Worst Band Ever

I hadn't heard the Alison Gold one before. That makes the Rebecca Black one seem like a masterpiece.

 

Creed had a hell of a lot of detractors at the time. They were a Christian rock Pearl Jam knockoff. I don't think it was any kind of retroactive disdain -- a lot of people disliked them at the time, and then Stapp lost it.

(The one that has always been a little puzzling to me is Nickleback. I mean, they're not good, but why exactly did Nickleback become the go-to punchline for shitty band jokes? Is it just because they sold a ton of records? Because there were worse bands of the era.)

 

Google search Joel and Atilla.

 

And The Hassles.

 

While you’re not wrong... If I’m going to be forced to listen to (a) “Piano Man” or (b) anything by Attila, I’m going with (b). No question.

 

(499) The Big Lebowski - I hate the fuckin' Eagles - YouTube

 

I think the Christian rock angle did have a lot to do with the dislike of Creed. Like they came across as posers or something, trying to be hard rock when they were really something else. I just dug their first couple of albums, thought they were pretty good, and maybe didn't listen closely enough to the lyrics back then to get that part of it. Sometimes you can go a long, long time before you really listen to and figure out what a song is about.

With Nickelback, I think it comes down to two things:
1) Overexposure. It feels like they try to release every song on their albums as singles, so every two weeks there's a "new" Nickelback song on the radio even though they're all coming off the same album.
2) Unfortunately, all of those songs sound the same. They all have the same tempo and riff. Hell, even hair bands in the 80s always did a power ballad that sounded different enough from their heavier stuff to make you stop and listen. Nickelback's version of that ("Photograph") was a shitty ode to growing up as white trash.
When you add those two things together, you get a band that is always on the radio but doesn't stand out in any meaningful way. Other than the shitty white trash song -- mostly because of just how awful it is -- I probably can only name one or two other Nickelback songs. And I know they've released a ton of singles.

Two other bands that I think fall into this category are Boston and Imagine Dragons.
With Boston, their first album has a pretty distinctive sound but there are several songs that sound like they could be spliced together into a supercut. I know some of their stuff is great classic rock, but they just always were the definition of bland, mediocre 70s rock to me.
Imagine Dragons has a good, wide mix of songs, but they became the 2010s version of Nickelback by releasing every single they recorded (or so it seems). There was a period of about a year there where it seemed like you heard a different Imagine Dragons song every 10 minutes on 10 different stations, and they were all off the current album.
Lately it seems like Panic! At the Disco is trying to take their title.

 

Imagine Dragons. That will be tough to beat.

Also, Steely Dan

 

Don Henley is a terrific singer. He is a shitty drummer.

 

Dear Zeke:

 

So many “bands I don’t like” rather than bands who are just awful at the basics of songwriting or performing, but they still got a recording contract.

 

As great as Boston's debut was they always struck me as a perfect example of one of the oldest axioms in the music bidness: you get your whole life to make your first record, six months to make the second one. (And 20 years or whatever to make your third.)