10 artists who lost touch with what made them special

Weezer

There was never a moment when Weezer was a band you needed to think too hard about. At best, they were a bunch of nerds that had a few pretty kickass songs throughout their discography, and even if they weren’t all that cool, that didn’t matter in an era that was already about being a little bit of a slacker. They made it cool to be a little bit of a dork, but it turns out that the public didn’t want to listen to Rivers Cuomo the minute he started to talk about his feelings.

Pinkerton might be looked at as one of the greatest albums of the decade now, but when you see all of the backlash that it got when it was released, something must have messed with Cuomo’s head a little too much. Because if you look at every move he’s made since releasing that record, every single album that they’ve put out has always been reactionary, whether it’s trying to get back on the radio or making tunes that they think that their fans will like.

They can walk away with a stunner every now and again, but even if we get great albums like The White Album or OK Human out of the deal, the sad fact is that Cuomo has turned Weezer into a band that’s currently stuck with Peter Pan Syndrome. There’s never a point where they truly grew out of their old sound, and despite them having some great tunes to this day, they seem to exist now as a kickass band that every one of their fans will eventually have to grow out of at some point.

The La’s

The entire story of The La’s is the kind of tragedy that every band hopes never happens to them. Even though the band didn’t have that much bad luck or anything, the fact that they ended up only releasing one album with that much potential meant that they could never take their place as legends of the Britpop movement. But when Manchester slowly became one of the biggest hubs of popular music, Lee Mavers seemed too far gone to realise what he had on his hands in the first place.

Then again, he never seemed to even like his debut to begin with. A lot of the songs were made as terrible as possible in the hopes that the label would give them more time to work on them, but since it was released as it was, Mavers has made it his personal mission to finetune every tune until it sounds great. There might be the occasional reunion of the band, but Mavers still seems content to woodshed his songs rather than throwing in any new ideas or trying to have an earnest collaboration with John Power.

Does he have the potential to make another classic? Sure, but it would have to take a lot more time before the rest of us get to see it, if we see it at all. Because, as much as people would love to still have Mavers around making new music, he was one of the many poor souls that fell victim to the studio rabbit hole and never actually managed to find his way out of it once the 1990s got started.

Roger Waters

The entire world of rock and roll lyricism would have looked a lot different were it not for Roger Waters. The entire prog community could relate to the more earnest feelings that he had to get off his chest in Pink Floyd, and even on his solo projects, he has an incredible knack for setting a scene and creating the perfect backdrop for what every one of his songs needs. But when it comes to the band that he helped propel to superstardom, Waters had a fundamental misunderstanding of what everyone brought to the table.

Since the band had been tied up in lawsuits ever since he left, the idea of Waters being the sole creative force of Pink Floyd is blatantly false. Every single member of the band was responsible for breathing life into those songs, and even if Waters wants to take credit for all of the lyrics, that’s not enough to go on. Just ask Bernie Taupin: lyrics don’t make an entire song work, and given what he did to one of the band’s crowning achievements, it seems that Waters has still yet to learn his lesson.

Dark Side of the Moon is one of the greatest albums of all time, and yet when he decided to take a hatchet to it with some new sounds, all that the fans were left with was songs that were competently played but with none of the character that Richard Wright added to ‘Us and Them’ or David Gilmour’s fantastic solo work on ‘Money’. Half of Waters’s greatest projects are normally helped by the people working with him, but even for an album that promised the fans any colour they liked, Waters did a fine job at making a rainbow of sound look utterly monochrome.

Guns N’ Roses

The entire journey of Guns N’ Roses was already moving way too fast when they got started. They were clearly one of the greatest bands to come out of Los Angeles in a long time, and by the time they released their debut album, everyone was rapturous when they heard a band that actually seemed to have some semblance of life to them. So when someone gets that big that quick, it can go right to their head, and Axl Rose was no exception when the band finally entered the studio again.

Use Your Illusion was far from the worst record ever made by any stretch, but when you look at their debut, they had become bloated faster than any other rock and roll band. The whole record flows like a hair-metal equivalent of The White Album, but when you look at the never-ending tour that the band went on to support the project, it was clear that Rose had acquired the kind of musical god complex that would have made everyone from Bruce Springsteen to Bono blush when he started cancelling shows in the middle of the tour.

So when the band did eventually regroup to make another album, it should have come as absolutely no surprise when every single member ended up leaving Rose on his own to tend to whatever new songs he had. There was a lot of potential for the band to become the next version of The Rolling Stones, but after one massive ego trip, Guns N’ Roses as a band entity went on the road and never really did find their way back home once they did get back to Los Angeles.

Eminem

There’s a good chance that Marshal Mathers would have never been able to exist if he came out today. Any teenager usually lives for controversial artists, but given how many homophobic slurs he used on some of his early records and his depictions of violence, there are probably still people who would wonder if he truly needed professional help after listening to The Slim Shady LP. He was clearly putting on a bit of a character, but after he ran out of material and his songs about being a deplorable human being went out of style, Eminem seemed to go through one of the strangest midlife crises that any star has ever gone on.

While his transition into his present state did still have a few decent records like Relapse, what turned up on records like Revival sounded more like Eminem if he were programmed to only say dad jokes. There are still some genuinely troubling songs and the occasional soft ballad that proves that he still has a heart, but when half of any of his verses are full of double entendres and dad puns, it becomes a little bit harder to stomach every time he picks up the microphone.

The Death of Slim Shady might have been a fitting end to this character, but when the bar was so low for him to cross after songs like ‘Walk On Water’, anything serviceable was going to feel like a step above everything else. He can still rap fast with the best of them and even make a few genuinely good songs here and there these days, but there have been more than a few terrible lines that make him eligible to have his GOAT status revoked.

The Human League

The entire MTV generation was built for bands like The Human League. Even though a lot of what they were working with at the dawn of the synth-rock genre was a lot more primitive than everything else, the heightened drama behind a lot of their hits is the reason why they were among the finest pop artists of their time. But even if a lot of their music sounded a little bit too polished for people’s tastes, that was nothing compared to when they got the idea to work with Jimmy Jamm and Terry Lewis.

Working with two of the biggest producers of the 1980s was never a bad idea, but even if they got one major hit out of the deal with ‘Human’, the rest of the album, Crash, paints the picture of a desperately confused band. There were plenty of moments where they could have made their own version of synth music, but after working with the producers behind Janet Jackson, their attempts at trying to loosen up and get funky made them look like any other pop rock act coming out at the time.

It’s not completely egregious from back to front, but the fact that someone willed the song ‘Swang’ into existence is a crime punishable by maybe not death but some other mild form of torture. Making their way through the 1990s was bound to be terrible for any synth rock act around that time, but Crash proved to everyone that the band were about to face some of the roughest waters that they had ever faced.

Maroon 5

Maroon 5 feels more like a machine of pop singles these days than an actual band. Half the time one of their albums drops, the singles tend to give off the impression that they were focus-grouped to get the highest chance of charting or getting radio play for those who still listen to the radio. It’s not unthinkable for this to happen to any pop group, but there was one shining moment where Adam Levine’s little project actually had a lot more merit to it than you probably remember.

They weren’t exactly the greatest band in the world by any means, but Songs About Jane and a good half of It Won’t Be Soon Before Long actually had some quality material on them as far as white-people funk goes. No one was going to call them their favourite band or say that they changed their lives in high school or anything, but somewhere around the time that they started making tunes like ‘Moves Like Jagger’, the changes started happening. Levine wanted to become a superstar, and he was going to get it by any means necessary if he had to do it.

And while the band do have some experimental moments throughout their career, it’s a 50/50 chance that any of them will be good, like when they extend their songs for a beautiful gospel jam or end up dialling Levine’s voice all the way up to 11 when making musical crimes like ‘Animals’. There was never any reason to have too much faith in Maroon 5, but they have all but guaranteed that they will be known as a band that lingered in the background of the 2010s half the time.

Coldplay

It’s hard to be too hard on a band like Coldplay. They don’t really have to be trying anymore at this stage in their career, and the fact that Chris Martin is even trying to make new music that breaks new ground is at least somewhat commendable. But when looking at some of their records, you can almost tell by the album cover art when they are trying something new and when they are playing it safe.

Simple: if you see the Technicolour artwork on half of their new records, they’re going to be making a pop-leaning album, and it’s been more than a few years since Martin decided that he was going to open himself again. Even if they were a different band than the Britpop-lite group that made ‘Yellow’, there was at least some merit to dabbling in world music on Everyday Life or making a sleepy electronica album on Ghost Stories. By the time that The Chainsmokers became involved with them, though, a lot of their tunes seemed so concerned with sounding big that they forgot to sound good.

If anything, one of the few pieces that are redeeming Coldplay nowadays is their live show, which is still one of the greatest concert experiences someone can have, presuming that they aren’t actually cheating on their significant others. It’s nice to go to that stadium and feel like you’re soaring through the stars for a few hours, but a lot of what they are doing looks like a shell of the mild-mannered band that had a bit too much of a Radiohead influence.

The Beach Boys

The Beach Boys’ legacy has always been more than a little bit complicated thanks to Mike Love. Even though Brian Wilson has forever been the face and mouthpiece of the TRUE band, Love has always taken to being the frontman and steering the band and the brand through just about every obstacle that they could possibly face. It was a noble effort for a while, but the more disconnected that they got from Brian, the less concerned they were with making the kind of timeless material that they were known for.

Love was already the one who was most excited about turning the band into a nostalgia act, but that’s never how Brian saw it. He wanted the band to keep experimenting with new sounds, and even if he got his wish when working on Pet Sounds, the fact that it didn’t sell well directly out of the gate was enough for the band to keep his experiments to a minimum on some of their albums. Granted, a lot of that came down to Brian’s own mental problems, but by the time they reached the late 1980s, everything that they had built was way too superficial to take seriously anymore.

Brian was making strange music in the name of innovation, but whenever Love decided to make more pop-flavoured songs and tried to stay hip with the kids, he made the band feel like a bunch of old men trying desperately to sell their tours. The Beach Boys are still a snapshot of what the summer was supposed to sound like, but it’s important to remember one thing. There are two separate Beach Boys: the one led by Love and the one led by Brian. You can imagine which one is the one that’s been carrying the name like a dead whale carcass for the last few decades.

Kanye West

Any artist normally has those one or two moments where they fall from grace just a little bit. No one can claim that they are one of the biggest artists in the world every single second of their lives, and even the biggest acts on Earth have those moments where everything just falls apart after a while. But no one seemed to possess the speedrun record for destroying their own career quite like Kanye West has over the past few years of his career.

Where the villain’s turn started is really hard to tell, but let’s start with him interrupting Taylor Swift. It was a shitty thing to do, but those kinds of unruly award show moments happen all the time. But in the past few years, he was practically scrubbing every single piece of goodwill that he had towards himself from the public eye, whether that was cutting his ties with all his famous friends or repping hate groups on his albums and his merchandise. And by the time he came up for air and realised what he had done, the albums that he released were too uncomfortable for anyone to really forget.

To his credit, he has tried to turn things around at many opportunities and seems to be on the road to recovery, but the public doesn’t forget a controversy, and Ye is going to have to pay for these problems for the rest of his life if he wants to be remembered as half the rapper that he once was. It took a long time to build himself up to the top of the musical world, but it turns out it only takes a few albums and zero filter to tear it all down.