Five times mainstream artists made avant garde music
Neil Young once said that the worst thing that can happen to an artist is that they become associated with one specific sound.
“That’s what success does – it will categorise you,” he said, “But luckily I haven’t had that much success. That was the one time and the first thing an artist will do if he doesn’t want to be categorised is to react and fight back. There’s a spirit inside you that’s like an animal. And it’s cornered when it’s categorised. So we’re not dealing with thought here. It’s an animal reaction.”
Creativity doesn’t maintain its structure. Artists are constantly changing the kind of music and direction they want to go in, and that means that they don’t want to keep pumping out carbon copies of albums. That results in versatility, but often artists can go so versatile with their sound that they end up making something which is point blank avant garde.
Even some of the most mainstream artists in the world have put out incredibly obscure records, and some of them are pretty good, despite seemingly coming out of nowhere. Love them or hate them, they’re well worth a listen.
When mainstream artists went obscure:
Nirvana – ‘Incesticide’
When we think of Nirvana, we think of one of the biggest grunge bands on the planet, as albums like Nevermind and In Utero come to mind and we celebrate some of the best rock music to come out of the ‘90s. However, the band weren’t just adamant on making grunge, they also made much more experimental avant-garde music, which you can hear on their LP of B-sides Incesticide.
“Have you heard the Incesticide record?” said Kurt Cobain when discussing the record, “That’s the kind of band we used to be. We used to be more like Gang of Four or new wave-influenced. More experimental with effects boxes and stuff. Then we started to get into the straight-ahead grunge music, which is what Bleach was like.”
Lou Reed – ‘Lulu’
Lou Reed’s talent has always been with lyrics. When you hear songs he released as a solo artist and with The Velvet Underground, you can’t help but be swept up in his stunning words. It was a very rogue move then for him to team up with Metallica and essentially ditch his unique approach to songwriting for an experimental concept album. The album was received poorly at the time, but in later years is beginning to establish itself as a cult classic.
“I can’t quite figure it out, but years later, it’s aged extremely well. It sounds like a motherfucker still. So I can only put the reaction down to ignorance … It took our fans to a place I wish they would go more often,” said Metallica’s Lars Ulrich. “Maybe it would be a better time to release it now with what’s going on outside in the world, the chaos.”
Rush – ‘Caress of Steel’
One of the best things that Rush ever did was appoint Neil Peart as their drummer. Their first record with him in charge of rhythm, Fly By Night, was one of the first records where fans realised just how good the trio were. The follow up was always going to be tricky, but the prog rockers took things a little too far with how experimental the whole LP was.
Fair enough, prog rock is a genre which is known for pushing the boat out, but Rush really stepped things up a notch when they put together Caress of Steel. It’s too complex for a lot of fans to follow, to the extent that it essentially leaves the realm of prog rock and sits in its own strange branch of experimentalism.
Bruce Springsteen – ‘Nebraska’
Nebraska was a shock to everyone, and it’s an album so layered in mystery it became the centrepiece for the Bruce Springsteen biopic Deliver Me From Nowhere. As he battled with the tribulations of newfound success and depression, the album which stemmed from such a dark period was a wholly acoustic record with no press surrounding it and that was written from the point of view of some of society’s most troubled souls.
“The action is the symptom, that’s what happened, but the things that caused that action to happen, that’s what everyone knows about – you know about it, I know about it,” said Springsteen when trying to explain his album, “It’s inside of every human being. Those are the things you gotta mine, that’s the well that you gotta dip into and, if you’re doing that, you’re going to get something central and fundamental about those characters.”
David Bowie – ‘Low’
Low was a result of David Bowie moving to Berlin and truly tapping into his emotions when writing. As someone who dabbled with concepts so much, opting to write music which was so honest and raw was a rogue move by the musician, and the end result was an electronic, fairly experimental sounding LP. Bowie was nervous about people hearing the album given how honest it all is, but was happy with the way it turned out.
“My concern with Low was not about the music. The music was literally expressing my physical and emotional state… and that was my worry,” said Bowie, “So the music was almost therapeutic. It was like, ‘Oh yeah, we’ve made an album and it sounds like this.’ But it was a by-product of my life. It just sort of came out. I never spoke to the record company about it. I never talked to anybody about it. I just made this album… in a rehab state. A dreadful state really.”
