The 10 most shameless genre switches in music history

The Life of Chris Gaines – Garth Brooks

It’s impossible to understate the kind of seismic impact that Garth Brooks had on the world in the 1990s. The 1980s may have been the era of the pop divas and stars like Michael Jackson and Madonna, but even if you were half a world away, there wasn’t a single person that didn’t want to sing along to ‘Friends In Low Places’ when Brooks made his way across the world. He was the everyman if there ever was one, but at the height of his fame, he posed one question to all of us: how do y’all feel about soul music?

The answer from many fans was an emphatic ‘NO’, but that didn’t stop Brooks from trying his hand at some R&B music under the pseudonym Chris Gaines, complete with a gothic getup and a haircut that I can only describe as ‘1990s’. This kind of record was practically dead on arrival before it was even released, but what’s insane about it is the fact that it’s not terrible. Any other genre switchup here would be an absolute disaster, but you can tell that Brooks has an affinity for this style.

He was never afraid to show his love for non-country artists like Billy Joel and Kiss throughout his career, and given how well Childish Gambino transformed songs like ‘Lost In You’ is proof enough that he had a real knack for this kind of genre. There was no way that something like this could have flown on Music Row, but in a perfect world, Mr Gaines could have had more of a lifespan than just one album.

Reincarnated – Snoop Dogg

Snoop Dogg isn’t the kind of artist that people need to think too hard about when listening to his music. He was already one of the most dangerous gangsta-rappers on the planet when he debuted on The Chronic, but given how many features he was doing and high-profile he got, he wasn’t going to get the same kind of treatment in the streets after he became best friends with Martha Stewart. He could still dominate the microphone every time he performed, but no one was going to buy him adopting the Snoop Lion persona.

The idea of him becoming some reformed spiritual guru that relied solely on making reggae music was a novel idea, but it doesn’t really suit his voice all that well. Given his love of the ganja, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Snoop fit so well with making music that sounded like a knockoff version of Peter Tosh, but given how many people didn’t care, the fact that he directly switched back to his normal schtick made the whole thing feel like a decent marketing stunt than an actual record.

He was still one of the greatest in his field and the kind of presence that everyone is happy to have around, but believing that he was going to stop freestyling worked about as well as the one time in the 2000s where he claimed to be giving up the joints. We all know what Snoop Dogg was supposed to sound like and no matter how many animals he wants to add to his name, he was always going to be the same guy who made ‘Drop It Like It’s Hot’ to 2000s kids.

No Fixed Address – Nickelback

It almost feels cheap punching down on Nickelback at this stage of their career. Their reputation as one of the single worst bands in the world had been played out somewhere around the time that Trump got elected for the first time, but it’s not like they were completely innocent of some truly heinous rock and roll during their time. There were a lot of crimes that they had to answer for, but it’s easier to take songs that sound objectively bad than tunes that make you scratch your head and wonder what the hell you’re listening to.

While you can immediately tell when Nickelback was on the radio back in the day, No Fixed Address is the sound of a band completely unsure of what they want to do and are desperately trying to do everything at once. There are still the typical hard rock juggernauts like ‘Million Miles an Hour’, but the idea of the same band that made ‘Photograph’ making tunes like ‘She Keeps Me Up’ and using Flo Rida on one of their songs feels like a step backwards even for them in many respects.

It does make for a few cheap laughs in the back end of the record, but when getting political on tunes like ‘Edge of a Revolution’ is only one of several sharks that you jump throughout a record, you know something has gone wrong. In fact, No Fixed Address may be the best title they could have hoped for. They were going through every single genre that they could, and given how the record panned out, they never found their way back home again.

0304 – Jewel

Jewel was never one to cause that much trouble throughout her career. She was the epitome of what the singer-songwriter scene looked like in the 1990s, and even if she wasn’t the most adventurous wordsmith in the world, there’s no denying that a lot of people could feel the emotion behind ‘Who Will Save Your Soul’. But when one of her songs managed to make it onto a dance remix, someone in the studio got a horrible idea that she never fully recovered from on 0304.

Which is strange because the album doesn’t sound all that different from what was happening in pop at the time. You could have easily heard someone like post-’Promiscuous’ Nelly Furtado or even late-period Kylie Minogue on these beats, but it makes zero sense to see Jewel doing it. Her strengths were all about trying to make more introspective music, so to see her onstage without a guitar in her hand feels like she’s completely unsure of what to do on tunes like ‘Intuition’.

There are a handful of tunes where she starts to go back to her usual style of writing, but even in those moments, she seems to be buried underneath some of the production, especially when she tries to get political on ‘America’. There are still some decent songs in here if you know where to look for them, but the world found out what Jewel sounded like when she wanted to be Britney Spears and quickly realised that they didn’t want it that much.

Rebirth – Lil Wayne

You know the old adage that actors want to be musicians and vice versa? Well, it turns out that works when it comes to different genres of music too. There are countless musicians that want to break out of their usual wheelhouse whenever they make some of their more ambitious projects, and while there are some rock stars that have tried their hand at making hip-hop, Lil Wayne was practically lost in the woods well before any song on Rebirth was even recorded back in the day.

The idea of being a sensitive singer-songwriter was never in the cards for Weezy, but even if he got a borderline rock song off the ground with Kevin Rudolph’s ‘Let it Rock’, that shouldn’t have given him permission to make a rock record of his own. ‘Lollipop’ was already the worst excuse for a guitar solo that the internet had ever heard on his previous record, but the fact that he managed to shove his voice through every filter that he could with a bunch of faux rock and roll parts sprinkled in there for good measure was further proof that he was better off sticking to his old sound.

The whole thing did make for some of the strangest collaborations of Wayne’s career like hooking up with Weezer for a track, but given how much people pushed back on it, it’s no wonder that he ended up going right back to his old sound later. But given that this paved the way for someone like Machine Gun Kelly to make rock and roll music, Rebirth has a lot more to answer for than most people realise.

America – Thirty Seconds to Mars

It’s hard to even figure out what Jared Leto even wants to be at this stage of his career. One minute he might want to be a method actor making a mockery of every single superhero movie he touches, and the next he seems to be walking around like some fashionable prophet on a remote island in the middle of the ocean. The man is one of the most difficult people to truly understand in this industry, but we can all at least agree that he stopped making good music a long time ago once 30 Seconds to Mars dropped America.

The band was never outright bad on their first few records, but right as the late 2010s got underway, it was as if Leto decided that he wanted to spend the rest of his career trying to copy Imagine Dragons. The radio rock reptiles definitely had a handful of good tunes in their early days, but whatever good will that they had in the early days isn’t found on Leto’s little music project, which sounds like a ChatGPT version of himself trying to spew any kind of faux inspirational songs phrases that he could think of.

The music itself is already lazy, but what really puts the final nail in the coffin here is the album cover, where they practically have their audience make the album cover for them. Some of the tracks are still borderline listenable if you try and turn your entire nervous system off, but when this does take the cake for one of the single laziest rollouts in music history. The band just wanted to make a few massive radio hits, and even if they got their wish, listening to this record right after ‘The Kill’ feels like actively feeling your brain melt.

In a Metal Mood – Pat Boone

The fact that rock and roll still exists in some form today is all due to the fact that everyone did their best to ignore Pat Boone. The entire concept of him making watered-down versions of rock and roll tunes is everything that purists thought Elvis Presley was going to be, except Boone’s version felt like the sanitised versions of tunes that wouldn’t have felt out of place at the ultra-Christian dances throughout the bread basket of America circa 1959. There’s certainly a place for that kind of music outside of rock and roll, but the fact that In a Metal Mood exists is the closest rock and roll has come to making a musical version of The Room.

Simply put, Boone is the last person to play rock and roll, so what the hell did he think he was doing playing the greatest metal songs of all time. If you had told me that this was a gag, I would half believe you, but when you look at the way that he’s performing tunes like ‘Smoke on the Water’ and ‘No More Mr Nice Guy’, it sounds like he wants to be known as the cool grandpa of the household by playing up his metal chops.

The whole thing has already had spitballs thrown at it for years, but the fact that Alice Cooper was able to take pity on him when he showed up at an award show was the best that he could have hoped for for street cred. Many artists might like to take a chance and see where things go, but anyone who had loved metal for years was only left wondering who the hell let their dad into the studio.

Generation Swine – Mötley Crüe

There was never any version of the 1990s where Mötley Crüe was still going to be the biggest band in the world. Nirvana killed a lot of careers during their rise to fame, and for a band that was known for being the kings of the Sunset Strip in many respects, everyone was wondering why they were even bothering to get on the charts circa 1995. But even if they had a decent run at switching things up with new member John Corabi, getting Vince Neil back for Generation Swine made for one of the most drastic tonal shifts anyone had ever heard.

Neil was the kind of singer that lived and breathed hair metal, so to see him trying to match his voice with the post-ironic smarminess of U2 was never going to work. Nikki Sixx at least seems to have the right idea by writing songs in the vein of people like Rob Zombie and Nine Inch Nails, but every single song on the record feels like it’s confused on what it wants to be. Some tracks are old-school rock and roll, there are punk tunes, and there are the occasional track that sounds like stoner rock, but none of them are really their strengths, either.

However, this is one of the few albums on this list that’s easy to gawk at that a hair metal band had to gall to try this kind of switch. You weren’t going to see a band like Warrant or Whitesnake try their hand at joining the Lollapalooza touring circuit, but if the Crue learned anything from this record, it was that more than a few people wanted them to just stick to the traditional sex, drugs and rock and roll formula.

Simulation Theory – Muse

The downfall of Muse always seems to be graded on a curve depending on who you talk to. There are no shortage of people that will gladly tell you that the band are nothing but a bunch of flagrant Radiohead knockoffs, and while that’s absolutely true in some respects, there are many tunes from the early 2000s where they sounded like they could genuinely take over the world. But after filling stadiums around the world, seeing them diving as deep as they did into 1980s nostalgia felt way too contrived.

Anyone who had seen them try their hand at dubstep probably would have seen this coming when ‘Thought Contagion’ was released as a single, but the album is about more than a bunch of squelchy synths. Muse seemed like the kind of band that could pull off that kind of thing, but aside from a few tunes that sounded vaguely close to their old sound, half of the record sounds like something that would appear on the soundtrack to a knockoff of WarGames around the late 1980s.

And given that the band didn’t really learn their lesson on Will of the People a few years later, it seems like they have been resigned to making music that’s more than a little bit cringy every time a new record comes out. This was far from the worst thing that they were capable of putting out, but since all of their fans gladly accepted this with no questions asked, it’s no surprise that they tried their hand at making a song like ‘We Are Fucking Fucked’ later down the line.

Standing in the Spotlight – Dee Dee King

The entire premise of Ramones was about trying to do everything with the bare essentials. They were paving the way for what punk was supposed to be, and every single one of their records seemed like a masterclass in how to make the simplest pop songs ever made played at breakneck speed. But if attitude was half the battle in punk, surely Dee Dee Ramone could make a name for himself when he went solo, right? In theory, yes, but as a rapper, absolutely not.

Dee Dee King was already a bit of a stretch before anyone had even heard the music, but Standing in the Spotlight is still one of the most unintentionally hilarious records that any punk rocker has ever made. Whereas Cut the Crap by the Clash feels like a sad epitaph of a punk legend, this feels like Dee Dee got his hands on whatever drum machines he could and started spitting whatever came into his head. No time for second takes here; this was punk meets hip-hop, and it was absolutely atrocious.

The punk legend tried as much as he could to blame the album’s failure on him not being black, but that’s not exactly the case, either. Sure, he wasn’t equipped to match the same kind of intensity as what Public Enemy and Run-DMC were doing, but if you wanted to hear something a hip-hop record that had a bit of a punk edge, you’re better off listening to every single Beastie Boys record before you even think about getting here.