Franchise Original Sin / Music

• From Cracked's Adam Tod Brown: "4 Classic Rap Albums That Ruined Rap Music."
  • The Notorious B.I.G.'s Ready to Die for "marrying rap and high fashion". His slick, suave persona stood out in a crowded genre that, until then, was dominated by a gritty, inner-city gang banger image, allowing him to sell Gangsta Rap to a mainstream that was still a bit uneasy with such content. In the long run, though, he wound up being the Trope Maker for Glam Rap, which completely took over hip-hop in the coming decade. Brown later doubled down on this assessment, going so far as to claim that, had Biggie never been murdered, the path of his career and music in the ensuing years would've mirrored that of Puff Daddy (who was his mentor and boss at Bad Boy Records) or Jay-Z. What separated Biggie from his later bling-era peers, however, was that his music was still as hard-edged as any proper gangsta rap. He may have been rapping from the perspective of The Don rather than a street hustler, and he made it clear that he enjoyed his money and power, but he also portrayed being "the boss" as a life of paranoia and loneliness, one where his wealth was soaked in blood and misery while he constantly had to look over his shoulder to make sure none of his many enemies and false friends tried to come for him. The Flanderized version of Biggie's style, on the other hand, embraced the Damn, It Feels Good to Be a Gangster! tropes that Biggie deconstructed, going straight for the "bling and bitches" and paying only lip service (if that) to what it took to get them.
  • Raekwon the Chef and Ghostface Killah's Only Built 4 Cuban Linx starting the trend of rappers taking on several different personas and alter-egos. Only Built 4 Cuban Linx was enough of a masterpiece that awkwardly trying to shoehorn in all the various names and internal mythology into the opening of the album barely dented its success, but it produced an era of rappers trying to Follow the Leader, starting with Nas himself, that just made getting into their work exhausting and impenetrable.
  • LL Cool J's Bigger and Deffer, particularly the song "I Need Love", inflicting the rap ballad on the world. While "I Need Love" was a great song, few rappers have been able to do the rap ballad half as well as LL Cool J, instead producing sappy and treacly songs that at best aren't what their core audience are here for, and at worst are grossly commercial at the expense of the actual music, especially when trying to mix rap and R&B.
  • De La Soul's Three Feet High And Rising and De La Soul Is Dead, both great albums when they were actually playing music, popularized 'skits', which break up the flow of an album and are rarely all that interesting, but rappers love experimenting and having fun with them and they serve to inflate the track list and make the album look like better value than it is.
• "Believe" from Cher and the abuse of Auto-Tune. Before then, Auto-Tune was primarily used for its intended goal of (minor) pitch correction. However, Cher liked the sound it gave to her voice and decided to keep it. It worked for "Believe" since, as a techno-pop song, it was supposed to sound weird and otherworldly, and that song was a massive hit. However, ever since, Auto-Tune has slowly started to take over pop music, with almost every song having a weird robotic element to the vocals, even songs that aren't supposed to sound weird and otherworldly.
• Lupe Fiasco was lauded for his political and social commentary in a genre that, by the '00s, was largely more pop-oriented, cleverly exploring topics like urban poverty and greed on his albums Food & Liquor and The Cool. Both of these albums are very highly regarded in 2000s hip-hop. However, his subsequent albums Lasers and Food & Liquor II were accused of trying to do the same, but with less subtlety. General fan consensus is not as positive on his subsequent albums.
• Eminem:
  • Much of Eminem's material since recovering from his drug overdose is criticized by reviewers and casual listeners for traits such as his Class Clown-to-Wangsty Mood-Swinger lyrics, his heavy use of Take That, Critics! and Accentuate the Negative, his autobiographical subject matter, and his reliance on Vulgar Humor and pop culture references. However, these traits were all present in his most successful material during the late '90s and early 2000s. Back then, they were the driving source of his appeal thanks to how well they meshed with the counterculture of the era (as exemplified by the contemporary rise of South Park and works influenced by it). However, changing times also brought about changes in tastes and social concerns and buffered the shock value that Eminem's style once had, resulting in his work being seen as increasingly antiquated.
  • When it was released in 2010, Eminem's album Recovery was seen as a major return to form for him, featuring collaborations with several major pop stars ("Love the Way You Lie" with Rihanna was an especially big hit) and lyrics about his musical legacy. However, his 2017 album Revival received a far more negative reception for doing the same things, as the collaborations with the likes of Beyoncé and Ed Sheeran, and the lyrics discussing social and political issues, were felt to be a case of trying too hard to keep up with the times. This led to a substantial backlash against Recovery, which is now seen by many as the start of a second Audience-Alienating Era.
  • It's common for a certain subset of his fans to complain about how much more socially conscious Eminem has become over the years, mourning his don't-give-a-fuck attitude from his early work and saying he got 'woke' for doing things like speaking out against Donald Trump, kneeling at the Super Bowl, or promising to stop using the word "faggot" in his raps. Eminem was always much nicer, more sensitive and more mature than his Enemy Within Slim Shady persona (not that this is a significant achievement), and right from the beginning his work emphasised his values of equality, freedom, working class self-expression, the corrupting influence of fame and money, and his hatred of bullies, rapists, corrupt authority figures and child abusers. As far back as The Slim Shady LP, he was already inserting apologies for his offensive lyrics into the songs themselves. He was already much Kinder and Cleaner by The Eminem Show in 2002, all but dropping the slurs, airing regret about his assault charges and turning Slim Shady into a Smug Super standing for freedom of speech. 2004's Encore is also full of apologetic songs, most prominently an extended olive branch to his beef opponents, and a song apologising for a racist freestyle he did when he was 16, the last of which many fans hold to be among the greatest songs he ever wrote.
  • The sober Eminem writes a lot of Self-Empowerment Anthem material that is often mocked as overly sentimental and bad taste. Yet even his early work under his Slim Shady persona had similar inspirational messages, just expressed by a Villain Protagonist. In "The Real Slim Shady", Slim suggests his evil influence on America's youth is just a way of helping them be themselves, gifting The Power of Apathy to his audience to liberate themselves cathartically, while baiting Moral Guardians. "Sing For The Moment", which is about his good influence on his child fans, also shows an artist concerned with uplifting his audience. In his Recovered Addict career, the empowerment songs are more direct, and focus on his own quest To Be a Master and the Hard Work Fallacy — in part because Eminem's much happier personal life gave him less to talk about.
• Post-Grunge is The Scrappy of music genres for fans of Alternative Rock, who by and large view it as a betrayal of everything that grunge stood for, taking a genre that was born as a backlash against corporate rock and turning it into a symbol of such. Yet the warning signs of where grunge was headed were there almost from the moment it got big.
  • Nirvana's Nevermind, the landmark album that catapulted grunge into the spotlight, came to be known as much for its epic riffs and (by grunge standards) fairly polished and commercial sound as it was for its Darker and Edgier lyrics and subject matter. Kurt Cobain himself developed very conflicted feelings towards Nevermind, particularly the lead single (and the band's Signature Song) "Smells Like Teen Spirit", largely for this reason, and Nirvana's follow-up album In Utero (which, notably, a large contingent of fans sees as Nirvana's true masterpiece) quite deliberately had a more abrasive, less mainstream sound in an attempt to turn off what Cobain saw as the band's Misaimed Fandom. Even as early as 1997, before Post-Grunge had fully emerged as the dominant brand of American rock, music critic Chuck Eddy had noted that Nirvana pioneered its most overdone tropes.
  "Nirvana popularized the hokey 'here comes the part of the song where we have a tantrum' school of '90s rock that's played a major role in hiding Courtney's powerful voice ever since, and they were pioneers of the 'you can tell this song is serious because we're playing it really slow' school as well."
  • Nirvana's contemporaries Pearl Jam and Soundgarden also played a heavy role in popularizing the most derided tropes of post-grunge, such as recycled Classic Rock riffs, Wangsty lyrics, and especially yarling (post-grunge vocalists from Scott Stapp to Chad Kroeger were heavily influenced by Eddie Vedder's style of singing). Even at the time, Pearl Jam's debut album Ten attracted some Hype Backlash from Seattle grunge purists, with Cobain calling them sellouts and Vedder himself expressing disappointment over the production, though their continued experimentation on Vs. and Vitalogy, as well as their fight with Ticketmaster, eventually won Cobain and many other critics over.
• Emo Music is frequently criticised for angry, sexist lyricism that frequently spills over into glorifying downright disturbing views towards women. This arguably dates back to what may be one of the key Trope Codifiers for the genre, Weezer’s critically-acclaimed Pinkerton, which has lyrics that frequently engage in stalking, oriental fetishism, or downright manipulative, possessive behaviour. The main distinction is that while Pinkerton largely comes across as pathetic and disturbing, it’s on purpose, with enough moments of self-awareness and humor to make it clear that they knew the sentiments contained within the album weren’t remotely healthy — something that many of the bands that followed in their footsteps seemed to lack.
  • It's worth noting, however, that going back further to when the genre was an offshoot of the Washington, D.C. Hardcore Punk scene shows what is very much an aversion of this trope, as the much more introverted introspective lyricism was partially meant as a reaction against the sexist attitudes common in hardcore punk circles at the time, something which may surprise the genre's more serious detractors who are largely only familiar with what came out in the 2000s.
• When Queen released the album The Game in 1980, with its disco and Synth-Pop influences, it managed to be a smash hit in the US (where it made about half its sales), even though disco was undergoing heavy backlash there at the time. It's still considered one of their better albums, yet on their 1982 follow-up Hot Space, they embraced disco whole-hog. Hot Space was lambasted for its deviations from the band's traditional rock style, and while Queen's international popularity would quickly bounce back, Americans wouldn't take them seriously again until after the death of Freddie Mercury in 1991.
• Whereas the first two Doors albums, The Doors (Album) and Strange Days, are good enough that even the filler material is compelling, from Waiting For the Sun onwards the band increasingly came to be consumed by its esoteric mystique — the very same quality that had helped to fuel its success in the first place. The band's impenetrable Word Salad lyrics weren't too distracting when the music itself was so enjoyable, but the combination of inscrutable lyrics and mediocre tunes was just too much of a hurdle for the later albums to surmount...until L.A. Woman, that is.
• Disco began as just that: music played in discos. In a setting where people are dancing, songs with a constant uptempo beat, musical repetition and extended length are welcome, and in the right hands those things could be used as the basis for well-crafted music. But once disco hit the mainstream and everyone started playing Follow the Leader, those characteristics started to annoy people and the backlash was inevitable.
• Linkin Park's Minutes to Midnight was widely criticized for the lack of rapping and Mike Shinoda's presence on vocals in general, with Chester Bennington taking up all the spotlight. However, two of the most popular songs from Meteora — "Numb" and "Breaking the Habit" — did not feature any rapping, and the latter didn't feature Shinoda on vocals at all. This was tolerated back then, because the rest of the album had Shinoda featured prominently, but when he's Demoted To Backing Vocalist, and Chester was the de facto frontman, that's when people objected. This has since been acknowledged, as Shinoda has been rapping (and also, singing) much more prominently in their later albums.
• The early-mid-'10s saw the rise of "bro-country", a strain of Country Music that was often derided for overblown electric guitars, computerized hip-hop beats and fratbro-esque lyrics that painted an over-idealized portrait of life in the rural South as a land of booze, sex, and partying. While it was popularized by Florida Georgia Line's "Cruise" (for which the term was coined) and the later material of Luke Bryan and Jason Aldean, Todd in the Shadows pins the blame a decade further back, pointing out that Big & Rich were doing country with a guitar-focused sound, party-focused lyrics, and a smittering of rap influences as early as 2004. While their brand of it was generally well-received for being ballsy and interesting, later rock-and-rap-influenced country seemed to be using its influences entirely to strain at gaining street cred.
• Metallica:
  • The band's 1991 Self-Titled Album (known to fans as "The Black Album") was criticized by longtime fans for moving away from their trademark Thrash Metal style, but it was not only by far the most successful album of their career, it was one of the best-selling albums of all time, earning them legions of new fans. However, their subsequent albums Load and ReLoad in 1996 and 1997, and St. Anger in 2003 saw them increasingly move towards mainstream hard rock, producing what came to be viewed as an Audience-Alienating Era for the band in the '90s and '00s.
  • St. Anger is widely considered the band's worst album by fans, but something observed among critics (who were polarized, but overall considerably less incensed than audiences) is that many of the album's more infamous failings can be found in some form on their much more acclaimed albums. ...And Justice For All had a notoriously shoddy mix where the bass was almost nonexistent, and James doesn't exactly have a spotless record regarding lyrics, with over-the-top and unintentionally goofy lines permeating the entire Metallica catalogue. What made the difference for those previous albums was that Metallica were able to play to everyone's strengths and help outshine their negative qualities with great overall songwriting and energy — when St. Anger rolled around, the band was notoriously dysfunctional and barely able to work together, resulting in the album's conspicuously more disconnected and confused construction.
• David Bowie's Let's Dance album was positively received at first. The idea of such a weird artist as Bowie making an album of masterful commercial pop was just crazy enough to be interesting, and fans eagerly awaited which new sound he'd go for next. The disappointment when Bowie went on to release two increasingly poor '80s pop albums was enough to turn fan opinion against Let's Dance as the point where Bowie's Audience-Alienating Era starts, even though the actual content of the album is still thought of as pretty much fine on its own.
• Michael Jackson:
  • His later albums were often criticised for his tendency towards the syrupy and the angry. These elements were always in place, but were kept balanced out with accessible music, largely due to others around him (such as his brothers in The Jacksons and producer Quincy Jones). By the time of Dangerous, Jackson had total control over his music and the elements described became much more prevalent. While it and its follow-ups HIStory: Past, Present, and Future -- Book I and Invincible were very popular at the time, they are often seen nowadays as weaker albums than Off the Wall, Thriller and Bad.
  • As beloved as the video for "Thriller" is, almost everything that would come to be mocked in his later "short films" starting with "Bad" begins with it: extended Talky Bookends that could be excised without affecting the Excuse Plot, celebrity cameos (Vincent Price's "rap" here), state-of-the-art special effects lingered upon for minutes on end, and a big-name director behind the camera. The difference is that beyond the novelty of all this in 1983, these elements work together as a piece—it's a horror movie pastiche befitting a song about horror movies. Later "short films" would have increasingly ridiculous and random Excuse Plots and Talky Bookends, name directors hired solely to give Jackson "street" credibility, celebrity cameos that left them extremely dated within five years or so, and (in the more fantastical examples) then-state-of-the-art effects shoehorned in every nook and cranny because Jackson was the greatest entertainer in the world and nothing less would do for him.
• The conventional wisdom that Woodstock represented the zenith of the dream of The '60s, while the Altamont concert four months later represented the collapse of that dream, ignores that many of the same issues that plagued Altamont also plagued Woodstock. A larger-than-expected crowd that became a logistical nightmare, a major traffic jam, people suffering bad LSD trips, and even deaths all occurred at Woodstock^note There were two recorded Woodstock deaths: a heroin overdose and a concertgoer sleeping in a nearby farm field getting run over by a tractor. Obviously, the big difference was that Woodstock's organizers didn't hire the notorious Oakland chapter of the Hells Angels as a security force, but in general, they lucked out in making some good choices in key areas (like medical facilities) that prevented a big disaster.
• The same applies to Woodstock '99, the notorious thirty-years-later follow-up that degenerated into a riot. Podcast 99, a podcast covering the history of Woodstock '99, notes that everything that went wrong in 1999 had precedent in 1969, in particular the Troubled Production nature of the event (including identical problems) and the fact that the organizers were out mainly to make money. Obviously, the original Woodstock wasn't as blatantly commercial as '99 was, but the organizers were still seeking to raise money to open a recording studio. It was just forced into being a free concert after so many more people than usual showed up and tore down the fences to get in (potentially starting a riot if faced with a paywall), while the exorbitant prices up-front at the '99 festival made the commercialist nature much more obvious. An HBO documentary on Woodstock '99 also noted how in 1969 there were people disgruntled with all the logistical problems, that forced solutions such as airlifting supplies, something elevated (along with the quantity of problems) in 1999 to the point of finishing the festival with a Powder Keg Crowd breaking, burning and looting everything in sight.
• The later music of The Beatles (i.e. from Revolver onwards) has often been criticised for being shamelessly cheery, lovey-dovey, and family-friendly, with "Yellow Submarine" considered the point where the band had started writing music for children. This, however, was a problem right from the beginning, as Brian Epstein deliberately moulded them into an inoffensive, radio-friendly group to distance them from their more rebellious Quarrymen/pre-1960 era - resulting in oodles of light-hearted boy band-esque songs. The band did, at times, attempt to portray themselves as less politically correct (for example, the "Butcher cover" and John Lennon's increasingly dark, anti-establishment songwriting) but were frequently held back by the pressure to keep their (mostly) pristine image intact, and this pressure contributed to their eventual break-up.
• Rascal Flatts moved toward a new sound in 2005. Originally purveyors of fairly light and breezy country-pop, they went for a much heavier sound starting with 2005's "What Hurts the Most". Produced by Dann Huff, it stood out thanks to its Power Ballad production style and emotional lyrics, and remains one of their most famous and beloved songs. But over the next five years (2005-2010), Huff continued to subject them to the Loudness War, saturating all their songs in screaming guitar solos and blaring string sections, which forced lead singer Gary LeVox's voice into an extremely high-pitched, melismatic, nasal delivery that quickly grated on critics and fans alike (the nadir widely considered to be "Bob That Head", one of their few uptempos in this era), combined with attempts at "emotional" lyrics that attempted to duplicate "What Hurts the Most" but often felt hollow and full of narm. Fortunately for fans, they got the message, as after their original label Lyric Street closed, they moved to Big Machine, and ultimately ditched Huff in favor of producing by themselves.
• Eddie Deezen has referred to the 1960 film G.I. Blues, Elvis Presley's first project upon completing his service in the Army, as the point where Elvis' career died, mainly by establishing the musical comedy formula that all of his films after that would take. John Lennon shared much the same opinion, remarking upon Elvis' passing in 1977 that Elvis "died when he went in the Army" and that his entire career that followed was "a living death". In G.I. Blues, the once-controversial, rough-hewn, hip-shaking rock star became a handsome, clean-cut romantic lead serenading young women with ballads that would've been more at home with Frank Sinatra or Dean Martin, and when the film became one of the biggest hits of 1960, that Bowdlerised version of Elvis became his type going forward. The difference between G.I. Blues and Elvis' later musicals was that he made this one with good intentions as a tribute to his fellow soldiers, and its story (about a tank crewman serving in West Germany who moonlights as a singer) was heavily based on his own experiences in the Army. The rest of his film career, by contrast, felt increasingly mercenary, especially after his stabs at dramatic acting after G.I. Blues failed at the box office while Blue Hawaii became the biggest hit of his film career, hence why Elvis' movies came to be remembered as his Audience-Alienating Era.
• As noted in this video by Sarah Z, ARK Music Factory originally made pretensions towards being a legitimate record company as opposed to a vanity label, recording pop songs that, while not great, were more or less acceptable... until "Friday" by Rebecca Black, the worst song they ever recorded, became a smash hit in 2011 on the strength of Bile Fascination. From that point forward, ARK tried to make lightning strike twice with songs that were designed to be So Bad, It's Good by copying the "Friday" formula, to diminishing returns that culminated in the label folding in 2013. Moreover, Sarah Z also argues that the impact of "Friday" reached beyond just music, marking a negative turning point for internet culture as a whole. The massive controversy that swirled around the song demonstrated that anger and outrage could be very effective drivers of conversation and engagement, creating a template for later companies, celebrities, and influencers that engaged in publicity stunts designed to court controversy in order to build brand awareness.
• Macklemore's "Same Love" was an Anvilicious song about a social issue (homophobia and same-sex marriage) that risked coming off as insincere thanks to Macklemore's own privileges, but the song was largely a success, in part because Macklemore took a step back after the first verse to ensure that he wasn't the focus of the song, and also by giving a prominent feature to an LGBT musician, Mary Lambert, to provide some much-needed emotional weight. "Same Love" would unfortunately pigeonhole Macklemore as "that white rapper who talks about other people's issues", and later songs in the same vein would often lack the same level of precision that made "Same Love" work, in addition to making the songs be much more about his own experiences. 2016's "White Privilege II", about his place within Hip-Hop in the age of Black Lives Matter, is generally held as the point where it became obnoxious, with its almost nine-minute running time making himself look overly indulgent.
• Unique Leader Records saw increasingly strong accusations of Network Decay in the late 2010s due to the large quantity of deathcore acts that they had recently signed, which became much more prominent after the label's founder Erik Lindmark died in 2018 and Jamie Graham took over their European operations. This, however, was a phenomenon that stretched all the way back to 2010, when Erik signed Rings of Saturn and Halo of Gunfire and wound up having the former turn into one of his flagship bands, and then began signing more and more deathcore acts over the course of the decade that strayed increasingly far from Death Metal.
• Rush's Audience-Alienating Era is often identified by their usage of synthesizers and lack of Epic Rocking. Both of these elements were present on two of their most acclaimed albums, Permanent Waves and Moving Pictures. In particular, synths were used on the comparitively short song "Tom Sawyer", which is considered by many fans and critics to be Rush's best song. The difference is that those two albums used the synthesizers primarily as backing instruments as opposed to putting them front and center as they did from Signals onward. Furthermore, while Permanent Waves and Moving Pictures lacked the 20+ minute epics of earlier albums, they still included fairly long and complex compositions (the 9-minute "Natural Science" and 11-minute "The Camera Eye", respectively), while subsequent albums rarely even had songs reaching a length of six minutes.
• Gorillaz as a project has always had multiple collaborators, with some of their most beloved songs featuring a guest artist. Demon Days (Album), which is often considered their golden age, has a total of five guest artists, while Plastic Beach got ten, which was a plot point in that phase's lore. That said, the focus was always on the band itself, with extensive lore and character work. This led to a popular criticism of Humanz, where it felt like the guest artists outshined the band to the point where 2D's voice was only in a select few spots. This in turn made fans feel like the album was a collaborative work using the Gorillaz name rather than an actual Gorillaz album. It was addressed when "Sleeping Powder" was released during the phase, which was a song directly by and about 2D in-universe. The Now Now also only had two guest artists as a response to the criticism. Additionally, both The Now Now and Song Machine go back to focusing more on the band as characters.
• Writing based real life events have always been a strength for Taylor Swift with her music, but this got to the point of Continuity Lockout and inaccessibility when listening to reputation. Additionally, most people are put off by the drastic change in image, as well as the shockingly petty lyrical content, but all of those elements have always been present in her early works. They are just not as prominently or as publicized like in this album, as well as the people she is feuding with (Kanye and Kim Kardashian) are much more relevant and famous than her previous feuds.

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