Red Hot Chili Peppers. I haven’t liked their last four albums at all. They’ve gone way soft and their music just lacks any kind of punch. One Hot Minute was their last good album, IMHO.
Genesis??! Genesis band that became awful is!
Well, at least, IMO. I loved the music with Peter Gabriel still fronting the band, with the notable exception of Lamb Lies Down. After Gabriel left the band, Trick Of The Tail was still pretty damn good.
Shortly thereafter came Duke, which if memory serves included “Grab A Cab”* and “Paper Late” and suchlike pop bilge, and that was the end of it for me.
Yes I know the early albums strike most people as a prog slog for stoners, but I liked it anyway, dammit.
*(OK, really, it was “ABACAB”, named for the chord progression of the chorus.)
Iron And Wine.
WTF?
I had no chance to get the first word in on this thread since I thought “Tom Waits” before reading your own answer. Swordfishtrombones and Rain Dogs are good, but Waits was starting his midstream change around that time. I like some of his newer songs such as “Cold Water”.
Billy Joel and Elton John aren’t my favorites, but they had some good albums up to Glass Houses and Yellow Brick Road.
No Doubt.
They used to be a really fun ska/punk-inspired outfit, with a couple of more mainstream but still good songs (Just A Girl, Don’t Speak), and then suddenly Gwen Stefani decided she wanted to be a pop star. I have a feeling she knows exactly what she’s doing but she’s alienated the band’s fanbase in the process.
I agree about Dr John, Steve Miller and the Incredible String Band.
I loved Leonard Cohen’s first few albums, but then he went all funky, and lost me. Though I suspect for a lot of people it would be the other way round.
Another one is Donovan. I loved him in the '60s when he was all fey, whimsical and psychedelic. Then from the 70s onwards he lost all that, and, again, lost me.
I suppose the classic example is Neil Young, who constantly changed his style, so whether you liked him depended on what he was doing at any particular time.
Black Sabbath was so wonderful right out of the gate. The first few albums were gold standards of heavy metal, and then about Vol 4 began the suckage. Ozzie left and those magical thundering songs faded away. The rest of their output to me seemed like bar band music.
Or, like the Pearl Jam mentions above, maybe I just moved on.
The thing they have just done with Lou Reed is an embarrassment for them all.
I’ve got two -
Artist - Jennifer Nettles. I hate country music with a passion that is nearly unmatched by anything else in my life. When she started fronting for Sugarland, it broke my heart. I sooo want for her to just do some old-fashioned funky stuff like she used to - just on the side, just for kicks. I know it isn’t popular, and I know she loves making money and having lots of people love her, but damn. Country?
Band - Linkin Park. Popularity killed their art. I know they say that they wanted to go different directions musically anyway, and I know they claim they are maturing as artists, but it’s funny that they are maturing into a pop-style boy band with a soft-edged emo frontman just like every other damn band on the radio now. I have serious doubts about their sincerity. Again, I understand - money is a nice thing. Popularity is a nice thing. Getting to put your songs on blockbuster movies like Transformers is a nice thing. If you’re selling out for the cash, just fucking admit it like grownups! If not, then seriously consider going back to your roots. You were interesting then, but your “maturing process” has made you just like everybody else, and that’s depressing.
Sorry; Sting’s erudite songwriter songs and smooth-jazz leanings were well-tempered by Copeland’s talking, breathing drums and Summer’s groove-driven ambient textures.
Without those edges to hang onto, his leanings fell into mush.
And he plays the fucking lute.
U2 once they went Hollywood after Joshua Tree.
Margot and the Nuclear So & So’s -I absolutely loved their first album, The Dust of Retreat. It was indie chamber-pop with a sort of eerie, haunted aesthetic. Their world was a swirling shadowland of lost love, vampire women and ghosts that haunt hallways. Their most recent album, Buzzard, sounds like a middle-aged man wanted to make a boring rock album. One of those cases where you wish the guy had just changed the project name and preserved the memory of Margot.
Second the Red Hot Chili Peppers. I think it’s pretty universally accepted that these guys were once funky, fresh, and fun. And then apparently they realized by phoning in the same pseudo-hippie-meets-frat rock sound with the same stream of conscious babbling of Anthony Keidis atop, they could make the big bucks. Between his lip-spat annunciations of drivel and the everpresent trite images of California, even John Frusciante’s (still superb) guitar playing can’t save these guys.
I also think that the Lou Reed/Metallica thing must be the kind of joke that supremely rich rockstars who have seemingly conquered the world already would pull on the public, knowing they can. If you read some of their quotes (which is easier than listening to the music) - it just has to be a joke, it just has to…
I will totally agree with you about everything else, but knock off the lute. That’s actually awesome. It takes real balls to play a medieval acoustic guitar in public. 
Five hard rocking albums with Steve Marriott and Humble Pie then “Baby, I Love Your Way”, “Show Me the Way” and the talk-boxed “Do You Feel Like We Do”. Ugh.
Chicago. A great blues-y, R&B band that rocked hard. And then they turned into Air Supply. WTF, man? Why did Peter Cetera have to ruin Chicago before he left?
Yeah, I was afraid of that. No dis to the lute as an instrument. I love the lute and own some lute CDs. It’s specifiically Mr. Sumner playing the lute. Just too obvious a douchebag move for him.
R.E.M.
Their early stuff had a dreamy, atmospheric quality. Part of this was the production of Don Dixon and Mitch Easter. Part was Michael Stipe’s esoteric lyrical references and his tendency not to enunciate all that well, which led to a lot of misheard lyrics and very personal interpretation of songs by listeners. Which was a GOOD thing.
Unfortunately, some smart-ass reviewer made the mistake of referring to the album Murmur as “Mumble,” and Michael Stipe took the criticism to heart. (I saw him reference that review in an early interview. It was obvious he had been wounded by it.) He began enunciating his lyrics very carefully, which paradoxically often made them less interesting. I saw a recent interview with Michael Stipe in which he (maddeningly, for fans of his early stuff) still seems embarrassed by the murky, mystifying vocals of R.E.M.'s first few albums.
Simultaneously, R.E.M. changed their production values and drifted away from the jangle-pop sound of their early recordings.
I wouldn’t quite say they “lost” me, but their early stuff is far superior to their later work, in my view.
I really like old Tom Waits stuff. I like it so much that I work at listening to his newer/newest stuff. It takes some work, but I enjoy everything in his catalog. But I can understand your POV.
Good one. Even Joshua Tree itself didn’t live up to the promise of Boy and War in my estimation.
Agree. Sadly the storyline in the video for Don’t Speak foreshadowed exactly how the band would actually develop.
I sort of agree with Leonard Cohen. Not a fan of Death of a Ladies’ Man, and (with one exception) he never regained the heights of his first albums.
Strangely, though, I’m Your Man is possibly my favorite Leonard Cohen album (that or Songs of Love and Hate). The “modern” synthpop production seems like it should be embarrassing… and maybe it is sometimes… but the songs are just too damn good.
My favorite Tom Waits is the one writing songs for plays (The Black Rider, Alice, Blood Money, Frank’s Wild Years). If his discography had come out in reverse, he would have “lost me” (not really but you get the point) when he went to the lounge singer style.