Slagged off, slated, and irritated: The five most hated classic rock bands in history
More than a few folks over the years have subscribed to the school of thought that all the best art is divisive. There are those who distrust the universally beloved and think that great art should confront and challenge you.
Oscar Wilde certainly leaned in that direction. “Art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic,” he once remarked, neatly summing up the suspicion that popularity and artistic merit aren’t always travelling companions. And the lavish Mr Wilde was famously grounded and unpretentious.
Challenging the public is at the very core of rock music. And the bands that attract the fiercest backlash are often the ones that become impossible to ignore. In fact, being impossible to ignore is quite often where that backlash comes from. It’s a staple of pop culture that artists will cling to the coattails of rivals on the rise with the odd showering of disrespect.
As Hugh Cornwall of The Stranglers recently told Far Out, “That’s what you did in those days, you know, slag people off, because that’s how you got in a headline.” So, while disrespect might be par for the course and a badge of honour in some respects, there are a handful of artists who have received an outsized amount of slander from their backstabbing peers.
We’re delving into those poor dossers below and looking at some of the harshest critiques levelled against them, and who has been dishing the dirt over the years.
The five most hated classic rock bands in history:
Led Zeppelin
“Fuck off, Zeppelin, you’re crap,” Jack Bruce once exclaimed. “You’ve always been crap, and you’ll never be anything else. The worst thing is that people believe the crap that they’re sold.“ These were bold words from the Cream bassist, and it seems they were borne by the fact that Led Zeppelin posed a threat.
They were, objectively, a group of four virtuosos. But more than that, they were doing something different with their profound skills. That gave plenty of people the willies. Yet, they also gave these naysayers a lot of ammunition. There’s no doubting the fact that the band were also overblown in their most indulgent moments, guilty of direct rip-offs, and their pants were often so tight around the crotch that you could count the change in their pockets.
Speaking of the latter, Kurt Cobain also voiced an issue that has seen the band succumb to a fair bit of backlash, too. ”I really did enjoy some of the melodies they’d written, it took me so many years to realise that a lot of it had to do with sexism,” Cobain remarked to Rolling Stone in 1992. “The way that they just wrote about their dicks and having sex.
Who has slagged them off: Kurt Cobain, Cream, Pete Townshend, Keith Richards, Robert Plant, Paul Simonon, et al.
Eagles
“Their albums are good for keeping the dust off your turntable, and that’s about all,” Tom Waits once witheringly remarked. It had a little added bite given that the Eagles had helped to launch his career when they covered ‘Ol’ 55′ and pushed Waits’ name into the charts. In many ways, that’s a paradigm for the band: commercially, they’re the only act with two LPs on the top ten best-selling albums of all time list. Yet, critically, an aggregate has them languishing as the 125th most recommended act.
For some, their peaceful, easy feeling marked the defanging of rock ‘n’ roll, ushering the genre towards commercialism. T-Bone Burnett even went as far as to tell Rolling Stone that they contributed to killing the counterculture movement. “[The Eagles] sort of single-handedly destroyed that whole scene that was brewing back then,” he opined.
So, how did they kill the scene? Well, as it happens, in the 1990s, the Eagles hit the headlines as the first rock band to charge over $100 for tickets. This was symptomatic of what many critics thought of them and their unpleasant knack of pairing oversimplified peace with a lofty price tag. While the masses clearly love them, their duplicity added fuel to critics’ fire.
Who slagged them off: Tom Waits, T-Bone Burnett, John Lydon, Stephen Malkmus, The Dude, Elliott Smith, et al.
Kiss
At first, Kiss were almost too divisive to take off. “It was like somebody pushing you into the deep end of the pool, whether you can swim or not,” Simmons wrote in the End of the Road tour programme. This bold approach meant finding admirers was a tricky task: their first album only sold around 75,000 copies, the second peaked at 100, and even their third, Dressed to Kill, didn’t quite crack the top 30.
The bulk of people’s gripe was that they were all show and shock. As Carlos Santana put it, “Simmons hides his talent beneath costumes and makeup. A musician doesn’t need the mask or the mascara. There’s a difference between an entertainer and a musician.” Simmons would reply that the band simply added pizzazz to rock ‘n’ roll, and they had the riffs to back it up.
However, even bands of a similar shock rock ilk have questioned the group’s sincerity. “I sometimes get offended by their music I hear that and go, ‘What’s this all about?’” Steven Tyler once said, “Do they really mean it?’ That’s why Aerosmith have been around forever. Because we take ourselves seriously.” In essence, they’re viewed as the WWF in a world of sport.
Who slagged them off: Bob Dylan, Steven Tyler, Nikki Sixx, Pete Townshend, Carlos Santana, Keith Richards, Slash, et al.
Radiohead
Radiohead: to some, they’re the last saving grace of modern music, to others, they’re just Travis for people who ask to sample the stout before committing to buying a half. Did they reclaim the essence of art when the charts were awash with ladish commercialism, or did they give rise to a legion of GoPro cyclists?
Well, while many would claim that they offered glimmering originality in an age where there seemed to be nothing new under the sun, the likes of Lemmy thought that what they offered was simply mild rock ‘n’ roll. ”All the shit that these magazines like is not exciting,” he said. ”Like Jesus, Radiohead, you know. Fuck me, you know. Coldplay. Jesus. These are not rock bands. These are sub-emo, you know.”
Similarly, Noel Gallagher found them whiny and wallowing. After watching the documentary Meeting People Is Easy, the Oasis man commented, “They’re stuck in the back of limousines telling you how bored they are being in a group. If you don’t enjoy it, retire. Do us all a favour. Or move to a mansion in Oxford so we don’t have to listen to you bleeding on about how shit your life is.”
Who slagged them off: Lemmy, Oasis, Muse, Billy Corgan, Robert Plant, Roger Waters, Radiohead, et al.
Nickelback
Nickelback are the curious punching bag of music. They became universally known as the most hated rock band in history, but they also clearly had a heyday. After all, ‘How You Remind Me’ was the most-played radio hit of the 2000s, with 1.2million plays between 2001 and 2009. Was this just some form of payola push, or were secret fans really hankering for them to be played?
Well, what largely seems to be the case is that they were simply catchy enough to invade the mainstream (and that’s about it). They weren’t cool enough for tastemakers, heavy enough for metalheads, or adventurous enough for critics, but they were accessible enough to become unavoidable. They were rock music for people who don’t like rock music, so even their fans weren’t fiercely fighting back and championing them as ‘art’. And once a band reaches that level of ubiquity, the backlash often takes on a life of its own.
In Nickelback’s case, it eventually reached the point where disliking them became something of a cultural in-joke. In 2003, when Brian Posehn appeared on Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn, he delved into the subject of violent lyrics and quipped, “No one talks about the studies that show that bad music makes people violent, like [listening to] Nickelback makes me want to kill Nickelback.”
Who slagged them off: Everyone
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