What are the 5 most overrated rock albums?


1. The Beatles: Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band. The songs on this album are nowhere near as memorable as those on "Revolver" and "Rubber Soul". For that matter, this album is nowhere near as innovative, nor ultimately as influential, as either "Pet Sounds" or the first Velvet Underground album. I'm not the first to point out that blame for such artless excess as all seventeen minutes of In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida rests primarily with Sgt. Pepper.

2. Pink Floyd: The Wall. All of the criticisms usually applied to late 70's stadium rock, i.e., that it was pretentious, bloated, pseudo-intellectual,and self-indulgent; apply doubly to this crock opera. If you want witty and insightful philosophizing on the human condition, read Nietzsche, H.L. Mencken, or Michel Foucault. To seek such wisdom from pop music, a genre defined by its righteous Dionysian folly, is the greatest folly imaginable.

Pearl Jam: 10. Johnny Rotten was bang on when he described Pearl Jam as "bloody awful" and as sounding like "Joe Cocker singing for Black Sabbath." To my ears, this sounds like so much bland 70's rock (e.g., Bad Company). As The Monkees are to The Beatles, so are Pearl Jam to Nirvana.

4. U2: The Joshua Tree. I don't know where to begin. These guys plagiarized Joy Division, and set their sublime riffs to dumbass lyrics bespeaking the most niave sort of Oprah Winfrey meets Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farms bourgeois liberalism. I've said it before, I'll say it again: If you make me listen to a record by someone named Bono, his first name better be SONNY.

5. Bob Marley & The Wailers: Exodus. Not only was Bob Marley not, by a long shot, the best pop music figure to come out of Jamaica, he wasn't even my favorite member of The Wailers. The monomaniacal cult of personality surrounding the deceased Robert Nesta Marley comes at the expense of all the other, far more exciting, music to come out of that poverty-stricken island. As Lester Bangs put it:

"Toots and the Maytalls, who never got promoted properly, are the real heat from a Stax/Volt kitchen, whereas Marley always struck me as being so laid back he seemed almost MOR. Rastaman Vibration was the last straw: an LP obviously calculated to break Disco Bob into the American Kleenex radio market full force, complete with chicklet vocal backdrops chirping 'Pos-i-tive!'
tweakgeek
Tbadder-I liked some Style Council stuff but hardly the best band of the 80's-as for dinosaur,geezer rock wasn't that Paul Weller in the 90's?
Every note that Kiss ever played,albums,rehearsals,tune ups replacing broken strings -everything.The worst rock band ever.
Fleetwood mac-rumours
Foghat-anything
Led Zeppelin-anything
Ted Nugent-anything
Ben, you may be right. That's why I listed it as a combo with the Jam. Paul does indeed seem to have lost his way over the last 4/5 albums, but after the terrific unplugged album I'm hoping for a resurgence. We all get old and boring though. I'm even listening to classical music now after feeding my head with my heroes: Clash, X, Jam, Costello, Velvet Underground, Ramones, Pogues, Black 47, Captain Beefheart, The Shaggs.
flap

I wasn't bashing Radiohead,
I was saying it's an "overrated" album

a decent album
but it wasn't the second coming
critics made it out to be

sorry to put it in the company of those other discs
Hey, this thread died too quickly. I would say generally that double albums by "major artists" are almost invariably overrated by fans and critics. It is a very rare event when there is truly enough first rate material to justify a double album. "The White Album", "Exile on Main St.", "Blonde on Blonde", "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road", "London Calling" to name a few, all could have benefitted from some judicious trimming.

On a related note, I think the increased capacity of cds is a major problem with modern recordings. It seems bands feel compelled to put too much material on their albums simply because they can. An album just doesn't need to run much longer than 40-45 minutes without a darn good reason. I can't count how many potentially great albums have been sabotaged in this way. For god sakes, exercise a little quality control. At the very least separate out the dreck and label it as outtakes/bonus tracks at the end of the cd.