The song is arguably the band's most recognisable and most popular song, and remains a well known song from the 1990s. It topped the Billboard Mainstream Rock Tracks chart, where it spent a total of seven weeks at #1. The video was released in June 1994. After several weeks of airplay on MTV, a second version of the video was substituted containing more elaborate visual effects than the original, including the addition of a computer-generated black hole. The music video for "Black Hole Sun" became a hit on MTV and received the award for Best Metal/Hard Rock Video at the 1994 MTV Video Music Awards.
The surreal and apocalyptic music video for "Black Hole Sun" was directed by Howard Greenhalgh, produced by Megan Hollister for Why Not Films (London, England), shot by Ivan Bartos, and features post-production work by 525 Post Production (Hollywood, California) and Soho 601 Effects (London). Visually, the video is very effective however, In an online chat, the band stated that the video "was entirely the director's idea", and added, "Our take on it was that at that point in making videos, we just wanted to pretend to play and not look that excited about it." This is very typical of the american-rock early 90's era, paying homage to bands such as Nirvana who similarly performed their music videos with a very 'care-less attitude'.
Greg Prato of Allmusic called the song "one of the few bright spots" of the summer of 1994 when "the world was still reeling from Nirvana leader Kurt Cobain's suicide the previous April". He said, "The song had a psychedelic edge to it". The lyrics were classic Chris Cornell—lines didn't exactly make sense on paper but did within the song."
Regardless of what some critics had to say about the song, evidently the song has been a commercial success, later featuring as a playable song in the 2007 video game Rock Band. The song is also available in the 2008 video games Karaoke Revolution Presents: American Idol Encore and SingStar 90s, for the PlayStation 2. Also, a section of the Nintendo DS 2008 role-playing video game Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood is titled "Black Hole Sun", a very likely reference to the song. Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock features the song in its downloadable content library.
Theorist Discussion: I have found certain features of Andrew Goodwin's theory.
1) There is a strong correlation between the lyrics, music and visuals, as a 'black hole' appears in the video accompanied by very disturbing and manipulated imagery, making the characters featured look surreal; (surrealism).
2) Sub Pop Records would have certainly demanded a lot of shots of the artists. It is likely that they opted for using Director Howard Greenhalgh to deliver the obscurity of the video, to help market the band in the alternative rock genre. It is interesting to note that Nirvana who were renowned for their strange visuals, were also signed to Sub Pop which suggests that the label played a big part in deciding exactly what they wanted to achieve from the Black Hole Sun video.
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