10 rock bands that are hated for dumb reasons

My Chemical Romance

The entire genre of emo music has gone through one of the strangest transitions in rock history. Whereas some pop music flips back around from being lame to eventually becoming classic, there are often times when people collectively hate on a project only to find out that it didn’t deserve any of the ridicule it was given. And while My Chemical Romance never adopted the emo tag that much in their press or anything, it was easier for people to take one look at the soldier on The Black Parade and consider them the next whiny pop-punk band for the 2000s.

But if anyone bothered listening, Gerard Way had a vision for the band that was far more important than a bunch of sing-alongs. He approached music the same way that a big-budget movie director might look at storyboards, and throughout every one of their albums, there was always something new to discover, from tragic stories about someone dying or the kind of comic book action/adventure that happened on Danger Days.

Were there any bands in the emo genre that were too whiny for their own good? Absolutely, but when listening to Way’s voice, he wasn’t screeching solely to make the audience feel something. He was taking on a character, and now with decades under their belts, albums like Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge and The Black Parade should be looked at today the same way people used to look at The Wall.

Metallica

The entire metal community has always been hesitant whenever a band decides to change. The whole point of the genre is to be the antithesis of the mainstream, so whenever casual musical fans can sing along with a metal song, that’s usually the sign for people to hang it up and claim that their favourite band used to be really good. But is there anything wrong with a band like Metallica trying to experiment every now and again?

Granted, this is if we’re talking about the most reviled entries in their catalogue. It’s easy to see why people don’t have fond memories of St Anger or Lulu, but the Load era and especially the material from The Black Album never deserved such a fate. They were ridiculed for having the audacity to make mainstream songs, and while metalheads were pissed, it was nice to have someone like James Hetfield be the face of metal in the mainstream than the typical burnout kid everyone associated with the genre.

If you want to see the repercussions of that much criticism, you only need to look at the music that they are making nowadays. They should be commended for having their music down to a science at this point, but judging by how monotonous an album like 72 Seasons can sound, it’s hard to think that them playing it safe came from anything other than fans pushing back on them. Congratulations, folks! The fans won, and now everyone’s favourite metal band is nothing but boring.

Phil Collins

The biggest crime that a pop star can make in their field is overexposure. Any great record should only be listened to in moderation, and when things start to get shoved onto the public, it’s easy to go from genuinely interested in an artist to repulsed by them whenever they come on the radio. But at the same time, was dominating the radio something that Phil Collins necessarily asked for?

Well, maybe. After all, he spread his songwriting expertise across both Genesis and his solo work, and since he was also moving into the world of soundtrack fodder in the 1990s, it was understandable why people had had enough of him after hearing songs like ‘One More Night’ one too many times. Then again, Noel Gallagher’s comments about him being the antichrist of music may have been blown out of proportion a little bit.

His time in the sun had simply expired, but Collins didn’t really represent the death of good taste by any stretch. Everyone had it out for the guy back in the day, and while nothing was going to ever change history, it’s time that we all calm down when it comes to his hits. People will still bash him for making soppy ballads or “ruining” Genesis, but no matter how much they talk shit, there are always going to be people air-drumming along to that drum fill on ‘In the Air Tonight’ whenever it comes on.

Sinead O’Connor

There have always been thick rules around what should be censored on television. Although kids can find some of the most disgusting or tasteless stuff if they want to nowadays, there was always an unspoken rule of what someone could and couldn’t bring up back in the long-forgotten 1900s. But some things needed to be said, and while Sinead O’Connor deserved to speak her mind, the idea of her getting blacklisted from the industry because of one performance was hardly fair.

That’s not to say that she didn’t want to provoke when she performed on Saturday Night Live in the early 1990s. Her music was some of the most emotional of her time, but the minute that she made a comment about the sexual abuse going on in the Catholic Church, the breadbasket of America considered her an enemy of the state and were disgusted by anything remotely associated with her.

But if every concerned churchgoer would take their blinders off for a second, what she was saying wasn’t without merit. It was simply calling to fight the real enemy, and wearing a priest collar doesn’t automatically absolve them from the most deplorable actions a human being can do, but the world that she lived in at the time was far more concerned with the fire-and-brimstone take on the church rather than caring about the lives of kids who will forever be scarred.

U2

There are always going to be artists who rub people the wrong way strictly because of their demeanour. Even if they make decent music, every creative medium has artists with a certain type of anti-charisma that makes your eyes glaze over them the minute you see them onscreen. But first impressions aren’t everything, and there’s a lot more going on with U2 outside of the self-righteous posing that Bono does every time he sets foot onstage.

But of all the people on this list, the haters may have a small point. Bono has been guilty of getting on that soapbox and preaching how their music will help make the world a better place, but their music has often helped the world in small ways. From their charity work to the fantastic songs they released in the 1980s, every part of their career has been about them evolving, which is a lot more than can be said for people who have been celebrated for making the same riff over and over again.

Not everything is perfect, and they do have a few stumbling blocks from time to time that have pissed people off, but there’s never been a moment where they didn’t mean what they’re doing. They are far from the prophets that Bono presents himself as, but when they sing songs about helping out your fellow man and being able to improve the world, it’s easy to believe them after a handful of tunes.

Janet Jackson

Anyone can have a few slipups now and again on live TV. No entertainer is perfect, and even the most magnetic people onscreen have been known for having a few moments where they strike out and don’t get the reaction they want out of the crowd. But there’s hardly any reason for one performance to cast any musician into a dead zone, and Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl performance is a prime candidate for that logic.

Because, really, why would anyone be getting too worked up about this kind of “wardrobe malfunction”? As much as people are still guessing over whether the stunt was planned or not, it was clear that whoever was in charge of censoring everything during Jackson’s performance with Justin Timberlake was not ready for the ending of ‘Rock Your Body’ when part of her clothing got ripped off. But the real problem was what happened next.

You could feel the monocles popping around the US from all the drama surrounding it, leading to Jackson going on an apology tour and never fully recovering her old fans. Sure, it might have been considered a little bit tasteless for primetime, but if we present the bare facts to everyone, the logic of the mainstream makes absolutely no sense. Because if we read only the truth of the matter, Jackson got exposed by Timberlake, and for seemingly no reason, she was the one who’s career got ruined while Timberlake’s skyrocketed.

Coldplay

By rock star standards, being boring will always be worse than being offensive. Countless artists have made offensively bad music that seems to assault the senses at every turn, but it’s far more frustrating when someone is trying to make impactful music and gives the fans nothing to work with. While that hate is normally reserved for bands like Imagine Dragons and Nickelback, it’s unthinkable for a band like Coldplay to be thrown into that same category.

They do fall prey to the same problems that U2 have in terms of being a bit overexposed, but their back catalogue is still one of the finest runs in pop-rock ever. The magic does seem to trail off a little bit around the time of A Head Full of Dreams, but looking at their old records, Parachutes is the closest answer to Ok Computer that the 2000s were going to get, A Rush of Blood to the Head was a tortured masterpiece, and Viva La Vida was the kind of creative second wind most bands only dream of.

Even when making some of their later records, they have found time to switch things up, whether that meant working with people from other cultures on Everyday Life or incorporating strange time signatures and stretching songs out for ten minutes on Music of the Spheres. Anyone in Chris Martin’s shoes shouldn’t need to take those kinds of chances anymore, but outside of committing the sin of appearing on a Chainsmokers song, Coldplay have at least continued to shake things up in an era where most would have begun phoning it in.

Oasis

No member of Oasis ever got into the music business to make friends. They only wanted to make the best rock and roll music that the world had ever seen, and it didn’t matter how many people they stepped on the way to get to the top of the world. But even if they talked a big game, it’s nonsensical to claim that the band never had any good songs in between their arena anthems.

Admittedly, there was bound to be some magic lost when they came out of the 1990s, but even when they were on top of the world, the Manchester legends were being treated like a second-rate version of The Beatles. Sure, Liam Gallagher sounded a bit like John Lennon in some areas, but if we were going to criticise every band that ever copied the work of Lennon and McCartney, we would have to eliminate over half of the songs from the past 50 years of pop music.

The band were always defiantly proud of their roots, and when they eventually scored their massive shows at Knebworth, it was a spit in the face to everyone who doubted them as being a hack version of classic rock. They were taking the basics of rock and roll and making an entirely new movement out of it, and even though their interviews could get more than a little bit harsh, nothing was going to stop them from being one of the best bands England had ever seen.

John Mayer

The entire 2000s pop scene was bogged down by far too many ballads. The whole American Idol generation seemed to already be coated in a certain shade of grey, and while the TV show itself would eventually spit out a showstopping voice like Kelly Clarkson, it only served to wake everyone up from the sea of lifeless balladeers like Daniel Powter or James Blunt clogging up the charts. John Mayer might fit loosely into that category on paper, but much of what he did was miles more interesting than the songs he was known for.

There are definitely songs where he comes off like a jackass like ‘Daughters’ and ‘Your Body is a Wonderland’, but even Mayer himself would agree that he wants to do virtually anything else other than that part of his career. As the years went on, people started to see Mayer for the guitar god that he truly is, taking all of the tasty playing that Stevie Ray Vaughan and Eric Clapton had and channelling it into his own music with the best backing musicians anyone could ask for.

A phrase like “bubblegum tongue” should be too nauseating a lyric to be forgiven, but Mayer is one of the few artists whose music has been able to transcend all of those rough growing pains. Some of his early stuff might not be the most spotless pieces of his discography, but if his debut had been Where the Light Is, people would be talking about him in a far more respectful tone than they are today.

Yoko Ono

The ending of any band is always going to do a number on the fanbase. Whenever something bad happens in the music industry, there’s usually no straight answer, but fans will always insist on knowing what split their favourite groups apart. Sometimes they just need one person to pin everything on, but looking at the final days of the Beatles, Yoko Ono was far from the biggest problem they had when working on their classics.

She may have been a change of pace for the rest of the band when John Lennon began bringing her to rehearsals, but the truth of the matter is that the Fab Four were growing apart. Lennon wanted to make more experimental music, and Paul McCartney was quickly becoming his usual perfectionist self, so it was only natural for them to go their separate ways once they started hitting creative walls in the studio.

Ono’s blame for the band’s demise may have come at an opportune time for Allen Klein to wipe his hands of any wrongdoing, but if there’s anyone who should be considered the scoundrel of their final days, it’s him. He was the one who pitted them against each other towards the end, but while Ono’s original music was always going to be an acquired taste, the thought of her maliciously stealing Lennon away from the band is the kind of rumour reserved for men who are afraid of the opposite sex.