10 musicians who tried to destroy another artist’s career
Music has never run short of a few artists who see everything as a competition. No matter how many times someone claims to be at the top of the world, there are always going to be people who are better than you, and they will often do whatever they can to put you in your place if they can. While acts like Oasis tried their best to make whatever music they could, they did have specific targets in mind when they began their plans for dominating the musical landscape.
Because even though inspiration can come from pure love, there’s a certain vitriol that comes with people trying their best to leave their competition in the dust. The whole concept behind rock and roll had grown stale for these artists, and even if their competitors were perfectly nice people, they were not going to rest until they made sure that every one of them was buried six feet underground by the time their music reached the top of the charts.
It was also about more than simply chart success as well. This was about the integrity of every genre coming together to obliterate what was going on for years. Every artist has a fear of growing stale, but it’s much better for someone to come out to confirm that someone is sticking around too long at the party and needs to be stomped out.
Not all of them were subtle about it, either, usually making sure that they created a personal wake for their targets and making sure there was an audience to remind everyone that they were dancing on their graves. It might not be the most diplomatic way of breaking into the charts, but it’s always better to pave the way for something new than relying on the older generation for help.
10 artists who tried to destroy another artist’s career:
10. Trent Reznor (Target: Marilyn Manson)
Nothing about the industrial genre was necessarily meant to be the most inviting music in the world. Even if there were some quality tunes in between, most of the biggest bands of the time were looking to assault the audience with sound rather than try to make the best radio hit for any one of their singles. While Trent Reznor may have been the puppetmaster behind the biggest success stories in the genre, Marilyn Manson was the one artist he would have rather taken back.
While he and Manson had a great relationship when they both began writing with each other, things slowly started going sour when Manson grew resentful of how little Reznor was looking after his career. Given the fact that Reznor was already riding the spiral of Nine Inch Nails, though, he wasn’t going to let the ‘Antichrist Superstar’ walk all over him when he struck back with a song like ‘Starfuckers Inc’.
Despite trying his best to make amends at first, this was a case of Reznor jacking Manson’s entire schtick to prove that he could do his macabre flavour of rock and roll better than anyone. It’s nowhere near the greatest song that he ever wrote, and Manson did, in fact, have a few more hits after this, but it was clear that any kind of peace that they had was burned away long before.
9. Linkin Park (Target: boy bands)
Rock and roll has always been the biggest antithesis to the mainstream. As much as bands would love the idea of being plastered all over MTV, the networks will always go with someone slightly more photogenic or people who will be told what to do and where to stand when it comes to doing interviews, videos and anything in between. While Linkin Park had all the makings of a great band, their main objective was to make something that would leave boy bands in the dust.
When talking about their beginnings, Mike Shinoda remembered getting the idea for the group while watching another terrible boy band schlock on television and needing to hear something real. Although Linkin Park’s style is indebted to nu-metal tropes, many aspects of their sound broke from that stream as well, including two vocalists speaking about their inner pain in a way that didn’t sound whiny.
And even though Linkin Park eventually moved on from their metallic roots, some of their greatest tunes are still the equivalent of looking at a bizarro world version of what a boy band could be. The Backstreet Boys may have still ruled the world when the band was still called Xero, but every kid that ever felt stepped on at some point in their lives would have gladly exchanged their Nick Carter poster for a Hybrid Theory poster in the new millennium.
8. Damon Albarn (Target: MTV)
Somewhere around the end of grunge, MTV started to become a genre of music unto itself. Even though many upstarts were benefiting from having their songs plastered all over the airwaves, many were still coming up that felt more like industry plants than someone who honestly put work into their craft. So when someone like Damon Albarn started getting sick of seeing the phoniness of television every time he turned it on, he knew that the next best thing was to work the system from the inside out.
Blur had still been going strong and had even become the darlings of MTV during the Britpop movement, but Albarn’s next venture was to make something deliberately cartoony with Gorillaz. Since he and Jamie Hewlett bonded over how insipid some of the music had become on the station, the creation of characters like 2D and Murdoc were a way for them to make a walking satire of what music could be on the station, almost like they were pitching for their own cartoon show.
Once people started to look underneath the surface of albums like Demon Days and Plastic Beach, they realised what they were truly working with. Albarn was still an artist in every sense of the word, and even if he was using the tropes that everyone else used, taking it to the nth degree by making everything animated ended up using the superficial side of MTV against itself.
7. Kendrick Lamar (Target: Drake)
Kendrick Lamar will do anything in his power to protect hip-hop. If you listen to him screaming through his verse on Big Sean’s ‘Control’, you’ll know that this is someone who doesn’t take anything less than perfection and will do anything he can to murder anyone who poses a threat to the genre. So when the ‘Certified Lover Boy’ started to turn the genre into more of a corporation than a proper style of music, Lamar knew that it was time for him to come back to demolish Drake.
While much has been made of how the beef between both men had gone back and forth for a few months, Lamar was almost clinical in the way that he tried to leave Drake in the dust. ‘Euphoria’ was always going to be a cutting track no matter what Drake had as a retort, but when listening back to ‘Meet the Grahams’, Lamar wanted to make sure that he left no stone unturned, practically ensuring that Drake would have people giving him side eye about his behaviour with underage girls for the rest of his days.
But listening back to a tune like ‘Watch The Party Die’, Lamar is clearly tired of that kind of behaviour in the mainstream. There are too many people who are in the game strictly for the hedonistic side of things, and since he has scaled to the top by taking care of his family and staying out of the spotlight, Lamar is the best example of the idea that living well is the best revenge.
6. Roger Waters (Target: Pink Floyd)
The story of Pink Floyd tends to be like talking about three separate bands. There had already been a version of the group with Syd Barrett at the helm for one album, but after he started to lose control of his sanity, it was clear that Roger Waters was the one steering everything forward, usually having the best concept for what their sound should be in the years that followed. If he had anything to say about it, though, Waters would have gladly made sure that nothing happened with the group following his departure.
Since he was convinced that he was Pink Floyd, Waters made it a habit of trashing everything that the David Gilmour-led lineup released during their time together. Even though Waters did sue them for using the Pink Floyd brand, that was already a losing battle, despite him still getting the rights to use the concept of The Wall for his own personal use over the years.
Because no matter which way you look at it, the band was always about more than simply Waters and a bunch of hired guns. The Final Cut may have been viewed as a Roger Waters solo album in disguise, but the core sound of Pink Floyd always came from how he worked off of Gilmour’s guitars or the immaculate keyboard stylings of Richard Wright on tracks like ‘Echoes’ and ‘Pigs’.
5. Martha Wash (Target: C+C Music Factory)
Most of the biggest names in electronic dance music didn’t need to be thought about for too long in the 1990s. The whole premise of the genre was to keep the beat going, and as long as there was someone who could carry a tune behind the beat, there was little else that really mattered. That doesn’t mean the musicians shouldn’t get credit, though, and Martha Wash came for everyone who did her wrong once C+C Music Factory took her vocals without compensation.
Despite being the massive voice behind ‘It’s Raining Men,’ Wash was known for her session work throughout the 1990s, including her massive hook on ‘Everybody Dance Now.’ But when she found out that she wasn’t given a songwriting credit, she knew she had to say something. She also took massive offence to the fact that they were hiring another woman to lip-sync along with her parts in the video.
That was only the tip of the iceberg, though, with most people realising that Wash’s vocals were across the dance music scene. While Wash has since been given proper credit in some places, she seems to exist more now as the revered godmother with the perfect voice to get people out on the floor.
4. Metallica (Target: Hair Metal)
The entire hair metal genre was meant to be polarising from the minute that it started. The whole glam image was already an homage to David Bowie, but listening back to the biggest names in the genre like Poison, it was clear that most of them were pulling from pop acts like Bay City Rollers rather than Sweet or T Rex. And if that was what metal was supposed to be like in the 1980s, Metallica was determined to make something even heavier in response.
Compared to the glamorous rockstars on MTV, Metallica were the skateboarding punks that wanted to play the fastest music known to man. Even though not every one of their songs was radio-friendly, they were already fast approaching legendary status, becoming one of the biggest arena rock acts in the metal scene despite only releasing one proper music video throughout the entire decade.
And for a brief moment before grunge hit, The Black Album confirmed that they left the genre in the dust, considering the fact that Lars Ulrich was seen throwing darts at a Winger poster in the video for ‘Nothing Else Matters’. The era of hairspray held strong for a while, but by the time ‘Enter Sandman’ reached the airwaves, was anyone really bothering to listen to something like Warrant on the airwaves?
3. Oasis (Target: Phil Collins)
There could be an entire list of all the artists that Noel Gallagher wanted to leave in the dust. Aside from his battle with Blur in the 1990s or his distaste for everyone from The Beach Boys to Sum 41, the Oasis songsmith was more than happy to say his piece when he thought someone was an absolute joke in the music industry. When he first gained a foothold with Definitely Maybe, the only major bone he had to pick was Phil Collins being the number-one artist in the world.
While there’s nothing inherently wrong with Collins’s music, having him be so omnipresent on the charts was enough to make most rock fans squirm. Here was the guy who was supposed to represent pop rock, and yet all he was doing was delivering the kind of safe ballads that most housewives went nuts over. There was no edge to it, and Gallagher knew that Britpop was what the mainstream needed to blow him away.
He didn’t even shy away from calling out Collins directly, considering him a perfect example of junk food music and claiming that he wanted to have his severed head in his refrigerator by the end of the decade. While Collins thankfully still has his head firmly on his shoulders today, it’s safe to say that he had outgrown the typical pop charts by the time Oasis came along and began writing music for Tarzan.
2. Sex Pistols (Target: Emerson, Lake and Palmer)
The entire punk regime seemed to want little to do with what had come before. They all had the same rudimentary understanding of their instruments, but no one bothered to claim that they had a favourite Beatles song when conversing with someone with a safety pin through their nose. Looking back on Sex Pistols’s rise to fame, John Lydon didn’t have more vitriol than he did when talking about Emerson, Lake and Palmer.
It’s not hard to see why, either. Many progressive rock bands may have had their edge, but listening to all 20 minutes of a song like ‘Tarkus’ would have been hell for anyone who wanted their music to get to the point. That was the beginning of music being made only for intellectuals, and Lydon was convinced that he needed to carve out his own place in history by trying to destroy everyone who stuck their nose up at amateur playing.
And while Sex Pistols were by no means the greatest musicians in the world, seeing them try their best to change the world inspired legions of artists to try their own approach to rock and roll, whether that was The Clash taking on political concerns or Green Day adopting their pop approach in the wake of grunge. Now, with Lydon being as cutthroat as ever in interviews, there still seems to be no less anger towards the artists who are more in tune with scale exercises.
1. Nirvana (Target: Guns N’ Roses)
Most artists aren’t looking to deliberately sabotage someone else’s work. Even though they might not enjoy their music with every fibre of their being, most people are happy to avoid their least favourite acts for as long as they can, whether that’s ignoring their music or trying not to get stuck on the same tour as they are. But in the case of Nirvana, Kurt Cobain knew his power as a spokesman, and he made it abundantly clear that he was no fan of Guns N’ Roses when he first started.
Although Guns N’ Roses were still considered one of the biggest names in rock and roll, having Nevermind blow everyone out of the water was the moment the tide started changing. Suddenly, Axl Rose’s casual misogyny towards women actually got a genuine reaction of disgust out of people, and Cobain was instrumental in committing the somehow cardinal sin of demanding to treat women with respect.
Even though Rose’s comments towards Nirvana made for some great headlines at the time, it’s not like the writing wasn’t on the wall before he even opened his mouth. ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ was quickly becoming the next anthem for a generation, and no matter what antics he tried to pull, there was no way that Rose was ever going to come off as effortlessly cool as Cobain did when tearing through his songs.
