“We’re doing this because Black Sabbath did it. Neil Young did it. Van Halen did it. Are you going to tell Eddie Van Halen he wasn’t playing guitar properly?” Soundgarden’s Kim Thayil recalls his battles with drop-D trolls

Thayil brought drop-D tuning to the mainstream with the grunge guitar revolution – but he had to contend with “purists and nitwits who would write into guitar magazines saying, ‘Drop D is cheating; you’re not really playing if you do that!’”