Bands that you should like, but hate instead.

This thread is devoted to slagging off bands that youSHOULD like, but really can’t stand instead. Perhaps you like their contemporaries, maybe they’re well respected in music circles, maybe all your friends like them, maybe all or none of the above - but which bands do you really hate, even though objectively you should like them?

I’ll go first - I nominate Smashing Pumpkins.

I think I SHOULD like them but I don’t. They’re awful. Their sound is dreadful. Billy Corgan has a rotten singing voice and is weird.

Their lyrics are pretentious and yet juvenile. Despite all my rage I’m still just a rat in a cage. Why yes, Billy. Yes you are. Is he trying to be profound? Did he once work in a lab and is having flashbacks? Is he just anti rodent? Who the hell knows. 1979?? That’s a stupid song. Billy hon, you were 12 in 1979 - I don’t know what sort of flashbacks you’re having, but I’d prefer not to share them, thanks.

Furthermore, of all the fashion icons Billy Corgan could choose, he who has about 1 brazillion dollars, chooses Uncle Fester. GAH!!! They are just so damn bad.

I like similar bands - Sound Garden, Blind Mellon, Jane’s Addiction. They’re all kind of whiney and pretentious and yet I like them. I was a damn bee person for halloween one year! Hell, I like the Smiths! Ya talk about your whiney pretentious lyrics! I like Modest Mouse, and The Arcade Fire and all sorts of whiney pretentious bands! And lest anyone think I’m a music snob. Or an Emo music snob or something equally as annoying - I’ll admit publically that I kind of dig AQUA for god’s sake!

Honestly, the only band that I hate worse than the Smashing Pumpkins is Def Leppard and they REALLY suck. Yes, yes, I know their drummer only has one arm, good for him, blah, blah, blah. Well guess what? They sucked when he had two arms. It would be unusual for a band that plays instruments to benefit from the loss of a limb of any of it’s members - Def Leppard is certainly no exception.

So - if anyone want’s to refute my hatred of the Smashing Pumpkins, be my guest. I really feel that I must be missing something - there must be some aspect that I have just overlooked. However, perhaps they just suck.

Don’t bother refuting my hate for Def Leppard they are well and truely henious and no argument will convince me otherwise.

Or, if you prefer, list the band that you SHOULD like, but hate instead.

There are no bands I should like but hate instead. If I hate it, then it is objectively awful. :wink:

I loathe The Beatles. I find them irritatingly chirpy and saccharine in their early days, while their later psychedelia is like a bunch of schoolboys trying desperately to get high from smoking a lump of licorice they were sold. Their romantic songs sound sappy and po-faced. Their rocking numbers sound overwrought and poorly executed.

And they’re Scousers.

There are probably some bearable album tracks out there, but I’m sure to me they will be tarred by the same poppy, pappy brush.

Having said that, I do enjoy George Harrison’s My Sweet Lord, and John Lennon with The Dirty Mac.

Hate’s too strong a word, but Green Day fits that for me. I spent my formative years listening to The Clash, **The Jam ** and the Buzzcocks, so GD’s music should be right up my alley, but they are so freaking derivative I can’t give them any love. Plus Billie Joe’s voice gets on my last jangly nerve. I’m glad that a band like them has made it big, but I don’t want to hear it.

The Beach Boys. Everybody likes the Beach Boys, right? To me it was nothing more than filler played on the radio between the good songs. Then my ex-husband became fixated on them for a while. He would play his CDs on an endless loop at nightclub volume, making the house uninhabitable. Death to the Beach Boys, say I.

Jimmy Eat World. I like all the bands around them, from the slightly harder-core later Promise Ring, to the equally poppy Anberlin and Panic! at the Disco (tho the latter’s more cynical) , to the equally lightweight Riddlin Kids and Get Up Kids. I guess the combo of poppiness and lightweightness just doesn’t do it for me.

I like the Ramones a lot but can’t stand Dead Kennedys. Go figure. Not sure exactly what it is - maybe it’s because the Ramones are easier to understand - who knows.

I don’t like the Beach Boys. They sound like corney 50s surf hipsters to me.

I don’t really like The Who. I like most other hard rock from that era like Zeppelin or The Stones.
I don’t see why anyone should like Def Leppard or Bon Jovi, Motley Crue or any other 80s hair metal band unless you grew up in the 80s and it’s more nostalgia based or you like it because you are 23 and like 80s music because it’s retro.

Actually that makes sense. If you grew up listening to classic punk like The Clash or The Ramones, Green Day will sound horribly derivative. If you are a little younger and you first exposure to the punk sound was Green Day, The Clash will probably sound retroactively cool to you but the new wave of post-punk emo pop bands like Jimmy Eat World, Panic at the Disco and Fall Out Boy will sound trite.

The Eagles. Dunno why. I like all the member’s individual efforts. Just not the band.

For some reason, I don’t like Pearl Jam. I like Soundgarden, even Temple of the Dog, but not Pearl Jam.

I grew up listening to post-punk hardcore emo (tho don’t ask me to name any of the bands, I didnt have pen and paper ready in college like I do now,) and these bands do seem trite to me, but I like P!atD and Fall Out Boy despite this, but not Jimmy Eat World, which is why it seems a bit strange.

Coldplay. I generally like cerebral, thoughtful, slightly ethereal pop/rock, but for these guys it never quite seems to come together. It’s like they have a germ of an idea for a song, but the parts don’t add up to a satisfying whole and it all comes out very bland and dull, when it could soar instead.

Can we go back almost 30 years?
As a 10 year-old white boy in the midwest suburbs (1980) my cousins introduced me to KISS. They thought it was the coolest thing ever. I should have been enthralled with the cool costumes, blood, pyrotechnics, etc. Then when they played it for me I thought it was complete and utter garbage. Cheesy songs with no heft to them like you’d expect some heavy rockers to have. Paper thin crap (my opinion at age 10).
I went back home and pulled out my older sisters new albums, Pink Floyd- The Wall, AC/DC- Back in Black, Queen- The Game, and listened to some real rock-n-roll and loved it.

Pearl Jam for me, too. It’s all because of Eddie Vedder. He always sounds like he’s singing off-key to me, and I just don’t get the appeal. I think I’d like Pearl Jam a lot if they had a lead singer who could actually sing.

I was a bit older than you when I first heard KISS (17, maybe), but man, I was surprised too. I missed out on the cartoony, commercial KISS - all I really knew was the costuming and blood-spurting. I expected, y’know, Heavy Metal. Then I heard Love Gun (or something) and, yeah, it rocks a little, but it’s missing something.

Joe

I also hated the glam metal of the 80s (never actually heard any K.I.S.S. until about 10 years ago,) even though I was a kid and teen then. I too thought it was trite and substanceless.

And now being “retro 80s” does nothing to improve them, they still suck as hard.

Looked at your location and paused. You could almost have been me, but a few years later. My cousin went from hardcore country fan who hated all rock music, straight to KISS devotee and then into metal.

One side of “I don’t care” to the other for me.

Put me in the Pearl Jam camp, too. I was a big fan of Nirvana, Soundgarden and Alice in Chains, and while Pearl Jam didn’t sound exactly like those bands, given the time period and my age, you’d have expected me to be into Pearl Jam, too. Nope. I just don’t like Eddie Vedder’s voice.

Nobody else has to give a wet toot, but as a “traditional” jazz fan, I find most swing and early jazz revival bands to be way too coy and campy. The exceptions, for some reason, are mostly from European countries whose first language is not English.

As a fan of hard rock one would expect me to have some appreciation for AC/DC. I don’t. Never have. Never will. There is not one single AC/DC MP3 in my collection, nor do I have any of their CDs. While the music may sound good, I can’t stand Angus Young’s style of “singing”. It grates on my nerves like the proverbial nails on a chalkboard (the sound of nails on a dry erase board doesn’t seem to have the same effect).

The Decemberists. I’ve had several friends recommend them to me after learning I love Neutral Milk Hotel, citing the similarities in the bands’ styles: the sad carnival side show worlds the songs create, the unstructured but pretty music with unusual instruments, the allusions to world wars, the strange and off-putting voices of the singers, etc. But I find what I’ve heard of the Decemberists to be annoyingly self-conscious and precious.

Jeff Mangum of Neutral Milk Hotel seems like a genuinely weird guy (in the best possible way) who writes the lyrics he writes and sings the way he sings because that’s the only way he can do it. It’s the only way his music can come out of his brain and into the world. Whereas the dude from the Decemberists sounds like he’s straining to be weird, and I can’t stand that. Or his voice.