and made coffee with a French press every morning. But I drank tea, because my parents are Indian.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thayil and Yamamoto hailed from Park Forest, a suburb of Chicago. \u201cWe grew up as immigrants and outsiders,\u201d Thayil says. \u201cI was raised on American culture: the Monkees and the Brady Bunch and Superman comics. But there was this distance \u2013 I wasn\u2019t necessarily a member of this club.\u201d This distance wasn\u2019t entirely a bad thing, especially when he got into weird, heavy music. \u201cI had no obligations to these subcultures I was not a member of. I could explore, without expectation, with no canon I had to adhere to.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thayil\u2019s gateway to heavy rock was Kiss, but the hair metal that dominated the 80s was, he says, \u201cthe Partridge Family, but with a fuzzbox: hopelessly suburban, white and milquetoast. I was a skinny, long-haired brown guy, and the idea of all that spandex and hairspray and makeup \u2026\u201d He tugs at his grey beard and grins. \u201cThis was not a fitting palette for that kind of display.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thayil\u2019s Indian heritage also set him apart from his peers. In his new memoir, A Screaming Life, he writes that when he and bassist Hiro Yamamoto formed Soundgarden in 1984, the group was \u201ctwo-thirds Asian\u201d, and that \u201cas liberal and accepting as the punk scene was, it was still largely white, and I was ever aware of that\u201d. Nevertheless, Soundgarden went on to become pioneers of Seattle\u2019s grunge movement, a multiplatinum-selling, critically acclaimed, Grammy-winning group whose breakthrough hit, Black Hole Sun, transcended their gnarly milieu to become an enduring anthem.<\/p>\n\n

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Kim Thayil has always felt like an outsider. 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