In your "objective" opinion, which are the 5 most overrated rock bands of all time?

Cafe Society
81

What they did musically and in the studio was inventive and ground-breaking. I doubt you can say the same for the Backstreet Boys. I can somewhat understand criticizing very early Beatles music as being more boy band fluff, but by Rubber Soul at the very latest (I might peg it at A Hard Day’s Night, even), they were in a league of their own, songwriting-wise, and I cannot think of another band as musically inventive and interesting, that did so much to expand the definition of what is “pop.” Harmonically, melodically, song structure wise, they were constantly trying out new ideas.

I mean, if you want to nerd out musically, how many pop bands do you know of that can throw in an 11/8-4/4-7/8 passage in a song (as in “Here Comes the Sun”) and make it sound so natural and completely pop? Or the classical-modal-pop fusion of something like “Eleanor Rigby”? If you like this sort of detailed musical analysis, read Alan W. Pollack’s Notes On… series.

And I’m not going to even get into all their studio innovations.

I actually don’t even own a single Beatles album, but Beatles love is not “embarrassing.” In the end, it’s the music the counts, and Beatles music is so natural and flowing that one often doesn’t realize the amount of sophistication going on in. They had an impeccible ear for melody, harmony, and orchestration, and very rarely delved into rock cliches. I honestly cannot think of a single band that has contributed as much to the development of pop music as the Beatles.

82

The Backstreet Boys did not write their own music. That’s a huge distinction. I can accept that a lot of the adulation the Beatles received in their heydey was based on the fact that they were young and cute, but time has proven that there was substance behind the sex. David Cook just had a hit with “Eleanor Rigby” over 40 years after it was written. That speaks volumes about their library.

83

People who slam the Beatles usually listen to music that wouldn’t exist if it hadn’t been for those 4.

84

I mean, also look at the incredibly wide range of musical artists they’ve inspired. There’s probably not a genre of music that hasn’t covered a Beatles song. Artists as diverse as Ray Charles, Sonic Youth, Jimi Hendrix, Frank Sinatra, Siouxie and the Banshees, Laibach, Wilson Pickett, Bela Fleck and the Flecktones, Danger Mouse, Jose Feliciano, Emmylou Harris, the Feelies, the Breeders, Husker Du, Guns and Roses, Stevie Wonder, Brad Mehldau, Nina Simone, Wes Montgomery, various symphony orchestras, big bands, etc., etc., etc. The list goes on and on…have all non-ironic covers of Beatles tunes or (as in the case of Danger Mouse) have used Beatles source material is their compositions.

Now, what are the odds the Backstreet Boys will inspire this many musical interpretations and tributes?

85

There’s always somebody who makes the “Beatles were the teenyboppers of their day” argument, usually because they only associate them with the Beatlemania phase of their career, which only lasted 'til '64 or so - by '65 they were doing “Yesterday” and “We Can Work It Out” and Rubber Soul, and we know what came after that. To say they were just a shallow boy band, to me, means that the person making the claim doesn’t really know their work.

Anyway, my list (pretty much the same as everybody else’s):

  1. The Doors - If there was one thing Jim Morrison was even worse at than “poetry”, it was singing. And Ray Manzarek’s endless organ noodling added nothing to rock but more bullshit.

  2. Nirvana - Having grown up listening to “underground” music in the '80s, I’d already been hearing this for about 10 years, usually in much better and more innovative ways. They single-handedly ushered in all the crappy alterna-whiner shit that major labels put out throughout the '90s.

  3. Pink Floyd - Dark Side of the Moon is the most soporific album ever made. And shouldn’t loud, thunderous music (like their later stuff) also have soul? Otherwise, it’s just bombast.

  4. Metallica - Whenever I hear “Enter Sandman”, it makes me laugh out loud. Not in the way that makes me admire it, though. Everything else I’ve heard by them is more of the same.

  5. Oasis - I never understood the Beatles comparisons - there’s no variety here, or even dynamics. Or decent vocals. Or a rhythm section you’d be able to distinguish from a billion others. Or, oh, great songs.

86

They wrote their own songs.
They played their own instruments.
The songs were topical, relevant, and damned catchy.

How many other groups posess members who could (self-taught) play drums, keyboards and guitar simply by ear? No. These guys were the real deal. They were way ahead of their time and paved the way for many others. Any criticism of The Beatles as a viable band just is not worthy of comment.

See here.

87

My main criticism upthread was that they had “plateaued” by 1968-69 (be it from whatever cause-Yoko, drugs, ennui, whatever) and a lot of other bands had caught up to them, but frankly…does anybody know exactly how hard it is to write a catchy hooky pop song? It isn’t nearly as easy as it looks. Influence-wise they have no peer of course as the PP said.

88

The thing about Nirvana (and their ilk) is how…conservative it all was, really. Each previous attempt (ultimately successful or not) to turn the musical world on its ear was audacious and challenging and nay innovative in one way or another. Grunge? Merely recycled a number of 70’s tropes, added some fuzz and angst, and pronounced it profound. Of course the mass marketplace will eat that up-how could they not?

89

1: Freezepop
2: The Wurzels
3: Depeche Mode
4: Cibo Matto
5: The Fleetwoods

90

Maybe this is sort of true lately, but overall I think they’ve gone through a wide variety of sounds. Breaking the Girl sounds nothing like Blackeyed Blonde; Fight Like A Brave sounds nothing like Behind The Sun; etc.

I like their older music better.

91
  1. The Doors
  2. Bruce Springsteen
  3. KISS
  4. Journey
  5. The Sex Pistols
92

I kind of feel that mentioning The Beatles means that one is indicting about 90% of Western music, because that’s about the percent that are either directly influenced by them, or bands they influenced… not to mention the studio stuff (tape loops, backward masking, etc.). It would be hard to adequately rate their influence on modern rock, methinks.

I feel Nirvana is fair game; they were a fine band and they helped to kill hair metal, which are all good things, but I do think they get way too much credit for grunge, which in turn gets a lot of praise because it displaced hair metal as the most popular music of the day. Thing is, hair metal was so abysmal that grunge sounded like some great epoch in music, when it reality it was just a recycled sound that cleansed the palate of the bad stuff that came before. Plus there were a lot of bands that are never fairly given credit for their innovation: Stone Temple Pilots, Soundgarden, Mother Love Bone, Alice In Chains - all bands from this era whose work has stood up quite well.

The owner of this thread is of course KISS. Just… not a good nor interesting band. More of a circus act. It seems to me that KISS fans are people in the 35-50 age range who can relate to the band because it reminds them of their adolescence, childhood, etc. Nobody outside of this demographic “discovered” KISS. There aren’t any kids in the garages of America telling their friends, “Dude, I found this killer tape in my dad’s collection!” And they had a song called “Beth.” Seriously, it might as well have been called “Mildred.”

When they took their makeup off… what was the point of that, exactly? I recently saw a retro video with Paul Stanley in dayglo spandex. Most unappealing. But I give them immense credit for milking their little talent for everything they had. Gene Simmons is a highly entertaining character and the world is richer for him being in it. Admirable business acumen but next to no musical talent.

Oasis might be fair game. Noel Gallagher was firing on all cylinders at one point, but who knew he only had two albums’ worth of creativity?

If we’re being honest, Hootie and the Blowfish deserve to be on this list. Chart-topping success for about three years, then everybody realized that their songs could be adequately aped by any college band (and I say this acknowledging that Darius Rucker has an awesome voice).

Guns 'N Roses might also make this list, though I am a fan of their first album. Why is anyone remotely interested in Chinese Democracy, especially after a year or two after G 'n R went kaput?

Valgard, pistols at dawn!

One last thing I must mention: The Doors certainly did suck. Not sure how the words “Jim Morrison,” “poet,” “singer,” and “sexy” ever got linked to each other.

93
  1. Jethro Tull – so much ego, so little talent
  2. INXS – '80’s flummery
  3. Yes – no
  4. Bread – boring for anyone male/over 18
  5. The Doors – Jim Morrison shirtless & pouty – It works for me. The music? utterly forgettable.

Love, Phil

94

Consider me marked. Proudly.

If this were the Wrongness Olympics, I’d give you a 9.8.

95

I should add that I actually like the Doors (and the Sex Pistols), but their hype:influence ratio is way out of balance. Had Jim not died, they’d be just another also-ran that occasionally shows up on the classic rock station’s playlist.

The Sex Pistols benefited from an extremely talented and aggressive promoter. Their name also gained them a great deal of exposure among folks who would never have heard of them (myself included): if some hand-wringing busybody wanted to whip suburbanites into a tizzy over the downward spiral of modern youth, simply mentioning “The Sex Pistols” would conjure up frightful images of decadence among the unhip that the Ramones, Blondie or the New York Dolls just couldn’t match.

96

I’ve gotta come in here and defend Nirvana. They wrote their own music (well Curt did), they were a 3-piece band (at least in the early days) with a great full sound, Curt was a great guitar player, and they ROCKED. Lots of angst and anger, a little humor and irony and intelligence in the weird lyrics. I think they were a product of the Aberdeen, Washington area just like Black Sabbath was a product of Birmingham. And I’m sure Sabbath was one of their influences, as were 70’s groups like Led Zeppelin and old blues like Leadbelly. But they didn’t just rehash that music, they did things their own way musically and lyrically.

And you can’t fault Nirvana for doing better than other grunge bands. I think bands like Alice and Chains and Soundgarden were really good as well, but they just didn’t have the appeal and range that Nirvana brought. Listen to (and watch) their With the Lights Out box set to see the range of music they did.
And anyone who doesn’t like The Beatles, Guns and Roses, Metallica or Dark Side of the Moon, there no help for you, sorry. You don’t really like rock music. :stuck_out_tongue:

97

Nirvana
Pearl Jam
Beatles
Black Sabbath

98

Big difference between bands I hate that everyone likes, and bands that I think are over-rated.

Radiohead are the archetype, the supremos, the one and only heavyweight champs of over-rated-ness. They’re still a fine band though.

Are U2 overrated? Tough call - They were awesomely good up till the Joshua Tree - total shit since then. Hard to say if that game of two halves is over-rated as such.

Coldplay (the bastard off-spring of U2 and radiohead), have gone from being lauded to the high heavens, to now being seen as an unwelcome turd of a band. The truth probably lies somewhere in between. Where Chris Martin less of a twat, I think they would be held in higher regard by critics.

Another band that are desperately over-rated, particularly in the US if this board is a guide, is My Bloody Valentine. They’re re-forming (I think) so anyone who missed their I*'ve had 10 pints and the room is spinning* brand of drone rock first time round can pretend to like it again.

99

Same can be said for Queen.

100

Again, if the title of this thread were “Bands That Suck,” you’d be free to put any of these groups on your list.

But overrated??? Bread? When’s the last time you saw them on TV or on a magazine cover? Do they make any critics’ “greatest band” lists? Do their songs get played on MTV around the clock? They were a mellow pop band that hasn’t been heard from in 30+ years. Yes, once upon a time, they sold a lot of records, but who exactly do you think is “overrating” them?

I have the same question about 70% of the artists named here. If you hate Boston or Kansas, swell- but how do you figure they’re overrated? They’re bands that had a few platinum albums when I was in high school, but are more or less forgotten now, except for a handful of tunes that still show up on “classic rock” stations.

Bad? That’s a matter of opinion. But overrated? How you figure?