Tainted Tunes: 10 terrible moments that ruined classic songs
It takes a small miracle to get any great rock song off the ground. For the duration of that one track, every member of the band has to be playing perfectly or incorporating enough hooks to keep the audience engaged. When it works, it feels like conquering a beast. However, it only takes a few missteps from artists like AC/DC to make some songs look worse in retrospect.
While each of these acts has made great music in the past, their decisions have often made some of their most famous songs feel a bit hollow. Whether it was something they said or trouble they got into afterwards, it frequently seemed like their actions outside the studio contradicted the very messages they wanted to convey in their music.
Then again, there are more ways that a song can be ruined than a bit of misbehaviour. Sometimes, it’s out of the artist’s hands that a song is used for something dark, and some of the biggest names in the world suddenly had their innocent song ruined by either real-life crime or someone trying to tie the tune into their strange, warped vision.
Does that mean that the song is unlistenable now? Not at all. Beauty is in the ear of the beholder in this case, and most people should be allowed to like whatever songs they want, yet when looking back on every one of these tracks, there’s a strange atmosphere around them that makes them a little more complicated to talk about.
10 moments that ruined classic tracks:
10. ‘Jeremy’ – Pearl Jam
Depending on what kind of artist you talk to, MTV is either the best or worst thing that could have possibly happened to mainstream music. Yes, it did give more people an outlet to look for more interesting music, but it also served to turn music into commercials rather than a legitimate art form. And if you were to ask any member of Pearl Jam, the entire reason why ‘Jeremy’ was controversial is more for the video than the song.
Most of the grunge icons’ videos had been promo clips, but their decision to make an artsy short film about a kid taking his own life in front of his class wasn’t going to fly with censors. So, instead of putting a disclaimer at the start of the video or running it late at night, the channel decided to turn the entire thing into a tale of an insane kid shooting up his classroom.
Aside from being absolutely tasteless, this one scene went against everything the song stood for concerning the need to reach out to those struggling with mental issues. Considering how many problems Pearl Jam got out of one song, it’s no surprise when they stopped releasing music videos specifically for this reason.
9. ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice’ – The Beach Boys
It’s not always serious matters that meddle with the the magnitude of a former masterpiece. Sometimes a song can be tainted for the most trivial of reasons. One classic way a song can be tossed into the weeds is an inclusion in an advert that is then blasted into your eardrums as mere commercial content endlessly for the next few months in a series of snippets you never asked for.
The latest to fall victim to this in the UK is the once glorious opening of ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice’ by The Beach Boys. In recent times it has become so synonymous with Lilly James trying to flog things from Sky that it’s now impossible to hear it without thinking of all the things you can’t afford. Worse still, beyond the painful ties to capitalism, being bombarded with the same 25-second segment of a song at least once a day for what seems like the last two years has entirely nullified its impact.
‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice’, like thousands of other great tracks before it and many more to come, has been rendered a mere traffic rumble of noise in the content congestion of the modern world. This, sadly, will only get worse. Most copyrights last for 70 years before art enters the public domain which means we are on the brink of thousands of masterpieces from the golden days of the 1960s being used freely to flog a rich array of products.
8. ‘Behind Blue Eyes’ – The Who
Anyone who has ever felt misunderstood can usually find something in ‘Behind Blue Eyes’. We’ll probably never know how Pete Townshend intended for the song to fit into the Lifehouse project that he was working on, but dealing with someone having to clench themselves and stifle their anger and love is something that adolescence is all about. It’s easy to hear the pain in Roger Daltrey’s voice when he sings it, but any younger kid automatically hates the tune because of what Fred Durst did to it.
Although The Who’s version of the song is the iconic rendition of the tune, the Limp Bizkit version from the 2000s ended up getting people singing for the wrong reasons. Now, this iconic tune about reaching out for love is cluttered by a guy who once talked of himself as a chocolate starfish.
Though covers shouldn’t really matter on a list like this, this is one of the few times where the new rendition ends up cannibalising the original on accident. Townshend used his songs as a way to air out his pain, but when listening to Durst, you’re hearing a manchild whining about how the world isn’t letting him be an asshole.
7. ‘Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle’ – Nirvana
Death always tends to change the way that you look at an artist. Even if people didn’t care for their music, any big name in Hollywood usually has their work poured over for years after their demise as everyone looks on in amazement at what a supposed visionary they were. So when someone as huge as Kurt Cobain died by his own hand, people saw ‘Frances Farmer’ in a completely different way.
No one could have predicted that Cobain wasn’t going to be here for the album’s one-year anniversary, but hearing him talk about the struggles of celebrity and how bitter he’s become made people look at the entire record a bit differently. Considering Frances Farmer’s story about being unruly and eventually being given a lobotomy, it’s hard not to look at it as Cobain’s attack on the paparazzi for putting him and Courtney Love in a box throughout the last years of his life.
Given how distraught he was towards the end, hearing lines about missing the comfort of being sad is that much more troubling. Cobain always had a slight problem with the press, but it took his death for fans to realise just how important his public perception was to someone who already had his own issues.
6. ‘We’re Gonna Make It’ – Sonny and Cher
Okay, so it’s not like anyone is saying that Cher isn’t a legend. Throughout her career, every massive tabloid drama that she has ever weathered has been harmless to her, and despite taking some hits critically, she has continued to bounce back nearly every single time. But Sonny and Cher weren’t meant to last forever, and ‘We’re Gonna Make It’ got that much more tragic when she tried to recreate that feeling of euphoria again with Gregg Allman.
Never mind the fact that the song is a blatant retread of ‘I’ve Got You Babe’, the entire track about sticking together through thick and thin even though everyone says they won’t is both funny and tragic considering how the couple fell out nearly a decade later. Whereas Sonny and Cher’s version had charm to it, Gregg Allman singing this kind of song is especially damning considering that the Southern rocker said in his book that he hated making their joint album, Two the Hard Way.
Considering Allman himself wasn’t on board with the project, seeing him insist that they would go the distance despite obvious cracks in the armour would never go over well. Where most artists would decide to just write a new song to their lover, ‘We’re Gonna Make It’ went from a cute little love song to the kind of spotty copy-and-paste job that you’d expect out of a jaded ex rather than the biggest star in the world.
5. ‘Say It Ain’t So’ – Weezer
For as goofy as Weezer could be at the best of times, no one could take ‘Say It Ain’t So’ away from them. Most of their record is about how much fun nerd life can be, but hearing Rivers Cuomo sing about the dangers of alcoholism is one of the biggest emotional gut punches of the entire 1990s. From a band this lighthearted, this is where everything got serious until 2009, when all sense of good taste went out the window.
While Weezer’s track record could be spotty in the 2000s, Raditude was the low point that no one could recover from. Right in the middle of the track listing, though, is ‘Can’t Stop Partying’, where Cuomo seems to take the concept of generational alcoholism and gives a swift middle finger to everyone who relates to it by talking about the joys of getting absolutely screwed up in the club.
Considering how desperate Cuomo sounds in the verses, it sounds like he had to deal with this kind of generational alcoholism himself, only to go right down the same road one decade later. While there’s nothing wrong with party songs, the lyric ‘Screw rehab/I love my addiction’ shouldn’t be coming out of the mouth of the same kid who was ‘drowning in the flood’ of his father. After a decade as a nerd rock act, one song began actively trying to nullify what made people like Weezer back in the day.
4. ‘Night Prowler’ – AC/DC
The ongoing argument that rock and roll corrupts the youth is still one of the most laughable urban legends in history. Yes, it might be loud and can piss parents off, but it’s a pretty big leap for someone to say that listening to music will cause the listener to do unspeakable things. Once that kind of danger became real in the 1980s, concerned parents had a lot of ammunition for AC/DC bashing on ‘Night Prowler’.
Most of the Australian rockers’ best songs are about that bad boy attitude, and this song about Bon Scott sneaking into his girlfriend’s house for some action ended up becoming linked to the ‘Night Stalker’ in the 1980s. After going on a major killing spree throughout California, Richard Ramirez would eventually be tracked down and imprisoned for life, only for authorities to find an AC/DC hat left at the scene of one of his crimes.
Given that the killer was linked with Satanism, the rumour was spread around that the band’s moniker stood for ‘Anti-Christ/Devil’s Children’, which probably wasn’t helped by the fact that Angus Young had a tail and devil horns sprouting out of his head on the album cover. There are a few unfortunate coincidences surrounding the song, but if there was any kind of harm that Scott intended to inflict upon the world, it probably had more to do with getting a little too wasted than committing despicable deeds.
3. All of Dark Side of the Moon – Roger Waters
Most people would argue that Dark Side of the Moon is absolutely perfect the way it is. Even for an album that has been around for 50 years, hearing Pink Floyd sing about the dangers of the world and the inevitable death that will come for us all is both ominous and comforting all at the same time. Waters apparently thought it meant something different in 2023, though, and his attempt to recapture the magic is still one of the more botched jobs that any classic rocker has done to their legacy.
While the redux of Dark Side of the Moon was never intended to replace the original work, Waters’s attempt to update the songs would hardly even pass for a decent Pink Floyd cover act. There are a handful of tracks that go over well, but once Waters opens his mouth, hearing him drone on about the modern age in what sounds like a bad Tom Waits impression just feels wrong without David Gilmour’s guitars and Richard Wright’s keyboards.
Plenty of artists have done work that has served as a love letter to Dark Side of the Moon, yet when looking at what Waters did with his initial vision, it’s far from the massive reimagining that he thinks it is. This is just the equivalent of remaking an iconic piece of art and then proceeding to draw graffiti on top of it.
2. ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ – The Rolling Stones
The Rolling Stones were never strangers to a little bit of mischievous activity. The whole reason why people were interested in them beyond the music was because they served as the kind of bad-boy alternative to what The Beatles had done just a few months before. While Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were proud of the rebellious spirit they put into their music, ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ ended up going a bit too far over the line at The Altamont Festival and overtly killed the Flower Generation.
Jagger was already tempting fate when writing the lyrics, changing the line to ‘who killed the Kennedys’ following Robert Kennedy’s assassination during the recording. Once The Stones descended onto the festival grounds, the song became infamous for instigating an incident that left concertgoer Meredith Hunter dead.
There had been plans to make the Altamont Festival the spiritual answer to Woodstock, but when actual blood was shed during The Stones’ set, the hippy revolution had eventually jumped the shark. It was supposed to be all about spreading peace and love around the world, and it took someone losing their life for everyone to wake up from the idyllic dream of the 1960s.
1. ‘Let It Be’ – The Beatles
Part of the universal appeal of The Beatles came from the fact that most of their music reflected positivity. In a world that was still considered for making songs that could piss off their parents, the fact that half of the Fab Four’s music was all about love and having respect for one another is the kind of code that most people can relate to. While McCartney probably didn’t mean any harm when writing ‘Let It Be’, those three words would live on in irony when the band couldn’t find a way to properly release the record of the same name.
In an attempt to get the group back to their roots, McCartney’s plans to reignite their creativity didn’t go over well, with George Harrison leaving halfway through the sessions before they folded the idea and went on to make Abbey Road. Once the group had officially broken up, though, Macca wasn’t done with his vision, initially hating what Phil Spector had done with the tapes on the 1970 release and even writing a strongly worded letter to Abbey Road Studios to never do it again.
That animosity hadn’t stopped by the 2000s, either, with McCartney eventually releasing Let It Be…Naked, being comprised of a stripped-down production more in line with what he wanted to hear. For an album that was all about the roots of the group and letting the small things go, the production hell of this album is a textbook example of not taking one’s own advice.
