Alex Chilton comes to mind, although his fan base was pretty small in the first place.
Celtic Frost. They’re much more of an underground metal band than someone like Metallica, but the level of revilement and hatred they attracted in 1988 with the release of their Cold Lake album was positively unreal. People were mailing their own feces to Celtic Frost’s fan club PO Box. And unlike Lou Reed with MMM, Celtic Frost never recovered their fan base.
Chris Carter alienated a lot of X-Files fans during the last half of the shows run. I wasn’t a big fan and even I was pissed at the final episode!
Morrissey must have lost some fans with his dodgy far-right references, including draping himself in a Union Jack on stage in the early nineties. But his cult appeal would keep him a decent fanbase regardless of his actions, I’d reckon.
Are you saying in theatre your popularity decreases if you are straight?
No, but it does decrease if you think being falsely called gay is so libelous that you should sue for monetary damages and win. If I were in theatre and someone printed I were a lesbian, I’d say “So freaking what?” and move on.
Is being falsely called gay libel?
Garth Brooks – dumped his wife for a newer model and tried to reinvent himself as a hard rocker. (I’m not sure of the order of those events.)
True story, which is a shame because their latest album Monotheist is a challenging but rewarding listen.
Rick Berman doesn’t count as an artist, does he?
Good point, I didn’t think of that.
I love it. It’s possibly my favorite CF album now, and I’m a fan since the old days.
So what was the problem with it? Was it a big change in style, or just really bad?
The Matrix brothers . . . er, siblings (Whachakowskis?) (but only with respect to the Matrix movies, I guess).
After the first movie, I was dying to see the second.
About 1/2 way through the second, I didn’t even care how it would end.
I still haven’t seen the third.
I’ve been a Garth Brooks fan for years, but my view of him as a person has gone down after I saw a recent interview where he talked about how much his current wife and his two little girls were the center of his life. I remember an earlier interview where he had said almost exactly the same thing about his first wife, who apparently no longer exists. If I hadn’t known better, I’d have thought that Trish Yearwood was the mother of his children, and the only wife he’d ever had.
There was a lot of talk back when Thag switched from using a charred stick from the fire to draw on the cave walls to using the actual spear, still dripping in the blood of whatever he brought home for dinner. A lot of people thought he’d gone too far, brought too much “hyper-realism” to the art, and that it was certain to warp the children.
I just mourned the loss of the extra red gravy.
Amy Grant—Queen of Christian Pop divorced her husband to marry Vince Gill.
I was never a Van Halen fan, but didn’t they upset their fans by releasing an album that was nothing but covers, and only about 30 minutes long?
No way. He pushed the definition of comedy. His wrestling was terrific. He picked the perfect audience to screw with and the way they fell for it was perfect. The audience was part of the show whether they liked it or not.
Kind of both.
Over the course of their first three albums, Celtic Frost laid much of the groundwork for death metal and symphonic black metal in Europe. They fused brutal, ugly thrash with female opera singers and orchestras in a blend that was strange, unexpected (especially in 1985!) but never sounded forced. On top of the revolutionary music, CF was a massive influence on the look of extreme metal: they wore armor and corpse paint onstage and just looked absolutely bad-ass…if you were into that kind of stuff, which I definitely was.
Then, in 1988, at what seemed to be their creative apex, they released Cold Lake. It was a hair metal album - it sounded like badly done Ratt or Motley Crue. Gone were the esoteric, occult lyrics, replaced by songs with titles like “Dance Sleazy” and “Seduce Me Tonight.” Gone was the jarring, innovative and just plain weird music, replaced by stock-standard glam metal plodding. And worst of all, in the cover photo, they were wearing Aqua Net-teased hair, cheesy jewelry and tight, ripped jeans. One of the band members was shirtless with suspenders over his hairy chest. It was one of the most surprising - in a negative way - creative and career decisions in music history. To top it off, they simply couldn’t pull off the new style: the music and lyrics were clunky even for the genre, and Tom G. Warrior’s voice was not at all well suited to light, melodic metal.
Really, really awful. And the underground metal community absolutely let them have it.
I’m still curious what Avril did. I don’t pay much attention to her - but she seems like the same Sk8r chick she’s always been.