Who is the most overated artist or band?
Posted by Leedsboy on 28 March 2008 - 7:37pm.
The mention of Guns and Roses made me consider if they are the most overated band of all time. Obviously a personal one but they join The Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, Yes and a few others onto the list of bands I just don't get.
There are bands that will get universal derision on these pages (Simply Red anyone?) but there are some bands that just divide opinion. Who is the most overated act of all time?
My vote goes to Guns and Roses (November Rain just tips it for me - horrible).
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I tend to shy away from the word 'overrated'...
...as it's all subjective but here goes. I love Yes, Floyd and The Stones but I'm right behind you with Guns 'N' Roses! The odd song from the debut aside, I can't bear them (and I love heavy rock). Those 'Use Your Illusion' albums are two of the worst I ever bought!
Have to confess The Clash go in this category for me, to be honest. They are an act that I wish I could like as so many people seem to love them, but I just can't- they don't fill me with ire or anything and I like some of the 'London Calling' stuff but I just don't like them with anything like the fervour that some of the music press feel you 'should'.
Those are the main two for me really; a lot of the current NME/indie brigade that I really dislike don't seem to be all that highly rated anyway!
Overrated
Yes yes yes to The Clash. Alright but..nowhere near the depth their status suggests.
Yep to GnR - stadium fillers with basically 2 good, actually really great, songs (PC & SCOM). See also Alice Cooper and Areosmith (4 goodish songs between them). The Killers - another with 2 great songs, but they're hardly REM or U2 are they?
I fervently disagree......
The Clash are one of a tiny tiny handful of bands to have made four truly great albums...
We did this a while ago
One of my earliest I modestly add.....
http://www.wordmagazine.co.uk/content/who-are-most-overrated-rock-stars
Anyway, clearly it's David Bowie
(runs for cover - previous set of bruises only just disappeared)
Guns 'n' Roses?
Who rated them?
It's Radiohead
by a country mile.
Actually it's...
Nick Cave.
It's not just me then
He's one of a thriving breed of performer that keeps wittering on about Gawd, the Debble, Hebben'n'Heck and other miscellaneous superstition. It's nearly 150 years since the publication of On The Origin Of Species -Â try to keep up, Jesus loons.
No, I'm the same...
I like wordy, intelligent tunesmiths yet can't get into him (or Dylan for that matter). The fact that he uses words of more than 2 syllables and has a penchant for the New Testament immediately marks him out (to many critics) as praiseworthy. Now that he's gone all "rawk" they can witter on about him plugging into all that primal / fire and brimestone thingy whilst ignoring the fact that the music really is just..dull.
Peter Hammill at least made some frightening music to accompany his wordy pieces.
Hate the NME and their praising of the mediocre (anyone remember The Horrors? Thought not) also.
Nick Cave
Nick Cave when the ROCKS is great. It's the endless slow piano ballads that I have problems with. I love Abattoir Blues, when he finally just rocked out. Wonderful album.
Nah.....
They're the good bits. It's the noisy stuff that is over rated.
Quiet or Noisy?
I like them both. Couldn't choose one over the other personally.
I think you'll find
...it's Muse. They are stratospherically awful.
But then I like several Guns n' Roses songs, so what do I know?
On the other hand it could be
John Lennon's solo output. Each album worse than the one that went before.
John Lennon...
...I have to say, I do have a problem with a lot of his solo output. Paul McCartney didn't inflict us with 'Two Virgins' or that awful, atonal jam that takes up a whole disc of 'Sometime In New York City', and I have to say I didn't like the first disc of that much either! Only own the 'Plastic Ono Band' album, 'Imagine' and a 2-disc best-of Lennon, whilst I have about 16 or 17 Paul McCartney CDs! I'll get my coat...
I think you're absolutely...
bang on. I have the same Lennon records as you and agree with you entirely.
However, I do not own 16 or 17 Macca CDs... perhaps five.
Lennon
Sounds right to me - not that I think McCartney solo has been up to much either and he's had more time to come up with the goods, better in the latter period? But McCartney solo has generally been rated low so if anything is underrated. Whereas Lennon solo has been rated high (Imagine obviously) when not really deserving to be, so is overrated, if you are looking at it in terms of critical appreciation.
McCartney solo...
If anyone else had released...
Maybe I'm Amazed
My Love
Band On The Run
Live And Let Die
Let 'Em In
Coming Up
etc etc
they would be hailed as a major talent. The best of Macca's 1970s records are superb. I cannot understand why they've been slagged off so much.
I wouldn't go so far as that myself
There are some good songs though I agree, but there's something about him I find off-putting at times so find it hard to be objective. Nevertheless he has been given an overly hard time so is underrated for sure. He has made some absolutely rotten tracks though (we all know the ones), which tends to obscure the good stuff. One has to wonder about his judgement.
It's Rock vs. Pop
The speed of Lennon's post 1970/71 descent into mediocrity is staggering. But by 1970 there was 'rock' and there was 'pop'. One was cool and the other critically reviled. McCartney was perceived as just not rock. QED. But hey, it's ok because the critics have caught up with the rest of us and they love all that low-fi 'Maybe I'm Amazed' / 'Ram' / 1970's stuff now!
But you're right Sven, McCartney needed to exercise a bit of quality control. If he'd limited himself to an album and single a year, it would have done no harm at all!
In the Lennon debate, to gauge the extent of the current public re-evaluation, never lose sight of the fact that between 1970 and 1980, when death as career move intervened, even Ringo was out performing Lennon in the US (7 top 10 singles to Lennon's 4) and keeping pace in the UK (with 4
Fab Macca/Lennon
The problem for me with Paul's output is for every good track there is always another one of those cringeworthy thumbs up type of songs, thus very few consistantly great albums. But I love Memory Almost Full and I think its a shame that people wont bother listening because of his previous crimes. I've always thought another one of Paul's problem was that his ego would probably never allow him to submit to the suggestions of another producer, although given the stuff he has written over his lifetime this is probably understandable I also dont think Lennon's output is overrated, in fact after Imagine most albums were critically panned and sold poorly and rightfully so. I think people are confusing his personal popularity with his artistic output.
Too right
Right up there with Bowie for me in the overrated dept, and had additional recognition as having written the worst song ever, "Imagine".
For me, it has to be...
Suede
The Stone Roses and REM
The Stone Roses debut album now sounds horribly dated and it wasn't that good in the first place.
REM made a couple of decent albums in the early 80s but I simply cannot understand the current foaming at the mouth by the music press over their new album - a collection of mediocre songs that wouldn't even have made the grade as "B" sides twenty years ago. The fact that they made it public that they changed the title of their new single on the advice of Chris Martin just about says it all.
By the way, does anyone know what happened to Starsailor? They were hailed as the second coming - made two dull albums, the second produced by Phil Spector - and then disappeared. My god, they were dull.
All bands and rock stars
are overrated. Even the ones we like.
Except
Roogalator
and Supertramp.
Good point.
Well made.
All rock stars are overrated whereas all film directors and authors are, if anything, underrated because we don't adopt them as heroes.
That's because rock stars traditionally inspired the same kind of blind, or at least myopic, loyalty as football teams did and a large part of our attachment to them is based on the fact that we identify with them.
Most analysis is trying to intellectually justify a position which was emotionally taken.
Under-rated, over-rated, to our destination ... etc
David, didn't you state somewhere recently that the Beatles were actually the most under-rated band? Or am I making that up? Either way it's a sentiment with which I entirely agree.
I borrowed a line of Geoffrey O'Brien's...
...he said they were underrated and I think in a strange way they are. We tend to overrate the supposedly weightier, "grown-up" Beatles and underrate the apparently simpler classic stuff. In the same sense we tend to overrate anything that purports to be serious and underrate anything that is apparently just happy. That's why the conventional critical consensus puts Miles Davis above Louis Armstrong.
I saw McCartney
... live for the first time around 1989 or so and the song that made all the hairs on the back of my neck stand up was 'Can't Buy Me Love', not 'Hey Jude' or 'Sgt. Pepper. I wasn't around at the time but the effect of hearing those songs on the radio for the first time must have been staggering.
Slightly off point but I just finished reading Dominic Sandbrook's "White Heat - A History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties". If anyone hasn't read it yet, do so.
A question...
How can someone be overrated if millions of people have bought and enjoyed their albums? Overrated by who exactly? The fans? No, not if they genuinely love them. The critics? I don't think so.
I can't stand U2 or Robbie Williams but tonnes and tonnes of other people do, so who am I to say they're overrrated? Surely this is just about 'not getting' artists - that's about personal taste and nothing to do with someone's popularity or critical acclaim.
Nana Mouskouri has sold 350million records worldwide and I doubt you could find a reviewer who says nasty things about her but she is unquestionably a bit naff - so is she overrated?
The Stone Roses.
One good recording - Fool's Gold, and that was basically a Can tune. Also they started the pestilential practice of bands being vastly overrated by themselves and everyone from NME to the Batley Examiner then buying it lock stock and Jackson Pollock-decorated barrel.
Exactly. And this is why
REM annoy me more than, say, Natasha Beddingfield or McFly. As much as I dislike most of the music that passes for the top 40 these days, i'm sure that most of the artists that comprise it would be the first to admit that what they do is hardly brain surgery.
What really boils my urine, however, are these artists who take themselves so desperately seriously that we are expected to defer to their latest piece of work and accept that it is borne of some sort of existential crisis. This is what is happening with the latest round of REM puff. I've seen Stipe's face poking out from the cover of last month's Q magazine, painted gold and imploring me to take his latest album very seriously indeed as he would like me to understand that it is the product of many long dark nights of the soul. Absolute bollocks. The reason that the new album is slightly (and only slightly) better than the last one is because the record company have told Stipey and the boys that they'd better put a bit of effort into this one or they might come sniffing round to ask for some of their 80 million smackeroos back if they don't pull their socks up.
I don't think there is a Batley Examiner
I think they read the Dewsbury Reporter.
"pestilential" - thank you
Great word for describing that Roses/Oasis/Verve/Kasabian self-aggrandisement trick and also of BBC reporting of looming recession. There'll be a recession cos the TV News tells us there's one.
I would say there is a
I would say there is a difference between not getting it and thinking it's overrated. I don't really get Elvis Costello most of the time. Do I think he is overrated? Possibly but there's enough there for me to see the quality - I heard Alison on the radio the other day and can appreciate it's a very good song but it kind of doesn't engage me. And people whose opinion I respect rate him highly so I suspect he is pretty good, certainly not bad.
When we talk about being overrated don't we usually mean by critics, music press, people who are seriously into rock and pop music like us. Of course it sounds like a dubious assumption that such individuals know better than the masses who often put rubbish at the top of the charts, although you could say if you know more about a subject than someone else you are better qualified to judge. Anyway it's not really possible to deal with the masses as an entity, it's kind of meaningless? Among the best selling albums ever are Simply Red, Dido, James Blunt, and the Spice Girls along with The Beatles. I think we'd all agree The Beatles are the best of that lot, as would anyone who thinks about pop music seriously as an art form. You can measure it up to a point surely. But should they be rated higher than say The Rolling Stones? Not so easy to say.
I don't think it's possible...
...to over-rate The Beatles. I've given 'Beatles For Sale' a few spins lately and I'm always surprised at how much I enjoy it as it's one I tended to ignore. Really, aside from that cover of 'Mr Moonlight' ('Leave My Kitten Alone' should have been on it- now that is a fantastic cover version) I like everything on it. Only album of theirs I don't really like as much is 'Let It Be' which has some frankly weak material on it.
Glad to see some Paul McCartney fans appearing too. Most of those albums I have were acquired very cheaply (rarely more than £5 and in some cases significantly less!). I must confess that outside of 'Band On The Run' and the odd hit single, I don't like Wings all that much, though.
Albums
Perhaps there is too much emphasis on albums - tends to favour a certain kind of act more than others that get forgotten. If you look at singles instead the picture changes and you can elevate things like this to their rightful status and really see how so much is overrated (I heard a new song by this artist (Susan Cadogan) on the radio today that reminded me of this oldie):
I was looking for a chance to post this.
I should add
just to rather sadly reply to my comment, it should probably be singles and individual album tracks, for those who did not release singles. My point being that black artists, for example, get less well represented if you just look at albums, since many were singles acts, particularly in the past, and appeared mainly on compilations. But singles acts tend to be underrated whereas albums artists are often overrated. One-hit wonders get a chance too. Just a thought, which I know everyone is going to find brilliant and insightful (should there be a smiley thing here? Don't care for them though, so no.)
British Sea Power and Elbow
Gotcha! (Just checking to see if you were all awake.)
Overated: Miles Davis
Under rated: Miles Davis. Depend which tune you are listening too. Same could thus apply to the Beatles, Frank Zappa and the Grateful Dead: none of whom I like, but who have some cracking songs I enjoy.(Actually, kidding about the Dead, whom I love, but have far fewer likeable songs than Zappa and/or the Beatles. Funny that.
Van Morrison
What's all the fuss? I can only assume it it was not for his irratic behaviour, no one would bother.
Enlighten me?
Listen to...
'Into The Mystic'. There lies reason for 'fuss'.
Where to start.....or finish ?
Just three to start with.....
Pink Floyd
David Bowie
Prince
There , I´ve said it and I don´t care who knows. And while I´m at it........Bob Marley too !
Any excuse will do
You were saying?
Swallows and summers
All the mentioned over-rated bands have wonderful moments, sublime even, but he doesn´t float my boat.
The coolest music clip of all time?
This clip is extraordinary. When I worked for Bob Harris he told me that when The Wailers came into the studio to record that performance it was like watching something beamed in from another planet. You can still see that today.
The sound, their clothes, the attitude... just incredible. And the song's not bad either!
I would like to thank Bob Marley....
...for introducing me to reggae, or at least reggae beyond the singles chart fare of reggae-lite versions of old chestnuts (Elizabethan reggae, anyone?)However, give or take Live at the Lyceum, I find him also a somewhat ersatz and watered down version of the real thing, with lukewarm and somewhat muddy backgrounds to most of his oevre. I accept this was probably masterful marketing from Chris Blackwell, to guarantee, which it did, enormous cross over potential. I accept the likely unacceptability of my comments also, but I far prefer, say, Black Uhuru. However, like in jazz, I sometimes struggle to know what I will like. Given this blog gave a shed full of ideas for jazz excursions, a box full for folk and an eggcupful for World, when asked, who will I like in reggae, having uttered my blasphemous preference?
'70's Gregory Isaacs. . .
always used to flaw-at my baw-at.
NEW THREAD PLEASE
Well spotted Retro, you must start a new "Reggae Starters for 10" thread.
I've got the Marley albums, the Uhuru albums, the Trojan boxes, the U-Roy, the Pablo, the Tubby and the various Perry incarnations and lots more; but I'd still love to pick up some recommendations for the peripheral stuff I haven't had the time or the cash to explore.
What better place to garner some critical input than here?
But they're miming
Yes it is a great clip and I love Bob Marley - but they're miming. What was that about?
Bash The Clash
I'd have to say, like one or two others already, that for me it's The Clash. Even as a remarkably naive, stupid and ignorant 14 year old in '78 when their logo was plastered over schoolmates haverssacks and school bags I felt that they were all bluster. Predictably full-on 'committed' delivery of lyrics that Rik from the Young Ones could have written. Mind Mick Jones looked cool then. A snarly Keith Richards-alike. Charmingly he seems to have now physically morphed into a lookalike of the guy who played Reg Varney's brother in law in 'On The Buses'. The one married to Olive. Michael Robbins I think he was called. Oh, Arthur!
I'm not a secret lemonade drinker!
There's a plethora of artists who are loaded down year upon year with laurels from music journalists whose music just doesn't float my boat : for your consideration, I offer up Bob Dylan, The Band, The Who, The Stones, John Lennon and every country & western musician that ever existed or will exist. However, the only artist I'd actually describe as over-rated by the music press would be Elvis Costello - yeps, he did some good stuff in the early days with the Attractions but I can't think of anything he's done in the last 25 years that I've heard that warranted the eulogies I've read during that time in the various media, although he's clearly a decent bloke.
Bob Dylan's late period trilogy
Time Out of Mind, Love and Theft and the third one which I cant even remember. He lazily nicks other peoples song, voice shot to shit and "Highlands" Say no more!
Overated
Arcade Fire. They're Echo and the Bunnymen without the tunes.
Keep the Car Running? I wish they would, preferably in an enclosed space lacking adequate ventilation.
Seconded.
Strum everything, including some unusual instruments that might not even be designed to be strummed, as fast and loud as possible and shout some lyrics.
I don't get it either.
Another vote for.......
REM - Haven't released anything worthy of the hype and newsprint since Green. Automatic for the People is horribly overrated.
The definition of overrated
would seem to be 'anything I don't like that 'the media' keep foisting upon me'.
On that basis; I'll lay down a marker for:
The Beatles & all offshoots
Van Morrison.
Pink Floyd (post Syd)
Coldplay.
R.E.M. A perfect argument for splitting up before the muse packs up and starts seeing younger bands.
Arcade Fire.
The Clash. Oh God, the Clash.
The Band. Just God-awful country rock? Doing something bad, and badly, before anyone else? Check.
The Verve. Lumpy 'astral' pub rock for the easily seduced.
The Sex Pistols. One half great album. Thanks for that.
Oasis. Still got it? No.
Muse. Never had it.
Eric Clapton. God was always going to be a tricky nickname to live up to.
Clearly, there are no surprises on this list, but that's the point.
And who could forget the most overrated thing of all - my ill considered opinion.
The same predictable targets
ad nauseum. Is that what you are getting at? It can get tiresome.
Just for good measure
What about Arctic Monkeys? Come on, let's all admit it - they're entertaining enough but hardly the messiahs the media has made them out to be.
Oh, and let's stop hero-worshipping Felt. I'll never forgive them for Train Above the City...
Felt
Worst band I have ever seen live (apart from PWEI).