I just wanna see some palm trees. I will try and shake away this disease.
When Art Alexakis of Everclear sang those words in “Santa Monica,” he tapped into one of popular music’s oldest fantasies: that somewhere beyond the cold, beyond the routine, beyond whatever is weighing us down, warm weather, the sun, hell, summer might make things better. The idea is simple: change the weather, and perhaps you’ll change yourself.
But what if the disease doesn’t shake away?
Throughout the 1990s, many alternative rock and metal bands seemed to challenge that very idea. Summer wasn’t presented as freedom but as something oppressive, surreal or even decaying. The sun didn’t heal – it distorted. Heat became suffocating. Brightness became blinding or unsettling. Rather than embracing one of popular culture’s most enduring myths, bands like Soundgarden, Deftones, Danzig, and Type O Negative headed for the shade and turned summer inside out.
“Black Hole Sun” by Soundgarden is one of the clearest examples of this reversal.
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Soundgarden vocalist Chris Cornell has said the song began with a misheard phrase from a news broadcast, “black hole sun,” which immediately suggested both its title and atmosphere. From there, the song was built around that image, with structure, melody, and lyrics forming through a stream of consciousness association rather than a fixed narrative idea.
The result is a sequence of fragmented impressions rather than a literal account of anything. Images of heat, decay, disguise, moral unease, and distorted nature appear without settling into a stable meaning. Summer is present, but it is not liberating. “Boiling heat / summer stench / ’neath the black, the sky looks dead” turns the season into something oppressive and lifeless, where even the sky loses its familiarity, looking more violent and extraterrestrial than like Earth’s.
Musically, it carries a strange contrast. It is melodic and almost soothing in places, but it moves with a humid, sweltering weight. There is a sense of warmth, but it is sickly, closer to something overripe than something refreshing. In that sense, it’s like an anti-Beach Boys song. Where classic sun-drenched pop presents warmth as ease and clarity, on “Black Hole Sun,” it’s warped and unstable, as if brightness itself has turned heavy.
The music video, directed by Howard Greenhalgh, extends the same logic visually. Tim Burton-esque suburban life is rendered as exaggerated performance, with faces, gestures, and domestic scenes pushed beyond natural behaviour. Nothing is subtle or hidden beneath the surface. As the video progresses, that world is soon sucked into this oppressive sun, which has become a black hole, pulling everything into dissolution as it “washes the rain away.”
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“My Own Summer (Shove It)” by Deftones sounds, by the title, personal at first, as if it is describing an individual experience of summer. It carries a sense of optimism in isolation, but the “shove it” part quickly changes that tone once the lyrics and delivery set in. Lines like “the shade is a tool, a device, a saviour” and “I try to look up to the sky but my eyes burn” make that shift explicit. Shade is something imperative in this heatwave. The sun, causing burning retinas, is an inferno to resist.
The Dean Karr-directed music video shows the band performing on top of shark cages in the middle of the ocean. Beneath them, great white sharks circle and tear into chunks of meat thrown into the water. There is a constant tension, as if the band might fall in along with the swimming pig with goggles on, only to be torn apart. The shade cannot save you here.
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“Summer Breeze” by Type O Negative reframes the idea of summer again, but in a different way. Before October Rust, before autumn, the song sits in that uneasy space where warmth is still present, but already feels like it is fading into something else.
Originally by Seals and Crofts, “Summer Breeze” is built on comfort, lightness, and domestic calm. In Type O Negative’s version, that same material becomes slower, heavier, and more ambiguous. Summer is still there, but it feels distant, like a memory being replayed through a different emotional filter. The song was also featured during the opening credits of I Know What You Did Last Summer, setting the tone for hook-handed bloodshed during the summer season.
The lyric “Flowing like the jasmine in my mind” carries a strange softness, but it is not clean or carefree. It’s imagined, something drifting rather than settling. In this sense, summer breeze becomes another kind of shade–a retreat into something cooler, and darker.
The imagined setting shifts with it. You can picture Type O Negative in a grassy field, dressed in black, sweating under the sun, not celebrating it but enduring it. The oppressive, late August heat weighs heavy, and then the slight breeze comes in.
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“Dirty Black Summer” by Danzig arrives after Type O Negative leave the field. Danzig and his band set up a picnic. Summer is still here, but it has changed shape again.
“No summer in the winter time / will keep you warm like a funeral pyre.” The line carries a strange, familiar lyricism, almost Doors-like in its phrasing, where opposites collapse into each other and emotional heat becomes literal flame. “And our love become a funeral pyre. Come on baby, light my fire.” The echo is there, but inverted–the warmth now consumes as it burns rather than igniting romance.
On that note is the line, “And nothing like an August night / drenched in your loving.” The word “drenched” evokes sweat more than romance. It carries over the physical memory of heat from the previous section–that same late-summer heaviness, the kind of night where the air feels soaked. It connects back to the “summer breeze” that came before it, except here the breeze no longer feels light. It feels humid, saturated, stuck to writhing bodies.
Around the picnic, the idea of this dirty black summer emerges from the soot and ashes of that earlier “funeral pyre.” Summer here is now nothing but residue.
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California, the album by Mr. Bungle, feels like satire on California itself–the place, the idea of it, and the “Californication” of things. The Beach Boys version of California sits in the background here: safe-sounding melodies, sun-drenched harmony, the promise of ease and clarity. But in California, that surface never stays stable. It keeps revealing something unnerving underneath.
The album moves through a sweltering, artificial, concrete summer, overheated and theatrical. Songs like “Retrovertigo” and “Sweet Charity” lead through this space, where nostalgia and romance are warped, with odd but memorable lyrics like “Even the bombs and scarecrows will sing.”
“The Air-Conditioned Nightmare” comes from author Henry Miller’s The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, where American comfort and modern life are described as a kind of spiritual suffocation. Here, even relief from heat feels artificial. “Get me out of this air-conditioned nightmare. Rots your brain just like a catchy tune” turns pleasure itself into contamination, where happiness feels engineered.
Like “Black Hole Sun,” the album shares that anti-Beach Boys sensibility, but takes it further into artificiality. Instead of sun-drenched clarity or even distorted heat, California presents something manufactured. Still, Patton asks in earnest or maybe naivety, or maybe while suffering heatstroke, “Where’s my rainbow?” This ties back to the innocuous fantasy Everclear brought up earlier about just wanting to see some palm trees. Even the visage of something summery is all the hope the hapless human needs. But that same impulse keeps mutating across the decade: into distortion, into residue, into something artificial.
Across the horizon of these bands, summer stops being a destination and instead becomes distorted, suffocating, ritualized, or synthetic. Each version unpacks another piece of luggage from the original promise of palm trees. By the end, “Santa Monica” doesn’t feel like something that can shake away this disease anymore. It could very well be the pathogen.
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Purchase Ryan Dyer’s book, The Underground in China: Metal, Punk, Hardcore and Noise 2013-2021, here.
