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
I like Joni Mitchell. Any group known as the "pogues"(slang for gay) can go butt-surfing as far as I am concerned. The 80's? A decade of stinking crap, including Clash, and the rest of the so-called British Wave. Talentless thrashers. Anything that was on MTV sucked.Techno-pop, hideous. Vitually everything post-1980 should be put in a time capsule and ejected to the far reaches of the universe. Of course, the '80s were only exceeded by the disgusting '90s which heralded such "greats" as Nirvana and Ice Cube. Total waste of cheap plastic discs. Perhaps this "art form" should be re-named "Unbridled angst of untalented, uneducated, disenfanchised, walking adolescent hormones", and placed in a museum which would be appropriately marked with warning signs.
I wish you'd stop sugar-coating your opinions, Twl! Despite that, I tend to think I lost interest in rock and gravitated more to classical by the mid 70s in part due to disco and the subsequent lack of interesting rock--even when my son was a teenager, there were only a few bands that interested me from what he was listening to (Matthews Band, a little Soundgarden (sp)). Most groups seem to lack the virtuoso instrumentalists I had access to when I listened to rock (Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, Hendrix, Clapton--notice 3 ex-Yardbirds?), and I think the genre is worse for it. Plus I'm just older, and really can't relate to the message behind the music anymore.
Twl and Rcprince were you the two old grumpy guys in the theatre box in the Muppet Show?
Rcprince:Yes three ex Yardbirds!!!! Better to burn out than fade away!!! I have posted in the past that the Yardbirds where the best guitar band in the 60s. When J Beck and JPage
where together, awesome!!! Unfortunately, there are only four songs they recorded that I am aware of, three rock songs and a commercial for "great shakes". You can see them together in the movie Blow Up (Jimmy Page on bass before moving over to co lead guitar). Some underground British music mags have staked the claim that the Yardbirds were the most innovative band of the 60s. Unfortunately they were better on stage than in the studio.

Twl: Nirvana's "teen spirit" was a great song, maybe they were just one hit wonders. I still crank that one up. I think they stole a lot of there material from Dream Syndicate. Does anyone remember that group???