The 15 Most Hated Bands Of Last The 30 Years, From Salon.com

What is it about certain bands that some folks love so much and they go on to sell ungodly amounts of albums? Then for as many fans that love them, their detractors seem to number just as many. 

Any true art form always walks a razor thin line between love and hate. Just ask someone that has a passing understanding about modern art and mention the name Jackson Pollock. His abstract paintings have left a legacy and an infamous nickname "Jack The Dripper," along with a true point of contention of what modern art actually represents. 

This communication breakdown is where intellect, choice and pop culture battle one another in a war to which there really isn't a clear winner or loser. Unless you are the artist on the other hand and your career and legacy are at stake. 

Time heals all, but I still cannot forgive Kiss for their disco album. Chasing trends is understandable, but a disco album? That is just plain heresy for a rock n' roll band. Read on below to see what bands folks truly loathe.

Check out the post on Salon.com 

Kenny G, the soundtrack to your next root canal.

"In order for something to be hated, it must first be loved; that love is what gives the hatred its roots. There will always be those unfathomably popular bands and singers that get an inordinate amount of airtime, and are loved by obsessed, cultish fans, only intensifying the hatred of those who realize one objective truth: that when you get down to it, the music isn’t even good. In fact, it downright sucks.

In the last week, Rush and the Eagles have been reappraised and argued about on Salon. We wondered which recent bands we might all be fighting about in 20 years. (When, by the way, they’ll still be terrible.)

Nickelback
Hating Nickelback used to be cool, but it’s so easy that it’s kind of just a fact, now. It’s sort of like hating Jonah Lehrer, partially because, like Lehrer, Nickelback plagiarizes itself and somehow still has fans. Oh, and also, Nickelback sucks.

98 Degrees
 Even in the 1990s, there were only so many mock turtlenecks and cargo pants the front cover of Tiger Beat could handle before fans revolted against the fashion. In a musical genre already dominated by the Backstreet Boys and ‘N Sync, Nick Lachey’s ersatz boy band never really had a chance.

Smash Mouth
 Smash Mouth is what would have happened if Limp Bizkit made love to a Lisa Frank poster. In theory, that sounds kind of amazing. In practice, it is not.

Black Eyed Peas
 If the Black Eyed Peas, the creators of nonsensical hits like “Boom Boom Pow” and “My Humps,” qualify as music, then any kid with a Barbie Mix It Up DJ Turntable is Mozart. Who needs vocals when you’ve got auto-tune?

Insane Clown Posse
 “The Most Hated Band in the World” gave birth to the most obnoxious fans in the world, the Juggalos, who are virtually a gang at this point. But at some point, founders Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope sort of lost their way and now this is all that’s left of them:

Hootie & the Blowfish
If music on the radio in the early 1990s all sounded the same, that’s because it was All Hootie & The Blowfish, All The Time. The band’s bland music had no real edge and just enough melody to have comfortably become background noise, except then the booming baritone voice of Darius Rucker came on and bore into your skull like a drill. Twenty years later and chances are that you can still hear Rucker rattling around there in your brain.

The Goo Goo Dolls
 Interchangeable with Matchbox 20, but technically not Matchbox 20. They are allegedly a different, other hated band.

John Mayer
John Mayer is that insufferable bro — you know, the one who wears a pukka bead necklace, is always shirtless, toting around a guitar at that house party you didn’t want to go to, anyway. He’ll suck the humor out of a joke and ruin the punch line every time, but no one else seems to care, because he’s a shirtless bro with a guitar. He probably likes Dane Cook. And misogyny.

Dave Matthews Band
Thirty-something adults who now now roll their eyes at Drake’s “YOLO” are no better: Chances are good that they used to follow around the cultish Dave Matthews Band 10 years ago, imparting profound, oft-quoted wisdom like “eat, drink and be merry” and “life is short but sweet for certain” while living it up in the suburbs and broadening their worldview by sneaking in SoCo and taking road trips to the Jersey Shore.

Creed
Listening to even one song by Creed invokes a sea of nausea, as if your brain is fried from watching “Two and a Half Men” reruns for 24 hours. As Spin magazine put it, they’re like “Nickelback before there was Nickelback.”

Train
Basically the Goo Goo Dolls of the next millennium.

Phish
Reflecting on Phish’s 30 years of music, Grantland’s Steven Hyden puts the problem best: “In order to like Phish, you must consciously decide to like Phish.”

Limp Bizkit
Limp Bizkit is one of the rare band names that could not be made any more ridiculous if it were spelled “LiMp b!ZKiT,” an observation that makes the band’s unchecked anger so hard to take seriously. I mean, really, was the “he-said-she-said bullshit” that rage-inducing, Fred Durst?

Blink 182 
Blink 182 began as an attempt to wean tweens off of boy bands, except they soon turned into self-parody when teenagers began to like them in earnest, ushering in an unforgivable era of wannabe-pop-punk rockers like Good Charlotte, Avril Lavigne and Jimmy Eat World.

Lana Del Rey
It’s not that Lana Del Rey is bad, per se, it’s that her music seems fraudulent when compared to the ’60s-era musical acts she’s invoking. Her emotionless performance on “SNL” cemented her reputation as robotic, the product of overly manufactured pop perfection. She’s another reminder that we live in a post-Black Eyed Peas era.

Dishonorable Mentions not on this list: Kid Rock, Linkin Park, real Matchbox 20, Spin Doctors and Blues Traveler … rest assured you are all hated, as well."

Tom Waits - Bad As Me, Highest Debut Of Career

"Artist" is a term that we continually feel unsettled about as it implies someone who is just "creative". This notion goes right back to Shooter Jenning's article about "Rockstars". As soon as someone says they are an artist, all I can think of is the amateur painter or musician that is internally tortured by not having a real sense of work ethic or unique ideas and has yet to prove their ability, to the level of an "Artisan". ( Artisan are persons having superior skill or ability, or who are capable of producing superior work. An artist is a person engaged in some type of fine art. An artisan is engaged in a craft or applied art. - from Dictionary.com)

Not to directly knock anyone for using the creative process, but the word "artist" has just lost its meaning, same as "rockstar". Anyone can claim it, but are they really that creative and risk taking? It is a razor thin line and the charming aspect of fine art is that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Take for example Jackson Pollack, he was a painter that I failed to understand until I dug much deeper into his ideas, or his drunken melee's to really come to a rational mindset of his work. Basically, his work runs parallel with Miles Davis in the sense of its movement. Its the unique signature rhythm of the drips he created on canvas, that plays visually right next to Jazz and its ability to morph on a whim, while still maintaining it's true character.

Jackson Pollack aka Jack the Dripper painting

Miles Davis creating Jazz magic

Artisans come in many forms and knowing Tom Waits personally makes it easier to see all aspects of him as a dyed in the wool creative individual. It could be his photos, the custom music instruments he makes or the sense of wonder when it comes to other "Artisans" that push him to constantly revisit the well of ideas and reformulate his own concepts.

We are damn proud to have had the opportunity to work with Tom Waits on his album Alice, photographer Matt Mahurin and the amazing Anti Records a few years back. After our long diatribes and too many cups of coffee chatting on the randomness of art, music and film, hearing about the biggest debut of his career just gives us one hell of a smile. Congrats Tom, you deserve it!

Link to Tom Waits site

"Tom Waits debuted on the Billboard Top 200 Album Chart at #6, making this the highest debut and the fastest selling (63K+) of his long and storied career—not only in the US, but around the globe. Bad As Me, his 20th album to date, is currently top #10 Europe including the UK, Italy, Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands, Ireland, Denmark, Belgium, Portugal, Austria and Germany; #6 in Canada and #11 in Australia.

Critics are making a racket with rave reviews including the Los Angeles Times: “The singer with the lowdown Howlin’ Wolf yowl, which is richer and more elastic than ever on Bad As Me…his first new studio album in seven years, and one of the best of his wildly fruitful creative life…The record…swirls with adventure and includes the instant classic ballad ‘Back in the Crowd,’ the stomping march ‘Hell Broke Luce’ and the transcendent closer ‘New Year’s Eve,’ a quiet yarn of a waltz” and Rolling Stone: “It doesn’t get much better than this.”

Meanwhile, 2011 is looking like a pretty good year for Waits…he started it off by being inducted into the Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame and may wind down the clock with his best-selling album to date, no mean task for an artist in these tough times."

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 

As a side note, for the album design of Alice, Tom really wanted the text to feel like a water mark on the cover. Went through many iterations and concepts but what finally worked is cutting his name out of a piece of balsa wood to create a stamp. This gave us the loose texture and by adding more water to the ink I was able to get exactly what he was after on paper and then transferred that to the final design.