(NOT TO DO WITH GAMES)Why do most bands suck when they sell out?

[Joe]

Lets think of a few examples here:
>Linkin park - I saw these guys loads, but since minutes to midnight, I wasn't impressed.

Wasn't Linkin Park a boy band that they added a rapper to? I'm pretty sure you can't sell out if you were already a corporate whore.

>GreenDay - Warning wasn't THAT bad, but all albums before it made it look abysmal.

If anything, they sold out with Insomniac, not Warning. Warning was the end of the pop punk period for them, which they pretty much started with Insomniac, so maybe even that wasn't selling out as much as it was creating a genre sell outs could easily conform to.

Around comes the 90's however, and the 'Tallica boys get hungry. They're the biggest underground band in the world, but they want to be the biggest band in the world, full stop. So for the Black Album, they ditch the intricate, complex nature of their previous works. They get rid of any brutality in their sound, and try to 'slicken' it up. Over the next few records they abandon guitar solos, Hetfield's vocals become half-arsed affairs, and the band all but embraces nu-metal. This isn't expanding their sound. It's chasing trends for the sake of money

Bob Rock is the antichrist. True story. Actually, I watched Some Kind of Monster, that documentary that came with St. Anger, over the weekend. (I do agree they sold out with the Black Album, but by God I liked Load.) By the time St. Anger rolled around, however, you can tell they just don't get it anymore. Hetfield and Ulrich ran off Newstead and wouldn't listen to Hammett about the complete lack of solos in St. Anger. Even the new guy they got to play bass had an incredulous, "what did I just sign up for?" moment when he heard the album. But I honestly think they were TRYING to make good music for an audience that grew up on Metallica, but between Hetfield kicking drugs, Hammett not having enough of a role in the band to force the solo issue (he's by far the best musician in the band) and Ulrich being completely done with Hetfield, nothing good was going to come out of the studio.

I do retain hope that Rick Rubin can squeeze something decent out of them, sort of like a last hurrah a la Rocky Balboa, but he's such a big name I doubt he'll do much with them other than make them over-loud and just as radio-friendly.

 

[Same River New Water]

You realise within that statement 'their 3 billion fans will buy the albums if only to burn them on a pyre', you have just given the definition of sell-out. Making a crummy record, and selling it on the back of your bandname.

Not quite. You have to intend to cash in, otherwise every popular band is a sell-out, or every popular band that makes a bad record of any kind.

My point was that Metallica didn't dumb down for the masses: if they had, St Anger wouldn't have been met with universal confusion. It's not a pop-like, radio-friendly record. It's unsettling.

Actually, I guess you mean they sold out earlier, like from the Black Album on? You've got a bit more of a case there, only you're forgetting what changed in the band around the time of And Justice For All. You're saying they sold out because after And Justice For All, their songs stopped being so intricate and progressive. Since you're familiar with their music, you should know that Cliff Burton died before And Justice For All was released. Yeah yeah yeah, so he was just the bass player, right? He was also the only classically trained musician in the band. He was the one who tried to encourage the others to broaden their musical tastes beyond British New Wave Heavy Metal.

They always wanted to be the biggest band in the world, most bands do. But their sound changed after the band's only musically omnivorous classically-trained pianist died and you're telling me it's because they got greedy? Please.

 

[sirdanrhodes]

Joe, Linkin park when they were called xero, they hadn't got the rocker, but then they changed there name to hybrid theory which was excellent, then they became Linkin Park

And, allow me to add, My chemical romance.

And let me add, I think the third drowning pool, wasnt THAT bad, but the second, was, well, s''t mostly, with a few exceptions (not many).

 

[fix-the-spade]

I disagree on LP and Green Day, they're both awesome live. Which is my measure of how good a band is. I have no idea about Drowning Pool, never realy paid them any attention.

Now My Chemical Romance. They can't sing, can't play in time with each other and pretended to cry on stage. The only thing that stood out about their set at Leeds was that I saw more bottles of flying piss than anytime before or since in my life.

Actually, that's not true. 50 cent at Download, like that scene with the arrows in 300. But with piddle filled coke bottles. Yummy...

 

[cleverlymadeup]

My point was that Metallica didn't dumb down for the masses: if they had, St Anger wouldn't have been met with universal confusion. It's not a pop-like, radio-friendly record. It's unsettling.

Actually, I guess you mean they sold out earlier, like from the Black Album on? You've got a bit more of a case there, only you're forgetting what changed in the band around the time of And Justice For All. You're saying they sold out because after And Justice For All, their songs stopped being so intricate and progressive. Since you're familiar with their music, you should know that Cliff Burton died before And Justice For All was released. Yeah yeah yeah, so he was just the bass player, right? He was also the only classically trained musician in the band. He was the one who tried to encourage the others to broaden their musical tastes beyond British New Wave Heavy Metal.

They always wanted to be the biggest band in the world, most bands do. But their sound changed after the band's only musically omnivorous classically-trained pianist died and you're telling me it's because they got greedy? Please.

ok before j-e-f-f-e-r-s responds let me put in my 2 cents here

as for trained musicians, something tells me kirk hammett was trained by joe satriani, so i think cliff wasn't the only trained guitarist in the band, not classically trained but i'm pretty sure joe would have taught him how to play and compose songs correctly, frank would have been pissed if he didn't

as for the selling out part, yeah j-e-f-f-e-r-s is correct about that. they are one of the biggest sellouts ever. they totally changed their sound "to sell more records" when most of y our original fanbase says "they sucked starting with the black album" and frankly all my metalhead friends agree with that statement and they got a combat boot that also agree whole heartedly with them

see it's ok for a band to alter or evolve their sound, ala the beatles, zepplin, zappa, patton, primus, tool and many many more but when you start fundamentally altering your music or keeping the rifts with minor pitch changes, ala metallica, nickelback or ratm you become a sellout.

now being a corp whore is the same as being a sellout, this doesn't count for the bands that are corp made bands tho, such as the monkeys, backstreet boys, new kids on the block or *nsync , avril levigne or alanis morrisette because they were made by a producer

i think most young kids refuse to accept that they listen to sellouts because sellouts aren't cool, but the fact of the matter is most bands in today's top 40 are sellouts and everyone thinks they aren't, probly why i also refuse to listen to the radio and i listen to lots of indie stuff

 

[Joe]

Joe: cheers for the St Anger info. I still think it's a godawful LP. You may be going through all sorts of turmoil when recording an album, but your ears should still be able to recognize shit when it's being played at you.

Oh, it was absolutely horrendous, but a hilarious perfect storm of bad. Rock played bass on the album, so he wasn't able to be objective at all. Their tour agent heard the album and all but said most of the songs were shit, and it was like someone stepped on the band's collective puppy. I think they reached a point of realization a bit too far down the line when one of the said, "Everyone gets a vote, and a song only goes on the album if everyone votes on the song. Only four songs got four votes." That's 1.5 years into a two-year process.

Combine the fact they had a psychologist working on site that became as antagonistic as he was helpful, and they just weren't in the right mental state to create music. Assuming I had creative control, I'd have told them to scrap everything and start again once they got the new bassist. The new blood would've helped, assuming they were willing to treat him like an equal. (Unfortunately, that wasn't the case. Trujillo has fewer votes to cast than the other three.) Really, bringing in the guy who did music with Ozzy and Suicidal Tendencies would at least give them another avenue to pursue.

I'm not sure what's gonna fix them, if anything can at this point. They're all clearly talented musicians, but something in the process has been failing them more and more. I'd like to throw all the blame on Bob Rock, but I think Hetfield's ego is suffocating everyone else.

The guy I'd actually like to sit down with is Newstead, who during the documentary was pretty much grinning like an idiot for getting out when he did.

 

[cleverlymadeup]

Yeah Satriani taught Hammet when he was a kid, or so I read in a guitar magazine. Though if the Frank you're talking about is Zappa, wouldn't Steve Vai be the appropriate guitarist, not Satriani.

actually both have been known to play with Zappa

now there's a guy who could have sold out but he didn't, instead he went off in his own direction and became a rock god

as odd and as bad as it sounds i put patton in that category too, he much like zappa, gave the finger to the rock industry and went his own way. funnily enough about patton it was the tour with guns n' roses and metallica that made him hate touring and big band fame and such. he also hate the numetal bands and is ashamed they looked to fnm and him as inspiration for music and how they sound

 

[Joe]

I always thought it was Lars Ulrich who was the egotistical motor-mouth of the band? The videos I have seen of him have been less than impressive.

Apparantly their new album is meant to be a lot like their 80's stuff. Hopefully a return to their thrash roots can bring out some good stuff from them.

And Bob Rock, along with Simon Cowell and Pete Waterman, should be sent off to some penal colony somewhere for crimes against music.

Yeah, Lars is a shit, but in the documentary Hetfield was by far the dominant personality in the studio.

And I think it's good they're trying to reach back to their roots. I think they're an album too late, but the timing is almost as right now as it was then. Music seriously sucks now, primarily because of the way everything is produced to sound good in seven-second chunks. The other side of the coin is the indie genre, which is so goddamn navel-gazey and listless it makes me sad college-age kids are gobbling it up just because it's the only answer. But it makes sense, I guess. Popular music now is about expelling as much energy as possible in a three-minute song. Figures the underground is about sitting around with your hair in your face experimenting with weird time signatures.

I swear up and down rap is on its way out, too. Something needs to come in and fill the void. If that something happens to be what was mildly underground in the '80s, so be it. Beats a decade of Coheed and Cambria.

 

[GrimRox]

Most great bands don't sell out, they just continue to make great music that changes over time. However, a lot of bands that make it big are usually good for their first album because they've spent years writing songs and those songs subsequently make up the first album. Their second albums usually suck because they've been forced to produce more music that will earn money whilst they're still popular.

Totally agree with this point. Some bands accused of selling out really haven't, but have grown with their music. Just my views.

 

[Joe]

Here's a great article on how digital music production homogenized music [http://www.wordmagazine.co.uk/content/why-records-do-all-sound-same]. It's really a shame. I mean, I'm sure Phil Spector would've done the same thing if he'd been able, but damn, man. Anyone with a computer can make Californication now.

 

[Lametta]

Korn started to suck honestly
What happened to their odl style
Drummer+guitar guy left ;X

 

[Same River New Water]

If my guitar teacher suddenly died one day, the knowledge he imparted in me wouldn't suddenly drain out of my mind. Similarly, while Cliff was a huge driving force in Metallica, Hetfield and co could still have come up with something far more challenging between them than 'The Black Album'.

What? If you were in a band with your guitar teacher and he died, the music your band wrote would change. Especially if he still knew more than you and frankly had a better musical mind than you did. And your songs would not be everything they used to be. That's the Black Album.

something tells me kirk hammett was trained by joe satriani, so i think cliff wasn't the only trained guitarist in the band, not classically trained but i'm pretty sure joe would have taught him how to play and compose songs correctly

Sure, Kirk Hammett is an amazing musician with a lot of training, but he had very little input into the song writing before St Anger. (Yeah, solos or not, Kirk had more direct influence on St Anger than the other albums, not less.) It's clear in Some Kind Of Monster how absolutely overshadowed he's been by the bigger egos.

 

[cleverlymadeup]

Here's a great article on how digital music production homogenized music [http://www.wordmagazine.co.uk/content/why-records-do-all-sound-same]. It's really a shame. I mean, I'm sure Phil Spector would've done the same thing if he'd been able, but damn, man. Anyone with a computer can make Californication now.

actually the other thing is because of stuff like pro-tools and synth programs like reason, you do have bands using the same synths, so they will sound the same. back 10-20 years ago you could tell which band was which and what synths they were using by having one note being played cause all the synths had a different sound to them

but it is a great article and with some digital transfer, such as to mp3/aac, you do lose some of the "warmness" of the song because those formats will cut out the ambient sound your ear will probly assume is there anyways

 

[gibboss28]

Actually, that's not true. 50 cent at Download, like that scene with the arrows in 300. But with piddle filled coke bottles. Yummy...

50 cent was at Reading Festival...not Download

 

[U-boat]

Original poster should have defined "sell out". Selling music is what musicians do, some more effectively that others. Making tons money doesn't necessarily mean a band will become terrible. Though it might, because money can change people.

"Selling out" should be more about principles/beliefs and changing them. For example, a punk band that shuns big company sponsorship should not take big company sponsorship. That makes the band unappealing because they're jerks and have misled listeners/fans.