Devastating Ditties: 10 songs that destroyed artists
Creating a song can be both a blessing and a curse for musicians. It’s one thing to make a track that everyone can relax with and have a good time listening to, but there are always those few hits that stand out as the moments where everything changed for the person who put that pen to paper that one fateful day. Most of the time, it’s for the better, but acts like Aerosmith managed to hit on something toxic when birthing these tunes.
While most of the tunes on this list are responsible for destroying an artist, that doesn’t mean that all of them are necessarily bad. In fact, some of them might be the best that they have to offer. Still, the amount of animosity or the vitriol between the guitar chords left them either unable to work together or brought their entire operation into a steady decline for years, if not decades.
That’s not to say there aren’t terrible recordings here, either. Artists can fess up to having a few dogs in their catalogue, but the tracks featured here were enough to leave even the hardcore audiences speechless. It was as if the moment it started playing, suddenly, no one needed to care about what the singer had to say ever again.
For many of them, this is where the story ends in terms of the public eye, leaving them to pick up the pieces of their broken career or wildly autocorrect to something different or become more in tune with what their fans wanted. In reality, the fans are the judge, jury, and executioner of every hit, and some bands are eaten alive for what they put together here.
10 songs that destroyed artists:
10. ‘Iowa’ – Slipknot
There’s an entire book that could be written about the massive casualties Slipknot endured while making their second album, Iowa. No one was getting along; they were doing way too many drugs behind the scenes, and the opening screams on the record came from Sid Wilson letting out all his emotion after losing his grandfather. It would be hard to top a loved one’s death in terms of raw emotion, but Corey Taylor almost saw the other side when recording the title track.
After being dared by producer Ross Robinson to go somewhere he was scared of, Taylor decided to disrobe in the middle of the studio floor and completed the song in two takes. The subject matter revolving around someone doing very nasty things to a corpse is bad enough, but Taylor wanted to go full method actor as well, eventually throwing a glass across the room and cutting himself up on the final recording.
So, when listening to the final seconds of the album, that’s Taylor actually torturing himself and vomiting on himself to get the kind of unsettling feeling for the final track. The days of hair metal may have had artists like Nikki Sixx and Ozzy Osbourne trying to one-up themselves in terms of disgusting behaviour, but when did we collectively cross a line and think this was a decent way of getting a vocal take?
9. ‘All Around the World’ – Oasis
There’s always been some debate surrounding Oasis fans about when the group started declining. Others can point to the moment that the core lineup split up, and the true diehards are still hoping that that infamous night in Paris in 2009 will somehow be redeemed when they reunite somewhere down the line. If we want to talk about their collective brick wall, though, we have to roll things back to the beginning.
Because ‘All Around the World’ dates back to the first rehearsals the group ever played together. It still had the massive chords behind it and Liam Gallagher’s snide vocal performance. Still, Noel was convinced that something was missing, which apparently was a massive orchestra and an outro that refused to die no matter how many times people tried to flog it.
While there’s a case to be made that ‘All Around the World’ is their version of ‘Hey Jude’, it represents everything wrong with the Be Here Now era, complete with everyone being far too high on cocaine and their own ego to realise something’s amiss. This was supposed to be the victory lap for the Britpop scene, but who would have thought that the most extravagant song Oasis would ever write would also be a death march of sorts?
8. ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ – Guns N’ Roses
If we’re being honest, Guns N’ Roses was probably dead in the water about halfway through the tour for Use Your Illusion. It was a miracle they survived long enough to make a decent double album, but since Axl Rose started calling the shots, every member of the band felt secondary to whatever the hell he felt they should sound like on any particular day. So a covers album like “The Spaghetti Incident?” should have broken up the tension, but a one-off Stones tune ended up being their demise.
By the time Slash got around to recording it, ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ was a facsimile of what Guns N’ Roses used to be. Every member was still playing on it, but it was easy to hear the tension in the air, as if everyone was playing in completely different rooms to avoid a massive fight, one of Rose’s temper tantrums, or perhaps both at the same time.
Slash would later call the record the sound of the band breaking up, only sticking around for a few more months before deciding that the SS Axl was far too big a ship for him to manage. The Rolling Stones’ original may have had the unfortunate shadow of Altamont thrust upon it, but once the ‘World’s Most Dangerous Band’ got ahold of it, it was like fans were seeing them being read their last rites.
7. ‘Killshot’ – Eminem
Anyone even remotely familiar with 8 Mile knows that Eminem is the one battle rapper that no one wants to mess with. He did have friends in the game and could even find other burgeoning talents like 50 Cent, but the minute someone badmouths him in the press or on record, the claws come out, and it’s like a tiger awakening from its cage. And if you throw in some questionable lines about his daughter like Machine Gun Kelly did, Slim Shady awoke from his stupor to deliver the execution of a lifetime.
Although half of Eminem’s discography past Encore had flip-flopped from decent to very bad, ‘Killshot’ was the one moment where Slim showed up again in full force. Rather than just call someone names like he did back in the day, Em pulls none of his punches when dissecting everything wrong with Kelly, from how he’s riding his coattails to how he better watch out if he ever comes for his daughter.
While Machine Gun Kelly is still alive and well today, the fact that he ditched hip-hop altogether to move onto another genre really says it all. Because once you’ve been dragged through the mud and buried alive like he was here, there was no use in him showing his face on any concert stage ever again.
6. ‘Why Can’t I’ – Liz Phair
Liz Phair seemed to always be happy being on the fringes of rock and roll. She never had the crazy knockout hits that other female rockers like Alanis Morrissette had, but it didn’t really feel like she needed to when her singer-songwriter fans adored her so much. While ‘Never Said’ seemed like the closest that we’d ever see her get to a pop hit, ‘Why Can’t I’ became the albatross around her neck when her self-titled album was announced.
There had always been a poppier side to Phair’s music if you looked for it, but ‘Why Can’t I’ was the first time she sounded like she was pandering, down to using pop producers The Matrix. Because if there was anything that the alternative kids wanted to hear, it was one of their reigning queens working with the same people who worked magic for other surefire legends of music like Jason Mraz.
Phair’s ironic edge is still there in her lyrics, but the amount of bubblegum shimmer in front of it is too blinding for anyone to ignore. Phair could have feasibly crossed over if she had the right people, but what she ended up with is an Avril Lavigne-style track that happened to have some lyrical punch behind it.
5. ‘Beat It’ – Michael Jackson
In the age of Thriller, there was nothing that could stop Michael Jackson. Even when he came to Quincy Jones with what could have been a classic, the production guru’s insistence on returning to the drawing board eventually birthed two of his greatest hits, ‘Beat It’ and ‘Billie Jean’. One man’s hit can mess up others by design, though, and Eddie Van Halen’s guitar solo on the record planted the first seed for his group’s first demise.
It’s not like Van Halen were getting along famously, either, with Eddie getting more into keyboards and David Lee Roth insisting on him sticking to guitar. So when the frontman heard his bandmate playing those incredible leads on someone else’s song, it was going to cause a lot more trouble once Eddie came in with a keyboard-driven hit like ‘Jump’ on the next album, 1984.
Although the record did give fans anthems like ‘Panama’ and ‘Hot For Teacher’, Roth wasn’t willing to sit and watch Eddie become a synthesiser nut, eventually leaving after the tour for a solo career. But given that Eddie could still make incredible solos on his own along with Jackson, shouldn’t just one little feature have been allowed?
4. ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ – Nirvana
Kurt Cobain never claimed to be a malicious man. He had certain tastes in music that may have rubbed some people the wrong way, but he was always just looking to make tunes that fans could relate to whenever he strapped on his guitar. But ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ was more than a song. It was a social movement in musical form, and it devoured much of the hair metal scene in its wake.
For all of the individual entries on this list, this is one of the few times where it’s hard to pin down any one artist ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ killed. All people knew at the time was that this kid in a flannel shirt was speaking to them in a much different way than the spandex-clad metal gods were, so it was more acceptable for them to slip on docker’s boots and a flannel shirt than have to put extra product in their hair.
In the wake of ‘Teen Spirit’, everyone from Winger to Mr Big to Warrant were now yesterday’s news, and the rest of the hair metal scene would have to pick up the pieces of what was left. There was still room for legendary artists like Metallica or Aerosmith to break through, but ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ really was the death knell for glittery rock, and Dave Grohl’s massive drum fills in the introduction may as well have been the kill shot.
3. ‘Not Like Us’ – Kendrick Lamar
It’s probably too close to call this a true demise of an artist. Kendrick Lamar has spent the last few months making songs dancing on Drake’s grave, but far more ambitious career comebacks have happened to someone as big as Drizzy. But if he does decide to actually make a return to form, nothing is ever going to be the same after the allegations that he is still dealing with on ‘Not Like Us’.
Whereas Lamar’s ‘Meet the Grahams’ is much more scathing in terms of its raw bars, ‘Not Like Us’ was the nail in the coffin by getting millions of fans to dance along with him. With every verse, K-Dot makes it a point to stomp out everything that Drake stands for, from his allegations of nasty behaviour with young girls to sponging off the goodwill of other up-and-coming artists in his wake, like 21 Savage and Lil Baby.
It’s also incredibly rare to see this kind of rap beef victory get such a welcome victory lap, too, especially during Lamar’s Pop Out shows, where he got an entire arena on their feet to put Drizzy in his place. And considering that Drake’s response on ‘The Heart Part 6’ makes him sound completely spent, it’s safe to say that ‘Not Like Us’ put more than a few minorrrrrr dents in his armour.
2. ‘I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing’ – Aerosmith
Rock bands are always concerned with whether they can reach number one in the charts. No matter how many times people say that the charts aren’t everything, it’s pretty special to see one of your musical offspring suddenly climbing its way to the top of the hit parade and managing to become the biggest song in the country. There is a price to be paid, though, and Aerosmith found out the hard way that singles don’t come cheap on ‘I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing’.
While neither Steven Tyler nor Joe Perry had a hand in writing the tune, Diane Warren’s power ballad had the word ‘hit’ virtually prestamped on it when they recorded it for the Michael Bay film Armageddon. Once Tyler saw the power one tune could have on their entire career, he knew what he had to do for the rest of his days: find another track that managed to sound just like it.
Despite leaning more towards pop on each subsequent record, albums like Just Push Play had too much of that Diane Warren-style polish on it, as if the supposed ‘Bad Boys From Boston’ woke up one day and decided that they wanted to give *NSYNC a run for their money. While they eventually went out on their own terms with Music From Another Dimension, ‘I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing’ is a cautionary tale about what constitutes a hit. You can have fame and adulation, but that means sacrificing credibility in the process.
1. ‘God’ – John Lennon
There was never any defining moment when The Beatles really got started. They had been the same rough-and-tumble group out of Liverpool for nearly half a decade, and then suddenly, they were four of the most sought-after men in the world because they happened to put together tracks that people enjoyed. But the cracks had started forming as far back as Sgt Pepper, and while Paul McCartney announced the Fab Four wouldn’t make music for a while first, John Lennon crushed any reunion rumours on ‘God’.
Then again, that probably wasn’t Lennon’s intention when he started writing the track. Most of Plastic Ono Band revolved around him dealing with his own emotional struggles, so a song about letting go of his faith in false idols should have just been another musical therapy session. Once he starts naming musical figures and ends with ‘I don’t believe in Beatles/I just believe in me’, all Fab fans knew that their dreams had been crushed.
Those four mop-top boys we all thought we knew for years had become very different men, and it was time for all of them to lead separate lives and go their own directions. The dream was indeed over, but accepting that it really was the end was the first step people had to take when moving on.
