10 albums that were made to piss people off

<em>Scream – </em>Chris Cornell

Chris Cornell was never one to make a “normal” rock album. Every single one of Soundgarden’s records was a bold new experiment, and while they were all connected by his voice, there was always more they had to offer than Led Zeppelin-esque guitar riffs and his booming voice. But if there was one thing that people absolutely were not looking forward to, it was to see whether or not one of the kings of grunge could transition himself into one of the biggest names in R&B.

While it’s not impossible for someone to toe the line between soulful rock and roll and straight-up soul music, Cornell’s attempts to be Prince with the help of Timbaland were one of the biggest mismatches of 21st-century music. Both of them have made phenomenal work apart, but this is the kind of pairing that works about as well as orange juice and toothpaste, and it’s not like the producer extraordinaire was exactly shocked when people were justifiably pissed off.

It was bad enough having the same guy producing for Justin Timberlake and Missy Elliott on one of Cornell’s albums, but even the frontman admitted that things were bound to go haywire after a bit, with the producer claiming that his audience was going to be mad before the record hit store shelves. We get it that Cornell can’t flex his muscles in Audioslave and make records like Euphoria Morning forever, but there were far greater targets that he could aim for rather than being a smooth loverman.

<em>Awaken My Love – </em>Childish Gambino

Since his start, Donald Glover has been the true Renaissance man across all forms of media. While no one expected the same guy from Community to be one of the biggest names in the business, seeing him take over the big and small screen and still making Childish Gambino work shows the kind of endurance half of Hollywood’s A-list wishes they possessed. But if there’s one thing that can drive someone to make something unprecedented, it’s telling them that they can’t do it.

While Childish Gambino was a juvenile persona in many respects, Glover’s decision to record Awaken My Love was far more petty than anyone realised. The albums he made up until that point had great tunes, but they weren’t necessarily hits, so went critics dismissed him as being the kind of niche artist who would never see a hit in his life, Glover pulled out all the stops, making the kind of record that sat somewhere between Parliament/Funkadelic and Lenny Kravitz in some spots.

Not everything on the record is perfect, but judging by what he has done since then with the Childish Gambino character, Glover not only got hits out of the deal with tunes like ‘Redbone’. He finally had the kind of artistic freedom to do anything he wanted, and if some critics got pissed about him playing outside of the rules, then that was just too damn bad.

<em>Somewhere in England – </em>George Harrison

The last thing any Beatle needs is to be told what to do. The Fab Four have written every single hook that the pop world has ever seen, and as much as fans might like to think that they are building on their tradition, there are only so many hooks someone can think of that The Beatles didn’t have their hands on first. George Harrison was always a bit tricky to define, though, but if there’s one thing that the fans knew, it was that labels should not piss him off when trying to squeeze another project out of him.

Somewhere in England already had all the makings of being a great extension of his spiritual side, but once the label thought it wasn’t good enough, he figured he’d go back and make the kind of hack pieces they were talking about. The bigwigs got what they wanted with tunes like ‘Teardrops’, but you can’t help but listen to the rest of the album and feel a tiny bit cynical, especially towards the start of the record where he openly starts making fun of his fans for listening to this crap like ‘Unconsciousness Rules’.

While Gone Troppo can be excused slightly only because Harrison was having fun on vacation, but this is the first time that he openly sounded like he didn’t want to be in the studio anymore. So if the artist themselves aren’t even sold on the songs they’re making, how the hell was the label going to expect the rest of the world to take the bait?

<em>Two Virgins – </em>John Lennon and Yoko Ono

The entire legacy of The Beatles has made Yoko Ono an unintended punching bag for far too long. Yes, her involvement may not have helped preserve the relationships between the Fab Four in the studio, but she also wouldn’t have been there as a comfort for John Lennon during the final years he was in the group. But even by the standards that most people had for Beatles weirdness at the time, they drew the line the minute that they saw what they were up to on Two Virgins.

Revolver and Sgt Peppers had shown Lennon’s habits of being weird, but having an entire album of him making strange ambient noises while Ono screeches away in the background was the antithesis of everything the band stood for. Before they even heard the music, though, Lennon and Ono knew what they were going for by posing nude on the album cover and staring directly into the camera lens for the cover shot.

There may have been many monocles popped looking at the album cover, but this kind of snide attitude towards the straights was part of what Lennon was all about. He knew that he would get in a little bit of trouble, but since he was a member of one of the biggest groups the world had ever seen, letting it all hang out and showing the back pages of his creative process was about the only rebellious thing that he could have done.

<em>Here My Dear – </em>Marvin Gaye

No one comes out of a divorce with strictly warm feelings about their former partner. Both of them had their own reasons for the relationship not working out, and they could either hold it together and keep up appearances or have everything devolve into a screaming match the minute that everyone’s left the room. When a divorce was on as grand a scale as Marvin Gaye’s was, though, there were bound to be a few sore spots that turned up on his double album experience.

Granted, Gaye was contractually obligated to talk about his feelings in many respects. He had already been married to one of the relatives of Motown CEO Berry Gordy, so if he wanted to recover any of the money he had lost in the divorce proceedings, he was going to need to either cut ties altogether or make another album of sunny tracks. But for the first time in his life, that kind of musical sunshine that Gaye brought to everything he touched clocks out in the first few songs of Here My Dear.

This was a man known for making something as heavy and hurtful as war and racial unrest sound immaculate on What’s Going On, but Gaye isn’t putting up a front at all on this record, almost sounding more angry as he passive-aggressively signs the checks for his days in court. Here My Dear does work as a great timepiece for what this era of Gaye’s life was like, but whereas Bob Dylan showed both sides of the conversation in his music, you can’t blame Gaye for wanting to wallow in his sorrow for a little bit.

<em>Perverts – </em>Ethel Cain

It’s hard to discount how exploitative the music industry can be for rising stars. As much as people like the idea of making the best music they can and reaching a broad audience, there’s a good chance that they can find people in their audience that either don’t agree with their point of view or are legitimate monsters hoping to make a profit or earn some cool points by saying that they listen to the up-and-coming legends. But even with the success of Ethel Cain’s Preacher’s Daughter, Perverts was her attempt at making the exact opposite of what her fans wanted.

For everyone who loved the slice of life tales on the previous album, this sonic experiment takes all of the harrowing terror of ‘Ptolemaea’ and turns them up to 11. No hooks are to be found on this record, but that’s kind of the point. There were already nasty connotations surrounding the sexualisation of women in the industry, but Perverts puts you in the headspace of one of those horrible men, as Cain plays the robotic version of someone who can fulfil their fantasies, all while coming off like a sexual abuser’s captive.

There’s no telling where Cain is going to be going on her next projects, but this was more of a statement than a properly fleshed-out album. There are some truly heinous people in the world looking to do heinous things to superstars, and anyone who has ever had their brain rocked by Perverts knows the sheer blackness that’s in those monsters’ hearts.

<em>No Code – </em>Pearl Jam

No member of the grunge community ever dreamed about being famous circa 1990. MTV was the medium that worked for other major hard rock acts, so artists like Pearl Jam were always a bit lenient when it came to playing the game of doing interviews and making special appearances on the network. But if they swore off making music videos after ‘Jeremy’, No Code was the first time that they actively tried to make their star power diminish.

In interviews after the album, Eddie Vedder said that he intended to make the album as impersonal as possible, leading to songs that go between decent hard rock ragers to strange art rock that would have fit a lot better on a Frank Zappa record. There are seeds of greatness across the album like ‘Off He Goes’ and ‘Present Tense’, but it also means dealing with singles that are hardly commercial like ‘Who You Are’, the occasional sleepy song, and whatever thought experiment was going on in ‘I’m Open’.

It may not have been the Pearl Jam record that many people wanted, but the band hardly cared about that. This was them licking their wounds after going through the wringer of fame without any kind of protection, and when they came up for air, they realised that they were better off making music that was the polar opposite of what the high school jocks of the world wanted to listen to.

<em>Encore – </em>Eminem

By the mid-2000s, Eminem had turned himself into the lovable villain of hip-hop. Not everything that he made was the most tasteful, and he took more than a few potshots at people that didn’t need to be dragged through the mud, but it was almost endearing to see this punk-ass kid sing about his hatred for everyone in the world and expecting to get a crowd bouncing to it. And while he came out with guns blazing on The Eminem Show, fans are still scratching their heads wondering how his quality control went so far out the window one album later.

‘Slim Shady’ was always looking to one-up himself with every record, but Encore feels like the kind of elaborate joke that he made for a goof on a weekend. Then again, that’s not far off from the truth. Since pieces of the album got leaked before it dropped, Em figured that he would completely redo the structure and flow of the record, leading to songs that have no business being listened to more than once, like ‘Just Lost It’ or ‘Big Weenie’.

It may have been a slight overreaction to have made something this petty after only a few songs leaked, but if tunes like ‘We As Americans’ had been included on the mainline album, there’s a good chance it could have been on par with The Eminem Show. Eminem may have admittedly been going through intense drug benders during the making of this record, but you have to be on some particularly strong shit to think that any part of a song like ‘Puke’ needed to be heard.

<em>In Utero – </em>Nirvana

By the time 1992 rolled around, Nirvana were the biggest name in music, and no one hated that fact more than Kurt Cobain. There was always a draw that came with being in a massive rock band, but Cobain never wanted to reach the big time this quickly, and when Nevermind took over the world, he was suddenly being invited into the musical A-list that he wanted nothing to do with. So if people wanted that long-awaited sequel, the frontman was going to do everything in his power to mess it up.

Because from the first blast of noise on In Utero, Cobain sought to make everything Nevermind was supposed to be. There were still hooks like ‘Serve the Servants’ and ‘Heart-Shaped Box’ on the record, but tracks like ‘Milk It’ were a clear indication that they wanted to shoo away any detractors. The best case of them changing has to be ‘Rape Me’, a song that is among the catchiest melodies that Nirvana ever made, and yet it will never be played on the radio because of its title.

And while many people like to look through the tea leaves and pontificate on whether or not any of the songs on the record hinted at Cobain taking his own life, it’s hardly that kind of album. Cobain was defiantly proud of the record that he made, and while it may have been a bit on the dark side, he would have much rather done what he loved than hand in a record riding the coattails of what ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ did.

<em>Everybody’s Rockin’ – </em>Neil Young

Neil Young is one of the least likely people to do what his audience expects out of him. He did what he felt from the minute he started his solo career, and while he was excused for being a great songwriter half the time, it was never easy to see him switch between different genres on the fly. Some of those pivots may have been interesting, but rarely has an artist made something offensively bad solely to prove a point.

While Young had been signed to Geffen Records for his rock classics, it was clear he needed to switch it up when the folk albums weren’t paying the bills. But when David Geffen came to him demanding that he make a rock and roll record, Young made sure to follow that command to the letter, greasing up his hair and making the kind of rockabilly record that felt like it was two decades behind the times.

Although some of Young’s later material is arguably worse, like Trans or Landing on Water, Everybody’s Rockin’ does at least give his fans a few cheap laughs out of the deal. After all, his hand was being forced to make a rock and roll album, and since he had no choice, he may as well try to have some fun with his record company. Because if there’s one thing that Young will never do, it’s cower to what the bigwigs want.