10 songs that confirmed the end of an artist’s career
No one is meant to stay in the music industry for life. Even though a lot of artists have dreams of innovating every time they make a record and have the audience eating out of the palm of their hand, there comes a point when the audience is either going to get bored or start to see them as passe after a while. It’s the nature of the beast for everyone to fade out gracefully, but rarely does one see the specific moment that artists stopped mattering like Billy Squier did.
The natural progression of any artist should be to bow out gracefully. There are normally only a few years where any artist is at the peak of their performance, but when they started to get a bit overeager in terms of what they could do, it became clear that no one was going to take them seriously once they started getting too ambitious.
Granted, not all of the “career-killers” are done in the same way. Sometimes, the song could be considered the final gasp of creativity from a group or a desperate attempt to get attention, but there are also moments where it’s clear the group has reached the end of the line, and there’s no chance that they are going to be able to work the same way again.
While some of these artists may still attempt to make decent music somewhere down the line, their attempts at switching things up or bowing out didn’t make it any easier for fans to witness. Some of them were already at death’s door, but it’s never fun seeing the final nail in the coffin being hammered in.
10 songs that confirmed the end of an artist’s career:
10. ‘Falling Down’ – Oasis
The entire journey through Oasis’ career felt like a time bomb waiting to go off. It was clear after the 2000s that the Gallagher brothers weren’t exactly cordial with each other off the stage, and even when they did find themselves having pleasant moments, it didn’t take long for them to get into verbal fisticuffs once in a while. The end was near by the time of Dig Out Your Soul, but listening to their last single, Noel seemed to see the writing on the wall before they properly fell out.
While most of the band’s swansong focused on heavier grooves than normal, like on ‘Waiting for the Rapture’ and ‘The Shock of the Lightning’, hearing this electronic-psychedelic experiment sounds like Noel watching everything he loved fall apart. By the time the band went out on the road, it wasn’t fun anymore, and hearing him talk about catching the wheel that breaks the butterfly may as well be him pleading for everything to stop.
Considering the confrontation was about to get physical, it didn’t make much sense for Noel to continue after storming out minutes before a gig in Paris. The band may have started out as a way of bringing hope and optimism into the world, but this was the moment where ‘The Chief’ realised that the good ship Oasis was finally running out of steam.
9. ‘Bollywood’ – Liz Phair
Liz Phair has always had a complicated history with her recorded output. Despite having some of the greatest indie pop songs to her name in the late 1990s, her turn towards a pop star in the 2000s was one of the biggest culture shifts most people could have imagined once ‘Why Can’t I’ hit the airwaves. If those fans had problems with the snarky indie goddess trying to be Avril Lavigne, though, they weren’t prepared for what Funstyle had to offer.
Despite already getting into trouble with her record company, ‘Bollywood’ was the first taste of what Phair described as the album that lost her the record deal. Even though going rogue on the record company had worked with acts like Wilco and Radiohead once Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and In Rainbows were released, all ‘Bollywood’ did was make us question Phair’s sanity, with her singing over a strange bhangra beat and trying to rap but coming off as a suburban mom trying out karaoke for the first time.
Although Phair eventually took a break for years before coming back strong on Soberish, ‘Bollywood’ is still one of the most mystifying songs ever released by a big-name artist. She still had the power to make decent hooks, so why did we have to deal with a racially insensitive take on the wonders of Indian culture?
8. ‘Tightrope Ride’ – The Doors
Most people would understand if The Doors wanted to hang it up after Jim Morrison’s passing. ‘The Lizard King’ was always more than any other frontman, and when he was found dead in Paris, there was no reason for them to think that they could carry on with a new singer. That didn’t stop them from trying to keep it together as a three-piece, and when they struck out on their own, you could practically hear the widespread apathy once Other Voices.
While I’m singling out ‘Tightrope Ride’ for this list, it’s saying something when this is the closest to a good song on the album. The groove is fairly tight, and while Ray Manzarek sounds nowhere closer to what Morrison could do, he’s at least doing a serviceable job as a lounge-adjacent singer. But that’s the real problem here. The words ‘serviceable’ and ‘lounge’ aren’t something that should be associated with The Doors.
Morrison helped people see parts of reality that had been locked away from them for years, and considering these were the same musicians that were behind him, he clearly had a lot more handle on the material than anyone gave him credit for. While their longtime producer Paul Rothchild complained that tunes like ‘Riders on the Storm’ sounded like cocktail music, this is a much better case for that qualifier.
7. ‘Door to Door’ – Creedence Clearwater Revival
No band ever wants to admit that their time in the sun is up. Even if they have an uphill battle in front of them, most are going to want to do everything in their power to push themselves over the line one more time and put one more track on the hit parade. And given how much a hit factory Creedence Clearwater Revival was in their prime, the fact that ‘Door to Door’ wound up on a B-side should have been a warning sign that things were about to go horribly wrong.
It’s not like Mardi Gras was slated to be one of their greatest records by any stretch, though. John Fogerty had already said that he didn’t want to be there, and since everyone else wanted to write songs, he finally let them workshop their own ideas. If all Stu Cook had to offer was this half-hearted song about being a salesman with a voice that sounds like a dying animal, maybe Fogerty did have everyone’s best interests here.
It’s not like the originals got any better on the record, either, with classics like ‘Someday Never Comes’ being balanced out by tunes like ‘Take It Like a Friend’, which would have been enough to make anyone take off their headphones out of disgust. The band may have seen Fogerty as a dictator, but there has never been a better way of proving that sometimes the frontman calls the shots for a reason.
6. ‘Meet the Grahams’ – Kendrick Lamar
The heated hip-hop battle of 2024 isn’t something that can be accurately described in a few paragraphs. Suffice it to say, both Kendrick Lamar and Drake have been two opposing sides of the hip-hop spectrum, and once they started throwing jabs at each other on wax, everyone knew that only one of them was walking out of the beef alive. But even by hip-hop standards, the way that Lamar single-handedly ended all of Drake’s goodwill on ‘Meet the Grahams’ is downright diabolical.
Most people would have given Drake time to breathe when he made his diss on ‘Family Matters’, but Lamar needed to go further than the average deconstruction of his character. Not even an hour after ‘Family Matters’ was released, Lamar’s song came out to scare every hip-hop fan to death, with each verse being a letter to a member of Drake’s family, from his estranged son to his parents to an alleged daughter that Drake has that he had been keeping from the world.
While it’s hard to feel bad for someone like Drake, given his checkered past, hearing Lamar bring him down in this fashion is almost hard to listen to. Many people have seen rap diss battles that have ended in career destruction, but no one has been able to publicly execute their opponent like this and then subsequently dance on their grave a few hours later on ‘Not Liks Us’.
5. ‘The Sad Cafe’ – Eagles
Eagles never claimed to have the greatest track record for cool points throughout their history. They certainly were on track to becoming a decent rock and roll band, but looking through their core studio albums, they were more interested in the concept of songwriting than being placed in the same hierarchy of cool as Led Zeppelin were. After the massive blockbuster of Hotel California, everyone was burned the hell out, and Don Henley knew exactly where things were going on ‘The Sad Cafe’.
Although The Long Run is an album that sounds like it was made kicking and screaming, ‘The Sad Cafe’ reads like a sad postscript for the band. Even though the California rockers have come back to their old haunts after years away, Henley knows that nothing is ever going to be the same as those nights when all they had to worry about was drinking and playing in the early hours of the morning.
Those days are all over now that they had become a money machine, and when Glenn Frey and Don Felder figured they couldn’t handle it anymore, no one was surprised when everything finally blew up. It had indeed been a long run, but when listening to this song, you can’t help but picture Henley shedding a single tear, knowing that everything had finally come to an end.
4. All of Tango in the Night – Fleetwood Mac
Anything that Fleetwood Mac ever released in a post-Rumours world should have been considered a miracle. Some of the best music of the 1970s may have come from them, but was it really worth it when they had to sacrifice their own sanity in order to record it? It’s no wonder that most of the band took some time off to work on solo albums, but when they had to learn the meaning of compromise again, everyone fell apart when it came time to record Tango in the Night.
Since Stevie Nicks was still working on her solo output, she started to get more agitated with her old outfit, thinking like she was being written out of the room. While no one should expect to have priority over the music if they aren’t even there, things only got worse when Lindsey Buckingham decided that he wasn’t going to tour for the album, leading to a physical confrontation between him and Nicks during a band meeting.
Although most people would consider a fistfight the minute that all goodwill ends, the band did keep it together without Buckingham for a while before reuniting for The Dance. Given how well Nicks and Buckingham get along today, though, there’s a good chance that a lot of their band camaraderie was extinguished the minute that they lifted a finger to each other.
3. ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ – Guns N’ Roses
For any volatile act, a cover song is usually one of the best routes that they can go down. No one has to worry about stepping on each other’s toes, and if all you have to do is pay tribute to the person you’re covering, it should be smooth sailing. For someone whose head had grown as large as Axl Rose’s had, though, Guns N’ Roses were lucky that they could have kept this cover of a Stones classic afloat for more than a few minutes.
Although “The Spaghetti Incident?” was already a signal that something was drastically wrong, hearing this take on ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ for Interview with a Vampire is almost painful, knowing the background information. Rose had already owned the rights to Guns N’ Roses, and if any of them wanted to continue with the group, that meant being a member of “his” band rather than the united front they had presented themselves as in the beginning.
Slash couldn’t even bring himself to give his approval on the song by the end, eventually calling the tune the soundtrack to the band breaking up. Because listening to the track itself, this isn’t some loose version of the classic Rolling Stones tune. This is the sound of a band on their last legs trying desperately to make music together.
2. ‘Rock Me Tonite’ – Billy Squier
When MTV first spread across the airwaves, most bands saw dollar signs. The whole point of making music is to get millions of fans tuning in to what you have to say, and now that one of the biggest radio stations in the world had become a TV station, it didn’t take long for people like David Bowie or Michael Jackson to start capitalising on everything. Some did get lost in the shuffle, though, and no one manages to hit a brick wall as severely as Billy Squier did on ‘Rock Me Tonite’.
Although the ethos behind MTV was about being extravagant, the video for this Squier tune could be considered an autopsy on where everything went wrong for him. Most MTV darlings benefited from going over the top, but Squier and his band are chewing the scenery at every opportunity, whether that’s him tearing off his shirt or prancing around his room playing an air guitar while his bandmates mime along with him.
Any MTV veteran can get over one bad video, but since this was Squier’s first time on the station, it was enough for every kid to call him yesterday’s news and change the channel to someone like Def Leppard or Poison. Squier’s songs might still blare over rock radio to this day, but looking at the crater that ‘Rock Me Tonite’ made, it’s easy to see why he got thrown in the trash soon after.
1. All of Vultures series – Kanye West
Anyone even remotely familiar with hip-hop can normally pinpoint the downfall of Kanye West throughout his career. Most people would have been either never seen again in the industry or been considered a joke if they had done half of what West had done during the 2010s, but it never mattered that much so long as he was still making decent music. Once he started saying the most hateful things that any celebrity would ever say, though, Vultures became the sad epitaph of what once was a decent rapper.
Because to understand Vultures means looking at the circumstances around it. Over the past few years, West has been making it a point to go against all sense of logic and good taste, and by the time he started talking about the gory details of his divorce in public and his love for antisemitic rhetoric, people knew that they were going to be in for a heavy listen if they even bothered to hear the albums at all.
Judging by how devoted a fanbase West has, seeing him lose all of his sponsors and hearing his fanbase say that his records are now embarrassing by his standards is saying a lot. There might be some miraculous way for West to pull himself out of this hole that he continues to burrow himself into, but if his recent output is any indication, he’s more than willing to dig himself deeper and become one of the most despicable human beings to have once been called a millionaire.
