Oh, Mars, YOU might have been making a joke. But believe me, there are legions who actually believe that. Really.
Radiohead. These people need to get out more!
Shania Twain (has to on top of this list)
Billy Joel
Faith Hill (ick)
Dixie Chicks (ick, ick, ick)
Celine Dion (icccccccccckkkkkkkk)
Creed
The Beatles
Tori Amos (“Little Earthquakes” was great, but what’s she still doing around?)
Elton John
Sting (and the Police by extension)
AMEN TO THAT!!!
:eek: Do you happen to have no taste? 
I don’t feel that U2 is overrated but Bono certainly is…Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby are masterpieces that deserve all the hyperbole they get
saying Van Halen is overrated is a low blow…they have wallowed in obscurity for at least the last five years and as far as I’m concerned they ended as a band when DLR left in '85. Fair Warning is one of the most UNDERRATED albums ever
Creed?..like shooting fish in a barrel
I hated Radiohead for years until I finally sat one day and LISTENED to Kid A…then I realized after hearing How To Disappear Completely exactly why they were hyped
maybe a subquestion to this is…How often does critical hype and endless pimping by mags and such make you hate a band even when their music is good?
JBerto said:
“Tori Amos (“Little Earthquakes” was great, but what’s she still doing around?)”
Oh them’s fightin’ words
I can understand why a lot of people here mentioned bands or singers of the 1960’s, especially the Beatles. Maybe it’s mostly younger Dopers whose parents tried to stuff that music down their throats. Nobody likes that. But come on people! Dissing the Beatles? You don’t have to love them, but there’s no denying their creativity, talent, or influence.
In the same way, Frank Sinatra, or even Glenn Miller, is definitely not among my absolute favorites, but I can certainly appreciate their contribution to the evolution of music. I can actually listen to it: it may not be rock-n-roll, but there’s some good stuff there nonetheless.
With that in mind, the genre shift between the 1960’s and now is probably still considerably less than that from 1955 to 1964, so I’m a little surprised and disheartened at the disdain for older rock acts.
I just can’t stand all the hype constantly surrounding Atom and His Package. Everytime I hear “Pumping Iron for Enya” on the radio, I just about throw up.
No. wait. Alternate reality.
My wife listens to country music a LOT (ugh…), and almost all of the contemporary country artists are utter semi-talents. They can play the guitar, perhaps, and/or sing in tune, but there are 3 or 4 country song templates that are reused over and over and over and over and over and over. Is there a genre of music that focuses on the death of loved ones in 15-20% of its’ songs? It’s not goth-rawk, it’s country!
The only contemporary country performers I’ve heard who have real artistry and true musicianship are the Dixie Chicks, and that’s only reallyevident in their new album - almost a masterpiece, but they do rely to some extent on the country song templates.
hrh
I may have missed it, but why hasn’t anyone mentioned The Sex Pistols? My god, they suck. And they did NOT invent punk… Not that The Ramones did either, but they were on the scene a full 2 years (IIRC) before the flaccid Pistols…
hrh
And how about the Clash? Why on earth do people worship them so? Medium rock.
hrh
At the risk of my marriage, the first thing that came to my mind while reading the title: Creed!
It hurts to watch an hear the lead singer strain and push and grunt out the vocals.
I said that not because I hate Tori Amos - in fact I like her independence and unwillingness to follow trends. So much of today’s music is formulaic to the point of banality. Banal is not a word you can use with Tori. My hope for her springs eternal, but I am routinely disappointed at how unlistenable much of her music is. 
I absolutely love Little Earthquakes, especially “Tear in Your Hand,” “Precious Things,” “Leather” and Happy Phantom." I even liked a few songs off Under the Pink like “God.” But she nosedived with Boys for Pele and has yet to recover. I tried so hard to like Strange Little Girls, which strikes me as a bold but failed experiment.
I certainly don’t expect a free spirit like Tori to make conventional music. But I often wish she’d return to the focus she had on her debut album.
Let’s do a Rodney King before this gets ugly - “Can’t we all just get along?” 
ISiddiqui and MemoryGongs, my wife corroboartes your testimony - she just bitch-slapped me for dissing the Chicks and Tori Amos. :eek:
Tough crowd! 
I said that not because I hate Tori Amos - in fact I like her independence and unwillingness to follow trends. So much of today’s music is formulaic to the point of banality. Banal is not a word you can use with Tori. My hope for her springs eternal, but I am routinely disappointed at how unlistenable much of her music is.
I absolutely love Little Earthquakes, especially “Tear in Your Hand,” “Precious Things,” “Leather” and Happy Phantom." I even liked a few songs off Under the Pink like “God.” But she nosedived with Boys for Pele and has yet to recover. I tried so hard to like Strange Little Girls, which strikes me as a bold but failed experiment.
I certainly don’t expect a free spirit like Tori to make conventional music. But I often wish she’d return to the focus she had on her debut album.
Let’s do a Rodney King before this gets ugly - “Can’t we all just get along?”
The Rolling Stones - (first thought in my head when I read the thread title)
**
Creed** - Too easy, I know… I couldn’t resist
**
Dave Matthews Band
Aerosmith - …DIE ALREADY!
**
Lenny Kravitz - Definitely overrated.
**
U2** - And for that matter…
Any band with a number in its name that gets played on the radio…
99.9999999% of all “modern rock” and “alternative” bands
Nirvana. Proof that death is the greatest career move a rock musician can ever make. I still can’t get over the amount of bollocks that was written and said after he shot himself.
This manages to make both Jonny Cash and NIN way overrated:
http://www.islandmercury.de/real/johnnycash/v/johnnycash_hurt_56k.ram
On Tori: while I think Boys for Pele was fantastic (the music was really really useful to figure out how to voice on a guitar, taught me a heck of a lot), it did mark the begginning of her lyrical decline into poorly articulated fairy garbage (which she had previously restricted mostly to loopy interviews). It was okay for that dreamy, surreal album, but when she took it back to the personal and rocking arena, stuff like “my pudding knee” just became gratingly awful. Not to say that she hasn’t had some fairly good tunes since Pele, but after Under the Pink, she often managed to ruin a fairly good song with some unforgivably awful line or tune. If only she’d picked some more consistently good songs for her cover album…
Luckily, there are a LOT of really good B-sides from the Earthquakes/Pink/Pele era that many fans of that time seem to have missed out on, particularly Take to the Sky, which should have been on a real ablum, being one of her best songs (and the first she wrote in her new incarnation, apparently). Upside Down, Mary, Honey, Black Swan, Butterfly, Sugar, and later on things like Siren, Cooling, Merman.
Wait a minute. I’m going on and on about Torid Anus, patron saint of weepy pre-teen girls. I am such a loser.
This never really happens for me; I tend to remain pretty objective about bands. I like Radiohead, despite the fawning that goes on about them.
I also really don’t like the Vines, no matter how much hype they get. They’re just not a good, interesting band with good songs, simple as that.
For me, music falls into roughly four categories:
- Music that sucks and I don’t like.
This one should be pretty obvious - Creed, Avril Lavinge, Puff Daddy, Brintney SPears, N’Sync, Limp Bizkit. To me, this music isn’t good - it isn’t groundbreaking, different, interesting, profound, artistic, or beautiful. I don’t appreciate it and I don’t like to listen to it. Most of it, however, probably won’t be played on the radio in thirty years.
2) Music that doesn’t suck and I don’t like.
This one is a little harder. I think David Bowie is my classic example for this. He’s done some interesting things, and I acknowledge his influence. There are even some David Bowie songs I like. But overall, I just don’t like his stuff. I can appreciate it, but I don’t like to listen to it. Also includes a lot of the Anticon hip-hop stuff, the Minutemen, etc. - interesting, creative, but it just don’t move me.
3) Music that doesn’t suck and I do like.
This is obviously what I spend my time listening to. Bands that I feel are creative, interesting, and provide me with joy when I listen to them. Pavement, Wilco, the White Stripes, Built to Spill, Modest Mouse, Miles Davis, Fugazi, the Velvet Underground, the Magnetic Fields, etc.
4) Music that sucks and I do like.
This is either “guilty pleasure” stuff or bands that I know aren’t that good but still keep me interested. Nelly’s “Hot in Herre” is a catchy-ass song that I won’t turn off if I hear it, but I realize it’s a shitty song in terms of artistic achievement. I might put the Strokes here, because I like the album but I realize it isn’t anything groundbreaking. Or Black Flag or the Ramones, both of whom aren’t very artistically gifted bands but they just move me for some reason. Or Guns N Roses, who are just a sleazy LA metal band (but Appetite for Destruction is so rad).
That being said, there are things that I consider to be overrated and I hate them, mostly because they seem to have stood the test of time and I can’t understand why:
Fleetwood Mac (god I hate Fleetwood Mac)
James Taylor
Pink Floyd
The Eagles
I hear the crap that these bands have produced far too often thirty years after the fact. I can’t believe people still like them.
i am so glad a good number of u dislike the beatles. personally, i dislike them quite intensely. they were talented, i agree…but they were still just a pop/rock band. it seems to the baby-boomers the beatles are beyond criticism. to do so is to risk serious rebuke. to me all their stuff has the same fuzzy twang to it.