Gotta disagree on this one - SOFAD is up there with my absolute favorites by them. They started to lose it after Alan left and have been on a downward slide ever since.
For those of you who Aerosmith has fully jumped the shark, I invite you to listen to a bit of their new album.
(Not to say that I Don’t Wanna Miss a Thing wasn’t definite shark-bait, but I think they’ve come around with this one. Then again, I think Pump and Rocks are great.)
Just FYI, the Jump the Shark guy has a section on bands in his Jump the Shark book.
It’s pretty lame, though.
Yes, I sort of agree with this. I still don’t think they’ve completely jumped the shark, but losing Alan Wilder marked a downward turn of quality, that’s for sure.
I much prefer Kooper’s bluesy and soulful version than Clayton-Thomas’s bombast.
Beatles: Magical Mystery Tour; a quasi-rebound with the White Album, then sinking further with *Abbey Road * and Let It Be. Yes, yes, I know there are living, breathing creatures on this planet who think Abbey Road is the pinnacle of their recording career but come on! Maxwell’s Silver Hammer? I Want You (She’s So Heavy)? Sun King? Something? And this measures up some way with Rubber Soul, Revolver and Please Please Me? Are you people on angel dust? Must I continue typing tiny, incredulous sentences?
REM: Document
Rolling Stones: Undercover
The Who: Who Are You; even if Moon hadn’t died this album did not bode well for the band. They were finished at this point.
The Replacements: Don’t Tell a Soul
**Van Halen ** when David Lee Roth quit/was fired (depending on who’s telling the story).
The Clash fired Mick Jones and a few years later released “Cut the Crap”. Fortunately they took their own advise.
geez…really…the Clash is my favorite band EVARR, but I still cannot bring myself to listen to that album
Imagine if McCartney kicked Lennon out of the Beatles and hired a shitload of crappy/unknown guitar players to replace him.
No. Would not work.
We don’t have to imagine: we have Wings.
U2 - I too would have said after Achtung Baby, or perhaps even starting with it, given some of the lyrics (the whole fish/bicycle nonsense springs to mind). But All that you can’t leave behind is a fairly good comeback from such crapfests as Zooropa and the other album in the middle there that I don’t own, neither of which deserve bolding.
Aerosmith’s jump coincided with Alicia Silverstone appearing in their videos. (Not that it was related to the jump, but that’s when it happened.)
Metallica’s Black Album caught them in midair, with the Ramp of Quality just behind them and the Ramp of Suck just in front of them.
I disagree that REM and U2 have ever really jumped. IMO, neither has made an album that isn’t worth listening to. (Yeah, even Zooropa had its moments, and I actually liked a lot of Pop.)
I’ll say that the Dave Matthews Band jumped when they added backup singers. I’ll also make a controversial (and perhaps sacreligious) supposition and suggest that the Grateful Dead jumped when Brent died.
Bob Mould – when he decided to put down the guitar and start fiddling around with samplers and sequencers and drum machines (a move that prompted me to give him the derisive nickname “Depeche Mould”). Not that samplers and sequencers and drum machines are inherently bad, but he has yet to do anything remotely interesting with them.
Perry Farrell – when he stopped getting high on smack and started getting high on life. Some people are just more interesting on drugs, unfortunately.
I’ll agree whole heartedly that R.E.M. sucks these days, but I’ll have to disagree as strongly as to when. While I have grown to love their first releases, Automatic For the People is the pinnacle of their recording career. It features the best songs, the best production, the best damn stuff the guys ever did. I remember being terribly annoyed with R.E.M. in the mid 80s 'cause I couldn’t understand anything Stipe was saying. Is it ironic that now I’m annoyed with the things I can understand him saying?
Anyway, they started sucking after Berry left and they got that 80 bajillion dollar contract.
STYX -Domo Arrigato, Mister Roboto ( man, we need a yucky smilie)
The Rolling Stones - Tattoo You (btw, is that David Bowie on the cover?)
Michael Jackson :rolleyes: - Bad
I think The Cure lost it with Wish when they went all fecking happy. Friday I’m in Love? Eek! A lot of people would probably argue that the shark was jumped much earlier than that, but I find I get something out of all the previous albums, but Wish has long since been sold to the second hand shop.
It’s not as dark as Disintegration, but much of Wish isn’t very happy either.
I didn’t think much of Wish when it first came out, but I like it a lot more now. I’d urge you to give it another try.
Pink Floyd - after The Final Cut, when Roger Waters left. Floyd’s too bubblegum without Waters, and Waters is too whiny without the band, IMO.
Queen - after The Works, although I’m tempted to pick that as their jumping point. It had some good songs, but they were trying something completely new, and it just didn’t seem to take off. Granted, Hot Space wasn’t exactly an inspired piece of work, either, so maybe they felt they had to do something to get out of the rut.
The Who - Who Are You
Yes - Yes seems to have jumped, jumped back, jumped again, spawned, and now all the various offspring are leaping left and right. Toward the early 80’s they were coming out with stuff like Going for the One and Tormato which were about as inspiring as warm spit. When 90125 came out, it was completely different from what they’d done before, and had several songs on it that were quite good. Then they released Big Generator and re-established themselves as tired hacks in a completely new musical genre. So many members have quit and joined that there were legal battles at one point in the 90’s over who had the right to call themselves Yes. This led to simultaneous tours by the winner calling itself Yes and the loser calling itself Anderson, Bruford, Wakeman, Jermaine and Costello or so such, neither of which were all that good.
Genesis, but I’m not sure when. Some say when Peter left and Phil took over as front man. Some say it’s when Steve left. I don’t know…I really liked We Can’t Dance (second-to-last album), but when Tony and Mike put out another album after Phil left, there was no doubt that they had jumped.
On a related note, I’d say that Phil Collins jumped around Both Sides. That album, for some reason, almost made me suicidal. Gah.
that, plus he was running out of ways to make an album cover with just his face on it.
Jamiroquai- After Stuart Zender left/was fired.
Good lord, Emergency on Planet Earth was incredible Return of the Space Cowboy was good, and Travelling Without Moving was great in places, but I feared for the worse the second I heard JK starting up a lamborghini on one of the tracks.
For Love of Pete, you spend two albums writing songs about what is going on in the workld, and them throw it all away because you can afford really fast cars and are shagging Denise Van Outen. Zender got pissed off with your crap and when he leaves you come up with the suckfest that was Syncronicity (King for a day has to be the most egotistical song ever written), and then just turned into a disco remix outfit for the last crapfest you came up with, who’s name I refuse to mention.
When you lost Zender, you lost all traces of Funk left in your band, and I’m glad you got twatted by that photographer.