Condemned By History / Music

Examples of Condemned by History in Music.

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Country

Subgenres & Trends

• The "Class of '89" ushered in a new generation of Country Music, when acts such as Alan Jackson, Garth Brooks, and Clint Black brought a new sound that blended traditional sounds with a slicker, more commercial approach that freshened up the genre without fully abandoning country values and sounds. While the "Class of '89" acts are not themselves examples of ending up Condemned By History, they did create two examples of this trope by association:
  • Many of the "Class of '89" acts were younger men in cowboy hats and pressed suits, which caused many new artists in The '90s to adopt a similar image known as the "hat act". While some were reasonably well-received in their day, most of them were derided as copycats of the A-listers, so "hat act" came to be a derogatory term; most of the latter-day "hat acts" wound up having little to no long-term success and a predilection for novelty line-dance numbers. The craze died off in the late '90s as country shifted back to a greater pop influence. The only former "hat acts" who survived unscathed were Kenny Chesney and Tim McGraw, both of whom grew into more distinctive and substantial artists who kept their careers alive well into The New '10s. Rhett Akins also escaped the "hat act" era by reinventing himself as a songwriter, which in turn laid the groundwork for the long-term success of his son, Thomas Rhett.
  • The city of Branson, Missouri owes its existence to this trope when the aforementioned newer artists began taking over at the turn of The '90s. Almost figuratively overnight, singers like Charley Pride and Barbara Mandrell went from having #1 hits to not even making the charts. (One other factor in this change was Billboard overhauling the methodology of its country music charts, thus giving a much more accurate and harder-to-manipulate picture of what was actually popular on radio.) Branson was the only place that such displaced acts could get anyone to pay to see their shows, so they all just moved there and opened up theaters. Even 1960s rock artists like Paul Revere and the Raiders took to Branson when the hits dried up and, in many cases, the original members left the fold. As The Simpsons put it...
    Nelson: What is this place?
    Bart: Branson, Missouri. My dad says it's like Vegas if it were run by Ned Flanders.
• The subgenre known as "bro-country" would eventually come to be this. In late 2012, duo Florida Georgia Line had a smash crossover hit with their debut single "Cruise" which would codify the subgenre with a mix of hip-hop beats, hair-metal guitar work, and Auto-Tune, combined with lyrics about hot women, trucks, beer, and partying. Many other artists - including not only established acts like Luke Bryan, Jason Aldean, Blake Shelton, and Jake Owen, but also up-and-comers like Sam Hunt, Cole Swindell, Thomas Rhett, and "Cruise" co-writer Chase Rice - followed suit, and Vulture magazine writer Jody Rosen gave the new musical movement its name. While most of the songs were hugely successful with young male listeners, bro-country was quickly subject to derision for being Strictly Formula, as demonstrated in a viral video mashup which played six bro-country songs on top of each other. Artists who were still enjoying success without succumbing to the tropes, such as Zac Brown Band, Gary Allan, Kenny Chesney, and Brad Paisley, began to decry the misogyny, sameness, and abandonment of identifiably country sounds.
  
  One of the first real blows from within country music itself came in late 2014 when Maddie & Tae had a dark-horse #1 hit with "Girl in a Country Song", a Deconstructive Parody sung by women that hated being objectified by bro-country. A few months later in 2015, radio consultant Keith Hill came under fire for saying that radio stations should play fewer female artists than male artists. This led to a massive outcry about sexism and misogyny in country music (although the change was not immediate; not long after this, for the first time in country music history, no women were in the Top 20 of the Billboard Country Airplay chart). Also not helping matters was the changing politics of country music and its fans; the genre was rapidly gaining popularity with pockets of America that weren't seen as a traditional audience for country music (i.e. more progressive, liberal listeners), and were therefore more likely to push back against it. By the end of The New '10s, most of the mainstream artists who codified bro-country had almost entirely distanced themselves from its tropes; many other male artists began incorporating more traditional sounds and/or lyrical themes with stronger appeal to women, and multiple new women rose to prominence. In short, "bro-country" is very much dead, with the country music genre as a whole not looking back fondly on it.

Groups

• Sugarland is one of the more unfortunate cases of this, going from being one of the hottest acts in country music to falling completely off the radar. Founding members Jennifer Nettles, Kristian Bush, and Kristen Hall saw their debut album, 2004's Twice the Speed of Life, produce three Top 10 hits and double-platinum sales, and Nettles sang duet vocals on Bon Jovi's "Who Says You Can't Go Home", a surprise hit on country radio in Summer 2006. Not even losing Hall after the first album seemed to slow them down, as their second album, 2006's Enjoy the Ride, sold even better and accounted for their first #1 hits along with two Grammys for their Signature Song "Stay". 2008's Love on the Inside fared similarly well, giving Sugarland three more #1 hits and becoming their first album to reach #1 on Top Country Albums. Sugarland was also sweeping the duo categories at various country music awards shows, and seemed poised to replace Brooks & Dunn as the genre's biggest duo.
  
  Then came their fourth album, The Incredible Machine, in 2010. While lead single "Stuck Like Glue" was their highest-selling single, the album itself was met with mixed reception for its increasing acoustic-pop and arena-rock influences, Lighter and Softer lyrics, and jarring steampunk influence. The final nail in the coffin, however, wasn't anything related to the band's music, but bad weather. Just before their performance at the Indiana State Fair in August 2011, a stage collapsed in high winds from a severe thunderstorm, killing seven people and injuring 58 more. Sugarland was held as The Scapegoat for the accident and found themselves at the head of several lawsuits, ultimately resulting in the duo paying a large chunk of settlements. After cutting a song for the Act of Valor soundtrack, they went on hiatus (which they were planning to do anyway since Jennifer was pregnant at the time). Both Jennifer and Kristian recorded solo albums, and while Nettles' first solo outing was a Hitless Hit Album, neither member found any radio success. Their 2018 reunion album Bigger, despite fairly positive critical reception, sold a dismal 50,000 copies and saw both of its singles flop on the charts. In addition, nearly every bit of media coverage about the reunion felt it necessary to mention the Indiana State Fair incident. Sugarland's legacy seems to be that of an act that started out strongly, only to grow too experimental and too reliant on style over substance - or worse, as the band who saw their careers getting "blown away" by an unfortunate accident that they had nothing to do with.

Songs

• Darryl Worley's "Have You Forgotten?" was a huge country hit in 2003, reaching the top of the Billboard country charts in only five weeks (tying an at-the-time record for the fastest ascent to the top) and staying there for seven weeks, in addition to peaking at #22 on the Hot 100. The song was intended to bridge the gap between 9/11 and the Iraq War, with politically charged lines like "Have you forgotten how it felt that day / To see your homeland under fire and her people blown away?" and "You say we shouldn't worry 'bout Bin Laden". While the historically conservative country fanbase took very well to the song for its patriotic themes, many people who weren't country fans derided it as an aimless tune full of strawman arguments. Between its heavy narm factor and the lyrics that could only have come from one very specific time period - it's hard to "worry 'bout Bin Laden" anymore now that he's dead, and the US pulled out of Iraq at the start of The New '10s - this song isn't played at all anymore, not even around patriotic holidays like Memorial Day or Independence Day.

Disco

• Disco as a genre is no longer an example, given both its revitalization and reevaluation in the 2010s as well as the more critical eye taken to the anti-disco backlash around the same time. However, it gets a special mention here not only because it is the former Trope Namer, but because the backlash was that heated during The '80s. A full exploration can be seen on the Analysis page for the Disco Sucks trope, but to summarize: disco skyrocketed in popularity in the late '70s thanks to the success of Saturday Night Fever, but thanks to a combination of overexposure, music critics lavishing praise on Disco artists whilst at the same time giving negative reviews to rock bands like KISS (who are now held in much higher regard than most Disco artists) and causing a lot of resentment among fans of said rock bands, the genre's association with things like Conspicuous Consumption, elitism, and hedonism, and plain old bigotry against disco's mostly black, Latino, and LGBT+ audience, the American public (though notably not the Europeans) turned against it in record speed. "Disco Demolition Night", a promotion by the Chicago White Sox on July 12, 1979 in which crates full of donated disco records were blown up in the middle of a baseball double-header (sparking a riot), marked the turning point, and by the end of 1980 disco was dead. Since then, however, disco has continued to influence dance music, Hip-Hop, and a lot of other genres while experiencing periodic nostalgic revivals, with The New '10s in particular seeing the backlash mostly die out. The sole exceptions are people who grew up during the 1970s and early 1980s, who are still likely to respond to the mention of disco with "Disco sucks!", and there's still plenty of jokes to crack about leisure suits. So while it's a bit early to say the backlash against disco has completely died out, it's certainly nowhere near as bad as it once was, and its subsequent reevaluation has caused disco to subvert this trope.

Hip-Hop

Genres

• Created by the Three 6 Mafia in the '90s, and then popularized by Lil' Jon and the Eastside Boyz in 2003 with their huge hit "Get Low", Crunk was absolutely massive in the mid-2000s. It was this genre that put Southern Rap on the map, making the city of Atlanta the capital of Hip-Hop (an effect that's still being felt today). Crunk-filled clubs and house parties all across the nation, being rap's equivalent to Post-Grunge in the 2000s. Not unlike post-grunge, crunk quickly gained a large number of detractors both in the hip-hop community and out, with its misogynistic objectifying of women, glorification of drugs, and screaming lyrics about immature subject matter (primarily about being drunk/stoned, having sex with prostitutes/strippers In Da Club, or both) that took Cluster F-Bomb and N-Word Privileges to the extreme (even for Hip-Hop). Today, virtually all crunk artists are completely forgotten, with the possible exception of Three 6 Mafia and Lil Jon (with the former due to Juicy J and their cult following in the hip hop community and the latter mainly because of his viral hit "Turn Down for What", in collaboration with DJ Snake). Crunk's basic idea of "danceable hip-hop" lives on in the form of Trap Music, but the genre itself is unlikely to come back anytime soon, as it's among the most hated genres of hip-hop and modern music in general.
• An offshoot of crunk, Crunkcore, is also firmly dead, maybe even more than its parent genre. It developed in the late 2000s as a fusion between crunk and the vocal styles of Screamo Music; many crunkcore bands, however, did not scream and often just combined the crunk atmosphere with scene fashion and pop melodies. Bands like Millionaires, brokeNCYDE, 3OH!3, Family Force 5 (notably combining crunkcore with modern Christian themes), Breathe Carolina and I Set My Friends on Fire helped popularize the genre, before quickly gaining a massive backlash for carrying regular crunk's misogynistic Intercourse with You themes, their even more annoying vocal and image style, and a reputation for as a haven for sexual predators (thanks to Blood on the Dance Floor frontman Dahvie Vanity's many sexual assault allegations). Crunkcore soon died with scene in the early 2010s, and many crunkcore bands changed their sound to abandon the genre.
• Another offshoot of crunk, Snap, is also stone dead. Spawned in Atlanta sometime in the mid-2000s, its origins aren't clear, though most will point to J-Kwon, Dem Franchize Boyz, and D4L as the creators of the genre. What is known is that it quickly became monstrously popular. A Lighter and Softer variant of crunk that downplayed the aggression in favor of a more danceable sound, snap ruled the charts from 2005 to around 2008 thanks to hits like D4L's "Laffy Taffy", Dem Franchize Boyz' "Lean wit It, Rock wit It", David Banner's "Play", and the Ying Yang Twins' "Wait (The Whisper Song)", which were downright ubiquitous and sold absolutely incredible amounts via online and ringtone sales.
  
  Its downfall came almost as swiftly as its rise for three reasons. The first was the rise of smartphones, which allowed people to store a library of hundreds of full songs on their phones, killing off the ringtone market. The derisive term "ringtone rap" was largely referring to snap, and as the genre derived most of its popularity from cheap digital singles and ringtones, this view was not inaccurate. The second was the backlash from both hip-hop fans and the mainstream as a whole, who saw snap as stupid, lazy, and Money, Dear Boy personified, with Ghostface Killah famously taking shots at it on his song "The Champ" ("My arts is crafty darts, why y'all stuck on 'Laffy Taffy'?/Wondering, how did y'all niggas get past me!?") and mocking the "snap dance" on tour. The third and final killing blow was likely the backlash against Soulja Boy. By the end of 2008, snap was having its last gasp by way of V.I.C.'s "Get Silly"; following this, the genre spent 2009 rapidly dying and was essentially gone completely by 2010. Nowadays, snap is viewed as the absolute nadir of 2000s pop music and one of the worst things to ever happen to hip-hop, and there has been absolutely nothing even resembling a revival of the genre. The artists themselves are invariably remembered as one hit wonders if they even are remembered, as it's more likely that people will just recognize the songs without knowing who recorded them. Kanye West has tried to rehabilitate the genre, (not unreasonably) praising Soulja Boy as one of the most influential rappers on the current generation and giving him a scene-stealing feature on DONDA 2, but even the few who look sympathetically towards the genre prefer the general vibe of internet-viral party music to the actual music itself.
• Swag Rap, an offshoot of alternative hip-hop that originated from both Cloud Rap and the hyphy movement in the Bay Area, is also dead in the water. The exact sound of Swag Rap varies, so it's really more of a scene than a sound. Noticeable characteristics include a DIY ethic and unconventional promotional tactics (often online, but not always), many Swag groups also use (fittingly) the term "swag", short for swagger, and a synonym for "cool". The genre originated from acts like Soulja Boy due to his penchant for saying swag in his songs, but it was OFWGKTA, Lil B, and A$AP Mob who popularized it, which resulted in the genre blowing up overnight on the internet.
  
  Its downfall came around the 2010s for many reasons. One, the genre is frequently mistaken for Cloud Rap, which resulted in many rappers like Danny Brown distancing themselves from the swag rap movement. Two, the term "swag" has been frequently ridiculed by mainstream listeners and the general public alike by 2012 due to its overusage online, which resulted in the term falling off the wayside by 2014. And three, its detractors have frequently accused the genre of having simplistic and highly stereotypical lyrics that heavily relied on materialism, glorification of drugs (such as weed, codeine lean, and prescription pills like Xanax), misogynistic overtones, and especially its heavy usage of the term "swag" and other internet lingo, despite certain acts like Odd Future and Lil B playing these cliches for laughs and as a critique of modern-day radio-friendly hip-hop. Any chances of the genre coming back are all but dead due to all of these acts either disbanding, changing their sound completely, or growing out of these topics over more nuanced subject matter, combined with many offshoots of Cloud Rap such as SoundCloud Rap, Emo Rap, and most infamously, Mumble Rap catching the attention of many newer acts, losing what very little chance the genre had for a revival.

Rappers/Producers

• In 1992, Alternative Hip Hop group Arrested Development became an overnight success with their debut album, 3 Years, 5 Months and 2 Days in the Life Of..., which went quadruple platinum and scored three top ten singles. Critical reviews were similarly glowing, and they became the first hip-hop group to win a Grammy for Best New Artist. However, within a couple years, they drew increasing criticism for frontman Speech's perceived self-righteousness and their hostile attitude towards Gangsta Rap, and their work became increasingly seen as milquetoast and moralistic compared to other acts in their subgenre. The critical and commercial underperformance of the band's 1994 sophomore album Zingalamaduni finalized their fall from grace and led them to be retroactively written out of hip-hop history, with analysts and retrospectives scarcely touching them except to voice embarrassment at their past fame. Today, OutKast is instead seen as the group that shifted Hip-Hop's center of gravity to the American South, while the name "Arrested Development" is more widely associated with an unrelated TV show.
• In the early '90s, MC Hammer was one of the biggest rap stars in the world, with his 1990 album Please Hammer, Don't Hurt 'Em selling ten million records - the first rap album to ever accomplish that feat - and his song "U Can't Touch This" becoming a sensation. A big part of Hammer's success was that he was considered a family-friendly alternative to the edgier and/or raunchier rap music of the day since he made it a point to keep his music fairly clean. However, as discussed by The Rap Critic, there soon came three factors that derailed Hammer's success. First, the Gangsta Rap boom caused MC Hammer to switch his sound in order to stay relevant, taking on a more hardcore persona that was more in line with the gangsta rappers of the day. This not only ruined the clean and wholesome image that Hammer had cultivated, but failed to appeal to a new crowd, since hip-hop fans viewed him as a trend-chasing poser and didn't buy this street-wise hustler act for an instant. Second, Hammer was massively overexposed - rivals like LL Cool J were dissing Hammer for what they saw as over-the-top commercialization, which included his Saturday-Morning Cartoon Hammerman. Finally, he single-handedly redefined the phrase "Conspicuous Consumption" for Generation X - he bought massive mansions, multiple cars, thoroughbred racehorses, and gold chains for his dogs, and kept an entourage that ballooned to nearly 200 people. He had to file for bankruptcy in 1996 as a result of this overspending, and he remains a symbol of living beyond one's means. By 1997, MC Hammer had all but vanished from mainstream attention, known only as a washed-up punchline with "U Can't Touch This" as a One-Hit Wonder despite having had several other hit singles, some of which charted higher. Todd in the Shadows posits in his review of The Funky Headhunter that Hammer probably could have made a comeback if he had just laid low until the late '90s when similarly family-friendly rapper Will Smith began to gain popularity in the wake of Gangsta Rap, and later discusses in his Song vs. Song podcast that Hammer still has some supporters within the hip-hop community.
• Soulja Boy came out of nowhere in 2007 with "Crank That (Soulja Boy)", a viral dance tune that became the first rap song to become a hit through the power of the internet. The dance spread across pop culture like wildfire, topping the Hot 100 for seven weeks. A year later, he released "Kiss Me Thru the Phone", which sold over five million in the U.S. alone. However, his popularity would collapse rapidly by 2010 for a few reasons. His primary audience was kids and teens, who eventually matured and grew out of him. He also infamously dissed the well-regarded Lupe Fiasco in a 2010 interview, prompting Lupe to release a diss track in response. And by the time the snap subgenre died out, the backlash against his immature antics and his music hit him at full force. Nowadays, despite his five Top 40 hits, he's remembered as a One-Hit Wonder for "Crank That", which is itself only brought up as a symbol of how bad rap music got in the late-'00s. Soulja Boy's lack of technical ability also limited his attempts to revive his career; Kanye West — who considered Soulja Boy to be one of the most influential artists on modern hip-hop — brought him on for a verse on his 2021 album DONDA, then scrapped the verse because he thought it was awful.
• Vanilla Ice burst onto the hip-hop scene in 1990 with his debut single "Ice Ice Baby", which topped the Hot 100, and his debut album To the Extreme spent 17 weeks on top of the Billboard 200, going on to sell over seven million copies in the United States. Unfortunately, he was quickly hit with accusations of plagiarism, which he awkwardly denied. The bassline for "Ice Ice Baby" was almost exactly the same as the one from Queen and David Bowie's "Under Pressure"(except for having one additional note), while another single named "Play That Funky Music" did not properly credit Wild Cherry's lead singer Rob Parissi as a songwriter. His motion picture debut Cool as Ice didn't make the Top 10 on its debut weekend, got terrible reviews, and earned Ice a Razzie for Worst New Star. His second album, 1994's Mind Blowin' was a gigantic commercial flop, and he fell into drug addiction and at one point was nearly Driven to Suicide. After recovering from his addiction and pledging to turn his life around, he released his third album, the Nu Metal effort Hard to Swallow in 1998, the executives at Republic Records seriously compared it to John Travolta's famous Career Resurrection in Pulp Fiction. It wasn't well received critically and commercially, only selling a paltry 100,000 copies, but he developed a cult following among fans of Bloodhound Gang and Insane Clown Posse after working with them. There was also a bit of a misconception that he had serious beef with Eminem, but Ice told interviewers that his lyrical references to Eminem were tongue-in-cheek, and Eminem subsequently featured Vanilla Ice in the music video for his song "We Made You", suggesting that Eminem might not have been that hostile to Vanilla Ice either. While Vanilla Ice has made a small fortune flipping houses on The DIY Network, and had more thoughtful reevaluations of his career in recent times, most people in America still see Vanilla Ice as the punchline for jokes about white rappers.
• After the death of Tupac Shakur in late 1996, Ja Rule tried to capitalize on Tupac's image and persona. Starting in 1999 with his single "Holla Holla", Ja Rule released several chart-topping songs through the 2000s, which got him four Grammy nominations along with six top-ten albums. But his hardcore gangsta image was always suspect, since he sang in most of his songs and released several romantic duets (described by The Rap Critic as "thugs need love too" songs). But what really sealed Ja Rule's fate was starting a feud with Eminem (due to his friendship with Ja Rule's archrival 50 Cent) by insulting his daughter Hailie in the song "Loose Change". Eminem, who is well-known in rap circles for being fiercely protective of his daughter, was so pissed off that he wrote a response track called "Hailie's Revenge" with D12 and Obie Trice, where they tore into Ja Rule for ripping off Tupac and not being a real gangster. Thanks to the backlash, Ja Rule joined the dustbin of flash-in-the-pan 2000s rappers, and his involvement in the infamous Fyre Festival fiasco erased any chance of him staging a comeback.
• Master P and his independent label No Limit Records were quick to pick up the torch after Tupac and The Notorious B.I.G. were murdered, along with the implosion of the West Coast Gangsta Rap movement that followed. By the time his triple-Platinum album Ghetto D came out in 1997, No Limit was embraced as the last bastion of Hardcore Hip-Hop by those who hated "shiny suit" hip hop. P's rise to prominence solidified New Orleans as the new capital of gangsta rap, paving the way for the "Dirty South" to dominate the industry in the 2000s. But after only two years, Master P suffered legal issues that would eventually bankrupt his label, and his style came off as a stagnant Flanderization of what Tupac had been doing. Plus, there were fresh faces emerging from the East Coast like Jay-Z and DMX, and fellow New Orleans label Cash Money Records sprung to prominence on the heels of Juvenile's breakout single "Ha", seizing the attention of P's fanbase. P's 1999 album Only God Can Judge Me got horrible reviews, while Cash Money had explosive success with "Back That Azz Up" and the debut of Lil Wayne. Throughout the 2000s, No Limit had little to offer aside from P's son Lil' Romeo becoming a family-friendly child star. To this day, Master P is largely written off as a detour in the history of gangsta rap rather than a legend. Meanwhile, Cash Money forged a hip-hop dynasty that is still going strong. 400 Degreez even made the 2020 version of Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, which Ghetto D missed completely, a testament to how thoroughly Master P's reputation has been shattered.

Pop

Genres & Industry Trends

• Charity Motivation Songs. The first few multi-artist singles were done in response to the famine in Ethiopia in The '80s, and they were seen as revolutionary in bringing many artists together to promote a worthy cause. Band Aid's "Do They Know It's Christmas" and USA For Africa's "We Are the World", both aimed at supporting those affected by the famine, are credited for kicking off the trend, and other multi-artist singles after that also made international charts. As time went on, Values Dissonance kicked in; multi-artist charity songs are now largely viewed as Glurge and (as this AV Club article notes) mostly concerned about promoting the artists themselves instead of the cause behind the song. While the UK has continued to pump out multi-artist charity singles (many of which went to #1 in that country), the last American one of note was the 2010 "We Are The World" remake benefiting those affected by the Haitian earthquake. Even so, despite peaking at #2 on the charts, the song was considered inferior to the original version, despite including the vocals of Michael Jackson from the original as a tribute to him. Nowadays, even original charity singles have been derided as egotistical glurgefests made by bands and artists looking for a quick bit of good publicity rather than people trying to promote a worthy cause. In Britain, however, this trope is averted; many huge singles are still made for charity, although many of them are comedic covers of pop classics, especially the ones from Comic Relief in particular. Notably, Ariana Grande's 2014 song "One Last Time" was not much of a hit in the UK until it was rereleased to raise relief for the We Love Manchester Emergency Fund, after which it peaked at #2 (up from its original #24).

Male Solo Artists

• During The '50s, Pat Boone was one of the biggest pop performers in America. He explicitly served as The Moral Substitute to the edgy Rock & Roll artists of the day by singing Bowdlerised covers of their songs, with a number of them (such as his versions of Little Richard's "Tutti Frutti" and Fats Domino's "Ain't That a Shame") actually making it higher on the charts than the originals. Nowadays, though, the original songs serve as the First and Foremost versions, while his covers have faded into obscurity. When Boone is remembered, it's usually as a symbol of the buttoned-up cultural conservatism of '50s pop culture; the fact that he's since found steady work as a right-wing Christian commentator hasn't done much to challenge that image. He has a cult following among metalheads for his album In a Metal Mood: No More Mr. Nice Guy, which featured covers of classic metal songs in his big-band style, in part because these covers helped demonstrate the musicality of a genre often dismissed as part of a Loudness War. (Ronnie James Dio even sang backing vocals on Boone's cover of "Holy Diver"!). Even then, though, it's chiefly an ironic fandom, akin to that of Chuck Norris.
• The animated character Crazy Frog, the former mascot of German music and cellphone company Jamster ^note (known as Jamba outside of the US, but renamed there to avoid conflict with the unrelated Jamba Juice), was everywhere in Europe early in The Noughties. The character was a male frog-like creature with a high-pitched voice who sang various songs and sometimes making weird sounds and gibberish. He was so popular that he gained his own set of video games and a few arcade cabinets. However, by the mid-2000s, the character started gaining a lot of dislike from the public for being annoying and resulted in Jamster having to retire the character in early 2007 and ended up getting replaced with Schnuffel, the company's current mascot who has gained a much more positive reaction with the public. Meanwhile, Crazy Frog has since fallen by the wayside. The character even made a cameo in The Amazing World of Gumball, where it gets chased by a group of dodo birds.
  Gumball: Run him over.
  Mr. Small: That won't be necessary. He's gone the way of the Dodo.
• Robin Thicke was immensely popular in the early half of the The New '10s. His Intercourse with You song "Blurred Lines", despite gaining negative reviews from critics and having its video taken down by YouTube for sexual imagery, spent 12 weeks at the top of the Hot 100 and topped the charts of 25 countries, alongside a controversially suggestive performance with Miley Cyrus at the VMAs that year. Thicke's popularity worked because of a carefully-constructed image of a Rule-Abiding Rebel - he played the part of a lecherous womanizer, but got a pass because he was married to actress Paula Patton. However, "Blurred Lines" began attracting criticism for its lyrical content. Firstly, a popular Tumblr post featuring rape survivors holding up cards with their rapists' quotes on them that echoed the song's lyrics, in addition to Thicke and collaborator Pharrell Williams losing a lawsuit filed by the Marvin Gaye estate for allegedly copying Gaye's "Got to Give It Up". Moreover, stories began to emerge that Thicke's persona wasn't all an act - Patton filed for divorce in 2014, accusing him of domestic violence and infidelity, and Emily Ratajkowski in 2021 alleged that Thicke groped her during the filming of the "Blurred Lines" music video. Thicke's follow-up album Paula, made as an attempt to win Patton back, bombed with only 24,000 copies sold in the US in its first week and a mixed critical reception. Thicke's collaboration with Flo Rida in "I Don't Like It, I Love It" fell short of the Top 40. Comparing that to Rida's other two singles from the My House EP, which had no problems reaching the Top 10, it's easy to see why "I Don't Like It" failed to be a hit. Now, Thicke is seen as a quintessential One-Hit Wonder to most of the general public, and while he has since found success as a judge on The Masked Singer, his music career remains dead in the water. The MeToo movement in the late 2010s onward amplified criticisms of the perceived objectification of women and trivialization of sexual harassment in "Blurred Lines". To gauge how low "Blurred Lines"'s reputation has fallen, Rolling Stone named it #50 in its list of the top 100 best songs of 2013, but less than a decade later in 2022, named it one of the worst songs ever made.

Female Solo Artists

• In 2003, Ashlee Simpson piggybacked off of her older sister Jessica to enjoy a meteoric rise with a Pop Punk sound akin to Avril Lavigne. Her first album, 2004's Autobiography, went triple platinum. Then came her disastrous performance on Saturday Night Live in October 2004, where she was caught lip-syncing when her band started playing the wrong song, followed by an embarrassing "hoe-down" when she realized what was happening. While awkward, this ultimately didn't derail her career, as she still had two more top-20 hits with "Boyfriend" and "L.O.V.E." in 2005. However, a disastrous performance at the 2005 Orange Bowl's halftime show — in which she was singing live, but so badly that she was booed offstage — cemented the idea in the public's mind that she couldn't sing without studio help. This awful performance, along with the 2005 Box Office Bomb Undiscovered, was where Simpson's career plummeted. Her following album, 2005's I Am Me, sold far less than Autobiography and didn't even reach the platinum mark. She only released one more album after that, the commercial bomb Bittersweet World in 2008. She's had a bit more success as an actress, playing Violet Foster on the short-lived Melrose Place Sequel Series and Roxie Hart in Broadway and West End productions of Chicago. But Simpson's career as a pop star is all but over, and it seems unlikely at best that she'll ever regain her pre-2005 fame. When she's brought up today outside the tabloids and reality TV, it's usually in the same breath as Milli Vanilli as the punchline of jokes about lip-syncing.

Groups and Bands

• Blood on the Dance Floor was always a controversial band, but for a long time it was mainly because the music itself fell into divisive territory due to its Crunkcore stylings (more on that in the Hip-Hop folder), and in the late '00s and early '10s they were among the faces of "scene" culture with a passionate fanbase and a Controversy-Proof Image. Lurking behind the edgy image, however, were indications that it wasn't all an act - there were a litany of allegations stretching all the way back to 2007 claiming that frontman Dahvie Vanity was a predatory pedophile. What's more, a number of their songs, such as "You Done Goofed" and "Crucified by Your Lies", directly addressed the allegations and saw Dahvie call his accusers liars and Attention Whores. For years, he was able to cultivate an impressionable cult-like fanbase that believed his every word, but a tipping point came in 2016 when Dahvie's bandmate Jayy von Monroe left on very bad terms with him, corroborating the sexual assault allegations while adding that Dahvie had subjected him to emotional and financial abuse. As other musicians defended Jayy and added their own stories of Dahvie's behavior, the band and its music were retroactively tainted for many former fans. In 2019, Spotify and Google Play both pulled Blood on the Dance Floor's music from their services due to the growing backlash against Dahvie and lyrics that violated guidelines on prohibited content, cementing Dahvie's fall from grace. Now, they're remembered as being among the worst excesses of scene culture in terms of both the music itself and the Warped Tour's late-period reputation as a haven for sexual predators. The only debate regarding them concerns why it took so long for people to believe Dahvie's accusers.
• Milli Vanilli was one of the biggest musical acts of the late 1980s (they were even featured in an episode of The Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3), but there was a fatal flaw that would doom them to this status: despite being advertised as the main men, neither Rob Pilatus nor Fab Morvan actually sung a note on their songs, instead resorting to lip-syncing in public. This reached a head in a July 1989 concert, where the backing vocals to the song "Girl You Know It's True" began to skip, exposing the band in public and causing both men to run off the stage. Pilatus spoke about the moment in an interview with the LA Times, saying "I knew right then and there, it was the beginning of the end for Milli Vanilli". And he was right — once the scandal broke, their fanbase vanished overnight. All of their music was immediately taken out of print, while class action lawsuits allowed listeners to claim refunds on Milli Vanilli recordings and merchandise. Their Grammy Award for Best New Artist was also revoked, the first and only time such a thing has ever happened. Well into the 2000s, the term "Milli Vanilli" was a byword for lip-syncing, and their image was only invoked as a punch line. Their music has quietly reappeared on streaming services in recent years, but has not received any significant airplay in any form of media since the scandal broke. Pilatus and Morvan are now generally viewed more sympathetically, due to later information making it clear they were victims of unscrupulous industry bigwigs rather than willing con artists, and their musical output has gotten a bit more appreciation. But lip-syncing jokes about them are still quite common, and it's clear that Milli Vanilli will never be taken seriously as pop stars ever again.

Songs

• The Archies' bubblegum pop song "Sugar, Sugar," by a manufactured studio group eventually tied in with the animated TV adaptation of the comic book of the same name, was a big hit in 1969, topping the Billboard and Cashbox charts. While the song was popular in its day, it quickly wore out its welcome and is now cited as a counterexample to the Nostalgia Filter, showing that even an era considered a golden age for pop music had dumb popular songs.
• Starland Vocal Band's sexually-suggestive "Afternoon Delight" was a huge hit when it was released in 1976, topping the Hot 100 and making #12 on the Year-End List. It even received three Grammy nominations, winning one, and likely contributed to the group's Best New Artist win (unfortunately for them, they never had another hit). However, the public eventually turned against the song to the point where if it's brought up today, it's most likely to make fun of it for being a cheesy Intercourse with You song that doesn't sound sexy at all. It being prominently utilized as a gag in the film Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy sealed its fate as the butt of jokes for generations to come. Todd in the Shadows summed it up like this:
  Only very rarely do you have a popular song that in retrospect pretty much everyone agrees was absolutely terrible.
• The 1977 easy listening ballad "You Light Up My Life", as recorded/covered by Debby Boone^note daughter of the aforementioned Pat Boone (it was written by Joseph Brooks and originally performed by Kasey Cisyk) was the best-selling single of the 1970s and one of the most successful singles overall, charting at Billboard #1 for ten consecutive weeks upon release. It even won both a Grammy for Song of the Year and an Oscar for Best Original Song (due to being a tie-in for the movie of the same name).^note  A movie that was panned and has largely been forgotten, which would not help the song's later reputation However, over the years the song's reputation has declined, due to extreme overexposure on the radio, criticism of the song as being bland and chaste even by love song standards, and suspicions that the song was a Christian Pop piece that was slightly secularized for a mainstream audience. Nowadays, "You Light Up My Life" is considered one of the worst songs of the 70s, often appearing on "worst songs" lists from the decade, and is played very little on radio stations today, even easy listening ones.
• When it was released in 2000, "The Christmas Shoes" by the Christian Rock band NewSong became a massive crossover hit with secular listeners, topping the Adult Contemporary chart in the US, reaching #42 on the Billboard Hot 100, and hitting #31 on the Country Music charts. Another version of the song by Girl Group 3 of Hearts also made the country music charts a year later, and a novelization was adapted into a Made-for-TV Movie. These days, it frequently shows up on lists of the worst Christmas songs of all time, mainly for its glurge-y lyrics that paint a very twisted portrait of the True Meaning of Christmas (which Patton Oswalt devoted a stand-up routine to tearing apart and making fun of). Because of the song's reputation, the song gets rarely played nowadays on radio stations during the holidays.

Rock

Genres

• Post-Grunge is to the Turn of the Millennium what disco was to The '70s - the punchline of a decade. It originated in the mid-late '90s when bands played music that took the most popular elements of grunge music while scrubbing down the more experimental elements and doing away with the dour lyrics, which were undergoing a backlash at the time due in part to Kurt Cobain's suicide. Post-grunge quickly became the most popular mainstream rock genre in the late '90s and only continued to get bigger in the 2000s, providing an ample amount of crossover hits and the forerunners of the genre became some of the biggest bands in the world.
  
  By the late 2000s, though, fatigue would set in for a variety of reasons. Firstly, post-grunge built up a reputation for being overly formulaic, as its mainstream friendliness made it easily saturate the airwaves. Secondly, numerous acts faced a backlash for writing lyrical content that was either excessively whiny and self-pitying, childishly hedonistic and misogynistic, or all of the above. And because post-grunge had become nigh inseparable from mainstream rock for over a decade, many rock fans felt that once the genre had succumbed to its own fatigue, it did lasting damage to rock music's overall reputation. Today, post-grunge is held up as a cautionary tale in what happens when you take a genre as unique as grunge and turn it into a mass-produced commercial product. Besides a small handful of acts that either incorporated elements of other genres into their sound or Genre Shifted, the post-grunge scene is now a graveyard full of bands that can't chart to save their lives or have broken up. Nowadays, whenever anyone uses the term "butt rock" in a derisive fashion, they're most likely referring to post-grunge.
• Shock Rock, rock music whose main allure was how shocking and offensive it was to Moral Guardians (such as Alice Cooper), has largely died out. The main reason is due to cultural desensitization to such musical flamboyance - mainstream pop singers like Lady Gaga, Nicki Minaj, Adam Lambert, Miley Cyrus (post-Hannah Montana), and others have made shock value such a major part of their routines that it's become, well, routine to expect musicians to push the envelope. Secondly, the internet has made far more extreme bands and genres (Gangsta Rap, Death Metal, horrorcore, etc.) accessible to young people wishing to rebel against their parents. Furthermore, the kind of Moral Guardians that once railed against shock rock, and gave it much of its allure in the process, are nowadays seen as nothing but ineffectual jokes. The last true shock rock band to make it big was Marilyn Manson in the '90s^note (who, ironically, wrote a song called "Rock Is Dead" that decried and castrated the Shock Rock genre). After Manson, the next musical moral panic starred Manson's occasional collaborator Eminem, a hip-hop musician whose sound didn't touch rock until he was already an established controversy magnet, and which was more about shock comedy than about shock alone. His cheerful, childish, MTV-friendly sound and videos made him a huge pop crossover artist, serving as the event that made shock a staple of the mainstream Top 40 pop world and sealing shock rock's obsolescence forever. Since then, this once-controversial style of rock music has turned into joke fodder.
  As Alice Cooper was also theatrical rock and straightforward rock this has allowed Alice as a solo artist to continue to record albums and have successful tours. His 2021 album, Detroit Stories debuted at #1 on Billboard’s Top Album Sales charts, and was top 10 on several other charts.
• In 2004, British indie rock became as inescapable as Britpop had been a decade prior. Listeners gravitated towards new indie and alternative bands like The Libertines, Razorlight, and especially Arctic Monkeys. These bands' aesthetic of being unglamorous, recognisably English musicians with relatable songs about everyday life as a young person in the UK stood apart from much of what passed for mainstream pop. However, rather than recognising that Arctic Monkeys had come up organically due to authenticity and a unique sound, the industry responded by marketing a suite of Arctic Monkeys sound-alike bands. The result was a flood of interchangeable and inauthentic bands filled with inexperienced musicians that were generally mediocre in terms of musical talent, leading to a sharp crash for the genre by 2008. Combined with overexposure, this quickly led to the derisive nickname of "landfill indie", with Scouting For Girls, The Fratellis, The Wombats, and The Kooks being considered archetypes of the genre; Scouting For Girls' emergence in particular was later highlighted as one of the genre's tipping points into being shunned and reviled. With the arrival of new synth-based artists like Lady Gaga and the consequent wave of "poptimism" being embraced and adopted partly as a backlash to the "indie" boom, British indie rock was almost entirely gone from the charts by 2010.
  
  These days, most British indie rock bands are extinct or nowhere near as popular as they once were. Any traces of their existence are nearly impossible to find due to releasing their music only on digital platforms, which were later removed when the genre sank in popularity. Guitar-based music in general has struggled to recover its place on the UK charts, with the likes of Ed Sheeran mainly becoming successful only after moving in a more blatantly "pop" direction. What little respect the genre does get is mostly from people who grew up with the music as children. Vice gives a thorough accounting of the nature of the genre in their "Top 50 Greatest Landfill Indie Songs" rundown, and separately interviewed Razorlight lead singer Johnny Borrell to chart the genre's rise and fall across seven songs. Borrell pointed to Razorlight's own song "Before I Fall to Pieces" as the cause of the British indie rock scene's drastic turn for the worse:
  "Yeah. So here’s where we totally fucked it up for everyone. I think you can kind of say that in 2006, at the start of this video, music was in quite an interesting place. Then three-and-a-half minutes later it's fucked."

Bands

• Creed was the biggest band in the world around the turn of the 21st Century, reaching their peak with their Diamond-selling sophomore album Human Clay in 1999. However, between frontman Scott Stapp's over-the-top yarling vocals, numerous stories of his prima donna rock star attitude, and their Signature Songs "With Arms Wide Open" and "Higher" being played on a seemingly infinite loop on the radio, a backlash formed from which the band would never recover. The tipping point came when Creed performed in Chicago at the Allstate Arena in 2002: Stapp was so drunk that he could barely stand up, and the band got booed off after only three songs. Creed soon broke up, and the backing band formed Alter Bridge with a different singer. (While never as successful as Creed, Alter Bridge is much more respected) Stapp's personal life, meanwhile, spiraled out of control to the point that he was broke and living alone in a hotel for a period of time. Today, Creed remains one of the biggest pariahs of the music world, being voted as the worst band of the '90s by the readers of Rolling Stone in 2013. It is now a social taboo to admit to having been a Creed fan, the general consensus being that they were a poor man's ripoff of Pearl Jam with an obnoxious frontman, both on and off the stage.
• Hinder was one of the many bands that fell to this status due to the death of Post-Grunge. While they were never critical favorites, their combination of post-grunge with Hair Metal stylings and lyrics won them a lot of early listeners. After they signed a deal with major label Republic Records (then called Universal Records) in 2005, they released their first album Extreme Behavior, where it debuted at #4 and went triple-platinum. The singles off the album, "Get Stoned", "Lips of an Angel", "How Long" and "Better than Me", soon took over the rock radio airwaves and turned them into one of the biggest bands in the country, and "Lips" in particular becoming a huge pop crossover success. Take It to the Limit, their 2008 follow-up, debuted even higher at #4, and while its main singles "Use Me" and "Without You" weren't quite as huge as "Lips of an Angel", they still filled up rock radio. The first sign of serious trouble was when both singles from the 2010 album All American Nightmare barely charted (although the title track was still a hit on rock radio). Not only did this not correct itself by the time they released their 2012 album, Welcome to the Freakshow, but sales were so bad that Republic Records unceremoniously dropped them. The final nail in the coffin was when frontman and founder Austin Winkler left the band in the middle of a tour in 2013 due to his drug issues. Now signed to indie label The End Records and with a friend of the band replacing Winkler, they released the albums When the Smoke Clears in 2015 and The Reign in 2017, the former only reaching #75 on the Billboard 200 and the latter failing to chart. While still around, Hinder has gone from headlining festivals to playing in small clubs with other has-beens, and their music is now viewed as emblematic of everything that was wrong with modern rock in the mid-'00s and early '10s: trashy, misogynistic, childishly hedonistic, and generally moronic.
• Limp Bizkit took off in 1997 after they were discovered by Korn's Jonathan Davis. Their blend of metal and hip-hop combined with angsty lyrics and use of turntables was a winning combination for teens and young adults across the world, bringing Nu Metal to the forefront of mainstream culture. Their 1999 sophomore album Significant Other shot up to #1 and went 7x platinum in the US alone, and their fame skyrocketed even further when their following album Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water was released in 2000, whereupon it debuted at #1 and went 6x platinum in the US. However, the band's popularity rapidly collapsed in the early-mid '00s. First was when their guitarist Wes Borland left. He was a fan-favorite and considered the most talented band member, so his departure left a huge hole in the lineup. Their 2003 album Results May Vary was delayed multiple times, got terrible reviews when it finally came out, had only one hit of note in a widely-disparaged cover of The Who’s "Behind Blue Eyes", barely made it past platinum, and proved to be a Genre-Killer for nu metal, which was already in decline at the time. The general feeling within nu metal circles was that they had created a monster, and had turned the genre into every single thing it was not supposed to be. After a hiatus, they reunited in 2011, when their album Gold Cobra debuted at #16 on the Billboard 200, and their 2014 single "Endless Slaughter" was met with near-unanimous derision and was widely decried as an incoherent, nonsensical mess. Once one of the most popular rock bands of the Y2K era, Limp Bizkit is now considered a disgrace to the genre, with frontman Fred Durst becoming a poster child of rock singers being egomaniacal jerks (though he did lighten up in the 2010s), and though nu metal did regain some esteem in the eyes of the music industry and the public, they're considered a joke by several people. Few bands are more hated nowadays than Limp Bizkit. Yet the funny thing is, Durst doesn't really disagree — the band's long-delayed 2021 album was titled Still Sucks, and the lyrics are filled with Self-Deprecation. Nowadays, they are mostly known for Durst's recent attempts at being a film director, with most film reviewers noting what he used to do, and that a JoJo's Bizarre Adventure villain's ^note (Sports Maxx) Stand was named after them. Even then, most mentions of said Stand are specifically to refer to "Flaccid Pancake" and "Limp Viscuit", its silly-sounding Writing Around Trademarks renames in the West. The band does have its defenders still — especially overseas, where the backlash against Nu Metal was nowhere near as pronounced as it was in the United States — but it's safe to say it's highly unlikely they'll ever come close to their former fame. If nothing else, wrestling fans (especially those who grew up watching in the Attitude Era) have a soft spot for them seeing as how their song "Rollin'" was used by The Undertaker during his "American Badass" phase while "My Way" and "Crack Addict" are closely tied to two of the all-time best events ever in WrestleMania X-Seven and XIX respectively.
• Puddle of Mudd became one of the biggest rock bands in the world after releasing their 2001 debut studio album Come Clean, which yielded four big hits, two of which were crossover successes and sold five million copies. Unfortunately, their 2003 follow-up Life on Display killed their popularity as fast as Come Clean made it. The album got trashed by critics and failed to go platinum, and while its songs did well on rock radio, none of them crossed over to pop. They had a small comeback in 2007 when the Title Track to their third album Famous was embraced with open arms by rock radio stations, but it was the Alfred Hitchcock-inspired "Psycho" that looked to put them back on top. But that's not what would happen when they released Volume 4: Songs in the Key of Love & Hate in 2009. The album tanked massively and got the same tepid reviews as Life on Display, though the era was still a decent success on rock radio. Less than a year afterward, all the original members of the group except Wes Scantlin were gone, and it looked like their 2011 cover album would be their last release. In later years, Scantlin became a raging alcoholic and more notorious for his obnoxious behavior both on- and off-stage, such as accusing a random concertgoer of stealing his house and repeated arrests. The final straw was a gig in England in March 2016, when Scantlin was so drunk that his bandmates just walked offstage. Things seemed to get better for the band near the end of the decade, as Wes Scantlin announced that he had overcome his alcoholism in 2018 and the band released its fifth album Welcome to Galvania in September 2019, which missed the Billboard 200 but managed to snag a Top 10 Mainstream Rock single. However, this would be relegated to a mere footnote in the band's history in April 2020 when a video of them covering Nirvana's "About a Girl" was discovered, which quickly went viral and became the subject of several memes due to Scantlin's strained, off-key vocal performance. Today, Puddle of Mudd is one of the most hated bands of the new millennium, with any reference to them today only being done to mock their name, note Scantlin's resemblance to wrestler Edge, criticize his "whiny voice", call them a poor man's ripoff of Nirvana, bring up the aforementioned video, or be held up as another example of "X-rated post-grunge garbage". Even in the "never say never" world that is the music industry, Puddle of Mudd has fallen so hard that it would be nothing short of a miracle for them to regain any sort of respect.
• Suicide Silence were one of many bands to benefit from the rising popularity of deathcore in the late 2000s. Despite being scoffed at by metal purists, they managed to become hugely successful and even the death of Mitch Lucker seemed to be nothing but a speed bump after his replacement by Eddie Hermida. However, the band's fortunes would take a bad turn with the release of their self-titled fifth album, which saw them make a Genre Shift to Nu Metal. Professional critics were ambivalent about the album, but fans were outraged by what they saw as the band selling out. To make matters worse, Eddie Hermida was accused of sexual harassment. While he managed to escape legal consequences, the damage was done. While the band would return to their classic sound with Become The Hunter and Remember... You Must Die, both albums have been poor sellers despite a positive reception from critics. Today, the band stands as another cautionary tale of what happens when you piss off your fans.

Solo artists

• During the '80s and '90s, former Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious was frequently touted as a musical genius and worshipped by teenage rebels in the wake of his 1979 death from a drug overdose whereas now he's viewed much more critically. For starters, years after his death it was revealed by former bandmates that Vicious hardly knew how to play bass (if he even could to begin with), so much so that sometimes the other members would turn off his amp during performances since his playing was THAT bad. Rather tellingly, the Pistol's iconic album Never Mind the Bollocks didn't actually have Vicious playing bass, nor was he even a member of the group during that time; the bass guitar on that album played by Steve Jones and Glen Matlock. It's notable that Sid's only real lyrical contribution was "Belsen Was A Gas", which the rest of the band thought was in bad taste even at the time. Modern punk scenes actively avoid Nazi references due to decades of clashes with Neo-Nazis, only making the song's (and by extension, Sid's) reputation fall further. As the audiences that were teenagers at the height of the Sex Pistols' musical influence aged out of edgy teenaged punk rock rebellion, and rock in general and punk rock in particular splintered into competing subgroups and seem unlikely to ever regain their former relevance or mainstream popularity, it seems unlikely that Sid Vicious will ever find a new audience from anywhere but a movie specifically about how Sid was an awful musician and a mess of a human being.

Technology

• 8-track cartridges were introduced in the mid-1960s as a way for motorists to listen to their own music in the car in stereo. Players for the home soon followed, and through the 1970s, they were a serious challenger to the LP record in terms of sales, as they had greater fidelity than cassettes at the time and were easier to use than reel-to-reel tapes. They were mainly successful in North America and the U.K., while the cassette filled this niche almost immediately in Continental Europe and Latin America. While they could store an album, even a complete double album, without having to change sides, record companies would change the running order from the LP to avoid interruptions in the program. Record companies also used cheaper parts, which would make the cartridges tend to break. Cassettes improved in fidelity by the late '70s and could use the same running order as the LP, were more portable, and more easily recordable than 8-tracks. The 8-track's popularity rapidly collapsed, and they disappeared from store shelves in the early '80s, even though record clubs and truck stops sold them until the end of the decade. While the other analog formats of the era — vinyl records and cassettes — have had revivals in the 21st century, no one seems to be interested in reviving the 8-track cartridge, which remains a symbol of '70s kitsch. The format has since become a byword for obsolete, dead-end technology, along with Betamax. Only a few novelty releases have emerged since the format left mainstream distribution.

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