Five artists who ruined their career with their own delusion
No one can make it in the music industry without a healthy amount of ego.
If you don’t believe in yourself, who else will? Fame and fortune’s distant beckon only come to those powered by unwavering determination and self-belief, defying all the odds to at the very least make a comfortable living playing and performing over getting a ‘real job’. For every Glastonbury headliner or Grammy winner, there are a thousand bands that never flew beyond garage jams with friends or the extremely local pub circuit for six months at best.
Then there’s just plain old bad luck. Hugely ambitious bands with all the talent in the world can fall prey to shoddy management, infighting, label disinterest, and a crippling cost of living that just makes any road to semi-financial viability all but impossible for so many artists. With the bleak economic terrain showing no signs of abating, ‘bad luck’ looks set to sadly feature as an increasingly common dead-end awaiting many up-and-comers.
Sometimes, however, an artist finds their fame but fucks it all up once success is in their hands. The essential ego that powered a big name through all the odds explodes to hubris, fuelling unprofessional conduct, cringe-inducing interviews, or reputation-damaging remarks that alienate your fanbase for good.
Whatever it was that upended such an initial career promise, we take a look at the five artists who seriously derailed their own musical futures.
Five artists who ruined their careers with delusion:
Babylon Zoo
Only several years earlier, Staffordshire indie wannabe Jas Mann had managed to nab a reasonably successful run as frontman for The Sandkings, opening for Happy Mondays and The Stone Roses in the early 1990s.
But Mann fancied himself as a solo star for the new decade. Adopting the Babylon Zoo moniker, Mann dreamed up a new sci-fi persona for himself, all glammed-up Gary Numan with a cyber neon aesthetic soaking up the pre-millennial tech fascination of the day. Cutting ‘Spaceman’ as his debut single, a brief snippet on a Levi’s advert would push the single to record-breaking sales, beating The Beatles’ ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ over 20 years earlier.
Fans were quickly disappointed, however, when the sped-up alien score to the popular commercial was just the weird intro, followed by a dirgy industrial grunge shuffle packed with pretentious lyrics and Mann’s preening star entity act. Narking the music press to no end with his self-aggrandisement at odds with the Britpop humour in the charts, Babylon Zoo nosedived shortly after, second album King Kong Groover failing to even chart in 1999.
Johnny Borrell
There are many worse offenders when casting your mind back to the ‘landfill indie’ that gunked all over NME and MTV2 in the mid-2000s, be it The Fratellis, Pigeon Detectives, or The Kooks during the era’s attempt at Britpop II.
The enduring pioneer of the decade’s Topman playlist formula is still Johnny Borrell. Whether fully deserved or not, the Razorlight frontman suffered the slings and arrows of a brutal UK music press, who lent a hand in propelling Up All Night up the charts, but had begun to tire of the white-jeaned guitar homogeneity Borrell grew to symbolise around the time of 2006’s eponymous sophomore.
He hadn’t helped himself. It appeared that no press interview could pass without some gobsmacking lack of self-awareness and misguided hubris, beginning to believe his own hype just at the point the music world was sorely looking beyond the landfill mountain clogging the indie airwaves. Third LP Slipway Fires sold a fraction of earlier efforts, and his 2013 solo debut Borrell 1 infamously shifted as few as 594 copies.
Lauryn Hill
It’s hard to imagine any of The Fugees expecting just how phenomenally successful their sophomore LP would be when landing in 1996. Shooting to stardom in the hip-hop world and mainstream America with The Score, Fugees singer Lauryn Hill landed an equally totemic solo effort with her debut, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, two years later, a cherished record of the era and still commanding enduring fascination nearly 30 years later.
Commercial momentum was stunted when no sign of a follow-up ever materialised, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill to this day is the former Fugees singer’s sole studio LP. Soon enough, financial woes and a reputation for live tardiness would do Hill across the ensuing years, sometimes cancelling shows at the last minute or arriving hours later than scheduled to fan exasperation.
Hill’s legacy can never be knocked, but the perennial unreliability, coupled with her own reclusive retreat from the “exploitative” music business, stunted a glimmering R&B career all but assured at the tail end of the 1990s.
Axl Rose
Before Seattle was suddenly thrust on music’s world stage, and the burst grunge dam was heralded as rock’s new awakenings, Guns N’ Roses were hailed as the sorely-needed antidote to the spandex buffoonery mugging 1980s’ rockwaves and MTV rotations. Despite being shaped by the city’s glam metal early on in the decade, and partying with the likes of Mötley Crüe and Ratt, 1987’s Appetite for Destruction thrust frontman Axl Rose to rock heavyweight overnight, the leading face seeking to instil some danger to a hard rock scene long lost its edge.
Yet, Rose’s penchant for onstage tantrums, public feuds, humourless litigation attacks, and a creative control freakery alienated their fanbase and pushed Guns N’ Roses to breaking point, with guitarist Slash finally leaving in 1996, with bassist Duff McKagan following suit two years later. Rose would soldier on with his long-gestated Chinese Democracy as the sole remaining founding member, his grand LP opus finally seeing the light of day in 2008 to a lacklustre reception.
While managing to corral the classic line-up for 2016’s Not in This Lifetime… Tour and selling ungodly levels of tickets, Guns N’ Roses’ cultural primacy has long taken a knock, forever tarnished by Rose’s unprofessional conduct and erratic behaviour in previous years.
Kanye West
If you were to select Kanye West as the 2000s’ most essential artist, few would disagree. Arriving at the arse end of gangsta rap when the likes of Ja Rule or 50 Cent were rehashing tired rap formulas, West unleashed his inventive production chops and injected some sorely needed colour into the world of hip-hop, granting license to future rap eccentrics like Chance the Rapper or Tyler, The Creator to grab samples from all the far-flung corners music had to offer.
Whether out of sincere political affinity or a bout of severe mental health distress, the slow creep into Christian nationalism and the adjacent MAGA movement tested long-time fans’ patience, before finally severing West’s public standing for good following a series of breathtakingly antisemitic and pro-Nazi rhetoric. Now operating under the name Ye, West made explicit statements praising Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, released a song called ‘Heil Hitler’, and splashed the swastika symbol on his Yeezy merchandise.
Despite writing an apology to The Wall Street Journal in 2025, West’s legacy remains stuck in an irreparably toxic legacy he’ll unlikely ever be able to shake off.
