Alice in Chains тобының "Man in the Box" әні

1991 single by Alice in Chains

"Man in the Box" is a song by the American rock band Alice in Chains. It was released as a single in January 1991 after being featured on the group's debut studio album, Facelift (1990). It peaked at No. 18 on Billboard's Mainstream Rock chart and was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Hard Rock Performance in 1992. The song was included on the compilation albums Nothing Safe: Best of the Box (1999), Music Bank (1999), Greatest Hits (2001), and The Essential Alice in Chains (2006). "Man in the Box" was the second most played song of the decade on mainstream rock radio between 2010 and 2019.

In the liner notes of 1999's Music Bank box set collection, guitarist Jerry Cantrell said of the song; "That whole beat and grind of that is when we started to find ourselves; it helped Alice become what it was." The song makes use of a talk box to create the guitar effect. The idea of using a talk box came from producer Dave Jerden, who was driving to the studio one day when Bon Jovi's "Livin' on a Prayer" started playing on the radio. The original Facelift track listing credited only vocalist Layne Staley and Jerry Cantrell with writing the song. All post Facelift compilations credited the entire band. It is unclear as to why the songwriter credits were changed.

"Man in the Box" is a grunge, alternative metal, hard rock, that is widely recognized by its distinctive "wordless opening melody, where Layne Staley's peculiar, tensed throat vocals are matched in unison with an effects laden guitar" followed by "portentous lines like: 'Feed my eyes, can you sew them shut? ', 'Jesus Christ, deny your maker' and 'He who tries, will be wasted' with Cantrell's drier, less urgent voice," along with harmonies provided by both Staley and Cantrell in the lines 'Won't you come and save me'.

"Man in the Box" was released as a single in 1991. The song was number 19 on VH1's "40 Greatest Metal Songs", and its solo was rated the 77th greatest guitar solo by Guitar World in 2008. It was number 50 on VH1's "100 Greatest Songs of the 90s" in 2007. The song was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Hard Rock Performance in 1992. Steve Huey of AllMusic called the song "an often overlooked but important building block in grunge's ascent to dominance" and "a meeting of metal theatrics and introspective hopelessness."

The MTV music video for the track was released in 1991 and was directed by Paul Rachman, who later directed the first version of the "Sea of Sorrow" music video for the band and the 2006 feature documentary American Hardcore. The music video was nominated for Best Heavy Metal/Hard Rock Video at the 1991 MTV Video Music Awards. The video is available on the home video releases Live Facelift and Music Bank: The Videos. The video shows the band performing in what is supposedly a barn, where throughout the video, a mysterious man wearing a black hooded cloak is shown roaming around the barn. Then, after the unknown hooded figure is shown, he is shown again looking around inside a stable where many animals live where he suddenly discovers and shines his flashlight on a man (Layne Staley) that he finds sitting in the corner of the barnhouse. At the end of the video, the hooded man finally pulls his hood down off of his head, only to reveal that his eyelids were sewn together with stitches the whole time. This part of the video depicts on the line of the song, "Feed my eyes, now you've sewn them shut". The man with his eyes sewn shut was played by a friend of director Paul Rachman, Rezin, who worked in a bar parking lot in Los Angeles called Small's. The music video was shot on 16mm film and transferred to tape using a FDL 60 telecine. At the time this was the only device that could sync sound to picture at film rates as low as 6FPS. This is how the surreal motion was obtained. The sepia look was done by Claudius Neal using a daVinci color corrector. Layne Staley tattooed on his back the Jesus character depicted in the video with his eyes sewn shut.

At Alice in Chains' last concert with Staley on July 3, 1996, they closed with "Man in the Box". Live performances of "Man in the Box" can be found on the "Heaven Beside You" and "Get Born Again" singles and the live album Live. A performance of the song is also included on the home video release Live Facelift and is a staple of the band's live show due to the song's popularity.

Professional wrestler Tommy Dreamer used the song as his entrance music in Extreme Championship Wrestling from 1995 to 2001, and with his own wrestling promotion, House of Hardcore, since 2012. The song appeared as a playable track in the video games Rock Band 2 and Guitar Hero Live. "Man in the Box" has been featured in films such as Lassie (1994), The Perfect Storm (2000), Funny People (2009) and Always Be My Maybe (2019). The song has been featured in TV shows including Beavis and Butt Head (1993), Dead at 21 (1994), and Supernatural (season 12, episode 6, "Celebrating the Life of Asa Fox" in 2016).