Five artists who tried and failed to take on new genres
I am a big proponent of musical evolution because greatness has certainly never been achieved by repeating the same format, and all of the musicians we herald as the true greats have consistently worked their way through genres with every new record.
The Beatles famously turned their back on their pop foundations to become psychedelic rock pioneers in the late 1960s, while Bob Dylan ‘abandoned’ the folk community to move forward and go electric. Plenty more have since prioritised evolution, with David Bowie becoming the poster boy for it, and so with all of these names combined, it proves it’s a move worth considering.
But these upcoming examples prove that it must be done with some caution, as awful ideas can’t be pursued under the guise of evolution and have us expect to buy it. Music fans can quickly identify when a foray into a new world has gone drastically wrong, and the artist in question has failed to land an ambitious musical somersault.
However, despite the heralding of icons that took place in my opening paragraph, those mishaps aren’t reserved just for lesser-known artists, where, in fact, the very artists I heralded, the ones who have built a career off the back of a legacy that marks them as chief innovators, have each taken the wrong sonic turn on their path to greatness.
Drum and bass, classical, and reggae all feature in these upcoming lists, from artists who quite frankly had no right trying their hand in any of it. High on their own supply, they took a sonic step that left them with egg on their face and subsequently acted as small blemishes on their otherwise triumphant careers, so here are five such instances to ground their fame.
Five artists who failed at crossing genres:
Jack White and Insane Clown Posse
Luckily, White didn’t dive any deeper down this rabbit hole and subsequently saved his blushes, but nevertheless, it’s out there in the world now, standing as clear proof that he is best left in the crunching realms of rock.
Enlisting the help of quirky rappers Insane Clown Posse, White sought to honour the lesser-known work of Mozart and, in the process, displayed the very worst parts of musical evolution, making for a confusing mess and doesn’t represent any of the involved musicians with any grace.
David Bowie
As innovative and mercurial as he was, there was one occasion where David Bowie stepped on one bridge too far. In the mid-1990s, when you could argue his career was entering the twilight, an era where he could embark on never-ending greatest hits tours and still remain as beloved as he always was, in true brave Bowie fashion, he turned his back on that idea instead.
As squat raves popped up all over the UK, Bowie decided to get involved, and not that Earthling is awful; it’s just that it feels almost too jarring, even for his standards. Because, to be honest, the genre was fine without him, and sometimes that’s exactly the metric musicians should use before they decide to get involved in something.
Machine Gun Kelly
Modern artists, media figures and internet celebrities are somewhat famous for balancing several projects at once. Never satisfied with being labelled as a master of one art, the modern star wants to be the jack of all artistic trades, and the same applies to Machine Gun Kelly, wherein, from afar, I struggle to differentiate his role as a musician and a general celebrity.
However, when I have thought of him as a musician, it’s mainly been as a rapper. Taking on Eminem, exercising his clear talent for cadence and flow, he’s found a niche in the modern landscape of rap, which does draw upon more alternative genres, but when he outrightly embraced pop-punk, it felt so cringeworthy, I wondered whether he had now fully embraced the role of internet prankster.
U2
Such is the nature of creativity, it’s quite hard to understand where the line between truly good and bad is drawn. When an idea feels good, it’s often not until it’s in the hands of someone else that it starts to feel truly bad, and that was certainly the case for U2 with Pop.
The attempts at glitchy production and dystopian electronic music was a misguided attempt at innovation, with Bono himself willing to admit to it, saying, “Great idea for an album. We just misfired, booked the tour before we finished the album”.
Snoop Dogg
When Snoop Dogg announced he was changing his name to Snoop Lion, it brought no clarity as to what the genre shift might be, where one might think that the aggressive intent of upping his spirit animal from a dog to a lion could have meant he would be bearing sharp claws and grinding his teeth to the aggressive words of heavy metal. With retrospect, that might have been better than the reggae music he subsequently produced.
On his album, Reincarnated, it almost felt a little bit like The Lonely Island, only with a genuinely reputable musician at the front of it. Snoop Dogg’s brilliance was in his cadence and flow, which felt completely neutralised in this new genre and sadly made for a bit of a damp squib genre switch. Luckily, one year later, the Lion returned to a Dogg and balance was regained in the world.
