10 songs that changed music for the worse
No one gets into the music industry to hurt people. Any songwriter looks at their writing as a way to express themselves, but chances are they are more likely to say what’s on their mind than writing something to piss someone off. Classics have consequences, and acts like Metallica have been paying for the actions they made on their classic hits.
Then again, there’s more than one way to hurt the music industry. It’s easy to just dismiss songs that hurt the industry because their music was subpar, but it’s more about the influence they had afterwards that left the real scars, with every single band trying and failing to capture what they did in the first place.
When they weren’t careful, those songs have gone from accidentally causing trouble to being actively malevolent in the face of the music industry. No matter how you slice it, these songs were one thing when they were in the studio, and once they made it into the public lexicon, they got the spotlight for all the wrong reasons.
From killing the careers of the biggest artists imaginable to putting their entire genre into decline, no band was truly able to recover from the disasters that happened behind the scenes on these songs. Any album track is supposed to be a labour of love, but even the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and these songs count for a few miles on the hellish highway of the music industry.
10 songs that changed music for the worse:
10. ‘The Miracle of Joey Ramone’ – U2
It’s at least commendable to see a band like U2 trying to innovate their sound into the new age of rock acts. They could have easily squeaked by playing arenas the rest of their lives and satisfying everyone who wants to hear ‘Desire’ for the thousandth time, but hearing a song like ‘The Miracle of Joey Ramone’ sounded like they were just getting in tune with their roots again. Then, a funny thing happened when everyone opened their iTunes and couldn’t get rid of it.
As much as U2 may have loved their great album Songs of Innocence, they figured everyone else would like it just as much as when they decided to shove it down the public’s throat on all Apple products. After striking a deal with the company, the album was now on everyone’s phone, which meant that you had to go through extreme measures trying to get back the storage space that was suddenly filled by Bono singing about his childhood.
Looking back, even the members of U2 thought it was a bad move, probably because they figured that the fans should have the final say in what they listen to rather than the bands. There are already AI sites now trying to put together an algorithm for what pleases an audience, but leave it to U2 to make an album that feels like the musical equivalent of a dictator shoving music into your eardrums whether you like it or not.
9. ‘Feel Your Love Tonight’ – Van Halen
There’s no denying that most of Van Halen‘s debut is a 10/10 album experience. Other hard rock acts had fun in the past, but this was the party that wouldn’t end for just under an hour, and no one would have had it any other way. While David Lee Roth was the court jester of the entire operation, the lyrical content of ‘Feel Your Love Tonight’ left a permanent stain of what rock vocals should be.
Let’s face it… rock’s never going to run short on songs about sex, but ‘Feel Your Love Tonight’ is the kind of trashy sex track that makes AC/DC look tame by comparison. Although Roth still delivers it effectively, the song feels like an unofficial blueprint for the hair metal scene, as if bands like Warrant and Poison followed this piece directly when talking about songs with casual misogyny towards their female partners.
That’s not to say that the trashiness ever stopped, either, with the hair metal outfits’ brands of lyrics being replaced by the even more trashy post-grunge bands that gained popularity in the late 1990s. Nirvana may have tried to swing things back the other way, but after ‘Feel Your Love Tonight’, we would have to suffer through the lyric sheet Chad Kroeger spit out in Nickelback’s material.
8. ‘Waiting for the End’ – Linkin Park
For a genre that has as poorly as nu-metal, it’s at least commendable that Linkin Park walked away with their dignity. They may have made some of the biggest anthems in nu-metal history, but their pain always felt like it was coming from a real place rather than a 20-something complaining about his parents not understanding him. Linkin Park knew they had to change with the times, though, and a song like ‘Waiting for the End’ felt like the next logical step for rock…which we all ended up paying for.
When looked at objectively, this piece is close to perfect in the Linkin Park catalogue. It takes all of the glitchy sides of their sound and turns it into the kind of tracks that works well as a stadium-rock song. While the band was aiming big and even succeeded on many fronts, the rest of the rock scene ended up becoming inundated with groups who thought all they needed was a sampler and a stomping beat to make a rock song.
Suddenly, every act coming to fruition was citing electronic bands as a primary influence and making the most feeble attempts at rock ever made, to the point where most “alternative” music today sounds like you’re listening to a truck commercial. Linkin Park shouldn’t be blamed for bringing their beauty into the world, but it’s hard to call them completely faultless when you think Imagine Dragons probably got their sound from songs like this.
7. ‘D’You Know What I Mean’ – Oasis
For a brief moment in time, it felt like the 1960s came back in the 1990s. Although Nirvana may have been known as The Beatles for that decade in terms of influence, Oasis weren’t too far behind, becoming known for their outlandish behaviour and some of the greatest anthems of the Britpop movement. All eyes were on them to carry the genre into the future, and they proceeded to fumble it so hard the minute ‘D’You Know What I Mean’ came out.
Then again, there isn’t too much wrong with the song on principle. The chord progression might still be classic Oasis, and Liam and Noel Gallagher are still in fine form behind the vocals. No, the real problem behind this song is how it acts as the face of Be Here Now, which turned into one of the biggest pop culture bombs in human history.
All of the album’s faults are present to some degree, from the overblown production to the song lengths going on for far too long to possibly great material being relegated to background music in a rock-and-roll-themed ambient piece. By the time you heard the final steps on the band’s subsequent album, you knew that the Britpop swing was officially dead and buried.
6. ‘Fight For Your Right’ – Beastie Boys
In a world where rock was starting to become a bit cliché, it was impossible for hip-hop not to be considered at least a little bit cool. We hadn’t heard about the terrors of people like Vanilla Ice yet, so hearing Run-DMC and Public Enemy playing on stations felt like a breath of fresh air from the bands who just wanted to sing about the love of rock and roll. Beastie Boys may have approached rap on rock’s terms, but their approach to writing a cheeky party song hit the exact wrong note with listeners.
Since half of the band’s debut album is meant to be a satirical look at the wise-guy Bowery Boy that was so prevalent around New York, ‘Fight For Your Right’ was the kind of loudmouth anthem that any of those mooks could listen to. It was meant to be funny, but no one took it that way, leading to many artists actively living out that lifestyle whenever they got a little rowdy.
Even when Beastie Boys went out on tour, their schtick ended up being the kind of jock jam that they were against, eventually leading to them going in a completely different direction on their next few albums. They weren’t looking to become just another meathead band, and if Paul’s Boutique taught fans anything, it was to expect the unexpected.
5. ‘Polly’ – Nirvana
From day one, Kurt Cobain never minced his words about how he felt about people. He had strong opinions about anyone who was into the music that he disliked, and there was no way that he would ever sanitise his music for what other people wanted. While ‘Polly’ pulled none of its punches in regards to toxic masculinity, Cobain was horrified when he heard about what happened once Nevermind hit stores.
Even though the song is a chilling look into the mind of a torturer who absent-mindedly stalks his victim, some wastes of semen ended up actually carrying out the events of the track, some of whom started singing bars of the song as they abused a woman. For Cobain, this was absolutely horrifying, later claiming that he would be uncomfortable playing the piece knowing that such people actually listened to his music.
By the time Nirvana released new music, Cobain had doubled down on his beliefs, eventually putting out the song ‘Rape Me’ in response to those taking issue with his stance on abuse. It may have ruffled some feathers back in the day, but when one of your works is being used for such an atrocity, those feathers need to be ruffled for a damn good reason.
4. ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ – The Rolling Stones
The Rolling Stones’ entire career has been about being the bad boys of rock. Considering how it was impossible to see Keith Richards without a cigarette in his hand throughout most of the 1960s, it’s not like they were the kind of band you wanted to bring home to your mother. They were meant to be dangerous, but once they performed ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ at Altamont, that dangerous streak got too accurate.
Although most of the Altamont Festival was a hot mess, this is when the entire hippie generation jumped the shark. In just a few minutes of the band playing onstage, Meredith Hunter was brutally murdered by one of the Hell’s Angels, which led to Mick Jagger trying to calm down the crowd so total anarchy didn’t break out.
Considering this movement was meant to be all about peace and love, this was the sad reality that the Flower Generation had to wake up to. No matter how many times they tried to change the world, there would always be evil out there, and it took just one song for that rock and roll utopia to look like a pipe dream.
3. ‘Revolution 9’ – The Beatles
The Beatles have done more than enough throughout history to be considered great for the music industry. They single-handedly breathed life into rock and roll, and all that they’ve done for the community since their breakup is worth having to endure a song like ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’. That didn’t stop them from throwing jabs at each other, and it all began with this one experimental track from John Lennon.
Although Lennon had the song ‘Revolution’ as the B-side of ‘Hey Jude’, Paul McCartney immediately hated this experimental soundscape when they first laid it down. While McCartney was a fan of avant-garde music, this was going too far for a Beatles record, which severely angered Lennon when it came time to sequence the album.
It may have made it onto the track listing, but the creative disagreements that came of this song eventually became a thorn in their friendship, eventually leading to the jabs at each other in the press and in their solo material like Lennon’s ‘How Do You Sleep’. Then again, the biggest crime is losing pieces of the track listing. With almost nine minutes left to fill on the album, it’s a wonder what great solo Beatles pieces could have been on The White Album had they decided to banish this song to the same musical purgatory as ‘Carnival of Light’.
2. ‘Alive’ – Pearl Jam
By the time Pearl Jam started to gain traction in the rock world, we sorely needed them. While Nirvana kicked down the door for alternative rock in the mainstream, Eddie Vedder proved that you didn’t have to sacrifice any hard rock chops to make alt-rock bangers. No one could say no to that voice, and ‘Alive’ became an unofficial cheat code for how the rest of the decade would sound.
Since Vedder already had a fairly low register with his voice, his trademark vocal tone would soon be copied by everyone under the sun. Even though the ‘yarl’ was most associated with groups from Seattle, everyone and their mother started to put their own spin on it, from California rockers Stone Temple Pilots wanting that kind of phrasing to Brit rockers Bush trying their best to sound like they were from Seattle.
While that brand of mainstream rock has fallen by the wayside today, some of the bands’ sloppy seconds stretched all the way to the 2000s, whether it was the sounds of Staind or the harsh grit of Puddle of Mudd. Imitation might be the sincerest form of flattery, but it took one great performance out of Vedder to create absolute hell from the Scott Stapps of the world.
1. ‘I Disappear’ – Metallica
Many Metallica fans need only to throw a dart and find a moment where they made the music world worse. They had already marginalised a good portion of their fans when they decided to make radio-friendly music that normal people would want to hear, but it wasn’t until Load that people really started calling them sell-outs. Nothing could stop the band’s momentum, though… not until Lars Ulrich walked into a meeting with government officials about the use of ‘I Disappear’.
Although the song is a decent piece of 2000s history from the Mission Impossible 2 soundtrack, the fact that it got leaked on Napster made Ulrich one of the most loathed men in the music industry. After seizing the right to use and complaining that the site was hijacking their music, many listeners thought that the band had disappeared up their own ass and started caring more about money than their fans.
The worst part was that Ulrich was kind of right. Even though ‘I Disappear’ was lifted from Napster, the advent of streaming led to many up-and-coming artists getting a fraction of what they are supposed to earn from people listening to their music, if they even get paid at all. Ulrich may have been looking for the music industry when he walked into that courtroom, but everyone’s due diligence regarding ‘I Disappear’ led to people questioning what music is worth to this day.
