Overshadowed By Controversy / Music

People

A-F

• Most people know 6ix9ine (real name Daniel Hernandez) for his public feuds with other celebrities, his aggressive and often violent behavior, and his convictions, for which he got all slaps on the wrists for, of using a child in a sexual performance, being involved in the activity of Nine Trey Gangsters (which included racketeering and conspiracy to commit a murder), and becoming a government snitch than the fact that he's even a musician at all. Perhaps disturbingly enough, he has been involved in a number of children's charities and even spent a day with a terminally ill eight-year old girl who wanted to see him; the reason why he wasn't flagged as a sex offender was a plea bargain he accepted to lessen his sentence.
• Absu was once a well-respected underground black/thrash metal stalwart, but lately they are more widely known for the 2020 controversy wherein Melissa (nee Matt) "Vis Crom" Moore came out as a trans woman and alleged that she was fired by founder Russ "Proscriptor McGovern" Givens for that reason^note which occurred in 2018 and had been known for a while in her circle, but was never brought to broader public attention until mid-2020, when Moore learned that the "new" iteration of Absu was going to be using the songs she wrote without her permission. Moore also alleged that she had written and recorded an entire Absu album that would never see the light of day as a result of her firing. To add to the acrimony, Moore attempted to take control of the "Absu" name while Proscriptor later announced that his version of Absu would rebrand as Apsu. These events divided Absu fans: many did not take kindly to Proscriptor's alleged transphobia and lack of any real response to the controversy and mocked his pretentious and unnecessarily flowery speaking style, while other fans called out Moore for essentially destroying a legendary band that she had only joined in their third decade with allegations that have not been completely confirmed.
• Although Ace of Base is still a respected name in dance music, they received a great deal of unwanted attention in the 90s when it was learned that band member Ulf Ekberg had dabbled in neo-Nazism in his youth. While Ekberg regrets this phase, it was still enough to get the entire band labeled as neo-Nazis and blacklisted from many radio stations.
• Ryan Adams had racked up almost constant critical acclaim for his music, but he had always been better known for his erratic Jerkass behaviour, his hard drinking, and allegedly having No Sense of Humor^note Stemming from an incident when he ordered security to remove a fan from a concert after the latter jokingly requested him to play a song by the similarly-named Bryan Adams.. However, this was nothing compared to 2019, when he was hit with numerous sexual abuse accusations, including from his ex-wife Mandy Moore. It was also alleged that his P.R. team had strong-armed an unidentified publication into cutting part of an interview with another accuser, folk singer Phoebe Bridgers, where she detailed the alleged abuse. Several radio stations immediately started dropping his work, a scheduled tour was cancelled, and plans to release four albums over the course of 2019 were shelved. While Adams would later resurface with a public apology and surprise released two of those planned albums from December 2020 onwards, nearly all major media outlets refused to touch them, indicating that the damage to his reputation still hadn't been undone.
• While All That Remains has a devoted fanbase, they've also faced a lot of criticism for frontman Phil LaBonte's outspoken right-wing views and repeated feuds with other musicians.
• AOA had once been a well-known girl group/band in the K-Pop industry, originally consisting of eight members in 2012, but have since gone down to four. However, their popularity took a hit in July 2020 when former member Mina, who left in 2019, made a series of Instagram posts detailing her experiences with being on the receiving end of bullying by one of the older members of the group for ten years, to the point of becoming suicidal, which influenced her decision to leave the group. Things escalated when Jimin, the main rapper and leader of the group, responded to the accusations by posting "Fiction" to her Instagram stories before deleting it, and Mina promptly exposed Jimin as the bully. The situation only worsened when Mina posted that she was visited by all the AOA members at her home, and Jimin had given her a very disingenuous apology to her. Finally, AOA's popularity took another major blow in the following month, when Mina was hospitalized twice after attempting suicide; the first one following her lashing out at others on Instagram and telling them they didn't know the extent of the bullying, and the second one following her posting pictures of the attempt and blaming the founder of FNC Entertainment, Jimin, and fellow member Seolhyun for driving her to her attempt. By then, the damage had been done, and Jimin quickly became a target of criticism from various fans before FNC Entertainment made her retire not just from the group, but from the K-pop industry as well, and it is highly unlikely that AOA will ever recover from the scandal.
• American metalcore band As I Lay Dying was once one of the most successful acts in the American metal scene. Then frontman Tim Lambesis was arrested for attempting to hire a hitman to kill his wife, and their popularity evaporated overnight. While Lambesis has attempted to clean up his act after being paroled, it's unlikely that they'll ever reach the heights they did before his arrest.
• Iggy Azalea is much better known for the controversy over her cultural appropriation^note Namely, that she's a white Australian who drops a lot of African-American imagery on her work. and making intolerant and homophobic remarks than she is for her music.
• Movie composer Klaus Badelt was a rising star in the world of film scoring for a time, with his work on the soundtrack for Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl garnering him enormous praise. But then it was revealed that most of the work was actually done by his mentor Hans Zimmer, with Badelt simply claiming the credit. His reputation never recovered, and he now largely works on indies and straight-to-DVD movies.
• Azealia Banks burst onto the music scene in 2011, when her debut single "212" earned critical raves and positioned her to be one of the next big things in hip hop. However, since then she's become far better known for her crass and confrontational behavior on social media and real-life violent incidents than she is for her music. Not helping is her defense of controversial individuals (such as accusing Bill Cosby's alleged rape victims of lying) and throwing homophobic and racist slurs at anyone she got into fights with (notably former One Direction member Zayn Malik, who is of Pakistani descent, whom she referred to as a "curry-scented bitch" and implicitly threatened with violence by making reference to smuggling firearms into the UK, which got her kicked off of a festival bill and earned her a lengthy suspension from Twitter). She's been kicked off at least three social media platforms, and her musical career has suffered as a result since no one wants to work with her or book her in concerts anymore. While she has remained in the public eye, even her most vocal fans have conceded that her behavior has basically destroyed any chance of her ever reaching her full potential and cost her the chance to be as big as someone like Megan Thee Stallion.
• Kathleen Battle is recognized as one of the greatest opera singers alive today. However, she also developed a reputation for behavior that was too over-the-top and egotistical even for an opera diva: throwing tantrums over the size of her dressing room, and changing hotels over and over again when performing with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, for instance. When she was hired by the Metropolitan Opera in 1994, she would leave rehearsals early, arrive late, or simply not show up. There were also complaints of "nasty" behavior toward other cast members. Finally, she was fired from the Metropolitan Opera, and cast cheered when they heard the news. While she has continued to sing, she has never lived down the stories of her behavior.
• Jeff Beck's nearly six-decade career, which included being a founding member of The Yardbirds, winning eight Grammy awards, and frequently being listed among the top five greatest guitarists in the world, has been overshadowed by his final two years, in which he decided to help rehabilitate the image of his longtime friend Johnny Depp, who had become a pariah in the entertainment industry for his drug use and his alleged abuse of ex-wife Amber Heard. Said rehabilitation consisted of a joint album, 18, that was widely panned because of Depp's lyrics (some of which were allegedly plagiarized), and a tour that coincided with the end of the equally controversial Depp v. Heard trial, which came off as an extremely tasteless victory lap for Depp after he'd spent six weeks humiliating Heard in court. Beck's sudden death a few months later meant that 18 became his final album and tour, leaving him unable to shake off his connection to Depp and his open display of taking a side in the immensely hot-button issue of Depp vs. Heard.
• Transgender DJ and model Munroe Bergdorf, already popular among the gay community for her music, had her popularity boosted when she became L'Oréal's first transgender model in 2016. Her career then took a huge hit when she made a long rant on Facebook referring to all white people as colonialists and racists, which many people found confusing due to her being biracial on her mother's side. This has cost her a large amount of respect from her fans and getting revoked from L'Oréal.
• Big Lurch, real name Antron Singleton, was once a popular rapper known for being a pioneer for the “Horrorcore” style of rap. However, after being arrested in 2002 for murdering and partially cannibalizing his roommate’s girlfriend while high on PCP, for which he received life in prison with no possibility of parole, he became mostly remembered for the murder, with his music falling into obscurity.
• Fans and non-fans of the Japanese Alt Idol genre group BiS remember the Take That! to mainstream idol theme that went too far. Some MVs and lyrics have loads of Nightmare Fuel, squicktastic and nearly pornographic premises, especially the infamous MV of "My Ixxx", which some idols perform almost naked in Aokigahara, a forest which is infamous for many suicide victims who hanged themselves. All of this, of course, led to the disbandment of this group.
• Black Box and C&C Music Factory, while successful in the late 1980s and early 1990s, are mostly known to non-fans of that era's House Music due to the fact that they both used an R&B singer named Martha Wash on their tracks, yet didn't give her credit for her vocals and actually credited the women^note most of them were skinny models, contrasting with Wash herself in their music videos instead. DJs and critics began to catch on because Wash had already been famous a decade prior as half of The Weather Girls, and once it was pointed out, it became pretty obvious who was singing on the songs. This led to Wash launching a successful lawsuit against both acts, which saw a law being created where record companies had to give credit to everyone who works on a track, no matter how minor the role.
• While they're still relatively successful, British boy band Blue gained this reputation among Americans after an interview gone wrong. They were in New York City when they witnessed the World Trade Center attack on September 11, 2001, and the following month, the group was being interviewed by the British newspaper The Sun. When they were asked about it, singer Lee Ryan, trying not to relive what they'd seen, said something to the effect of, "We don't want to talk about New York. Let's talk about something else like the whales dying." However, he was (allegedly) misquoted as saying people were "blowing it out of proportion" and they should focus on saving the whales instead. Unsurprisingly, many Americans who supported The War on Terror, as well as some who didn't, saw the statement as insensitive to the victims of the attacks. Ryan apologized for his remarks and donated to charities designed to support the families of the victims, but that gaffe (along with some others he made in the years since) still gets brought up in the media from time to time.
• Rapper B.o.B was a pretty big name at the beginning of The New '10s thanks to hit songs such as "Nothin on You", "Magic", "Airplanes" and "Price Tag". However, by the middle of the decade, he became more known for espousing conspiracist and pseudoscientific beliefs and recording "Flatline", a Flat Earth-themed diss track directed at Neil deGrasse Tyson in which he also defended Holocaust denier David Irving, which was overwhelmingly panned and ridiculed (including by Tyson himself on a Comedy Central show, to boot). His newer albums have had no impact whatsoever, and his earlier hits, with the exception of "Nothin on You" (in which Bruno Mars made his debut as a solo artist), have largely faded into the landscape of early 2010s pop and are rarely played nowadays.
• Although New Edition is regarded as a Cult Classic among the new jack swing genre, ask anyone outside the R&B fandom about member Bobby Brown and they will often bring up his turbulent marriage to Whitney Houston, which was plagued with cases of Domestic Abuse, as well as his extensive drug use and troubles with the law, and the many scandals surrounding his now-deceased daughter Bobbi Kristina.
• In the mid-2000s, Chris Brown seemed like he was going to be the next big male Pop superstar, complete with having a dream relationship with Rihanna. Then he savagely beat her up before the two of them were supposed to perform at the 2009 Grammys. Since then, he is mostly known for beating his girlfriend (and not really taking any real responsibility for it) and not being able to stay out of trouble with law enforcement.
• Jackson Browne has never quite lived down the allegation that he was physically abusive to his ex-girlfriend Daryl Hannah. While the claim has never been proven and no charges were ever filed, it still continues to hang over him to this day.
• Anita Bryant was a popular singer in the 1960s, with four top 40 hits, as well as the face of a series of orange juice commercials for the Florida Citrus Commission. However, the only thing most people remember her for today is her Save Our Children campaign against gay rights in Florida in the late 1970s, culminating in Bryant taking a banana cream pie to the face on live television. Bryant's crusade and the humiliation of being pied combined to effectively kill her entertainment career, and Bryant became the butt of many jokes throughout the remainder of the decade and into the early 1980s (when even David Allan Coe, the poster boy for political incorrectness, writes a song about how bigoted you are, it's over).
• The Norwegian music project Burzum, while remaining popular among black metal fans, is also known for the fact that its creator, Varg Vikernes, is a outspoken white supremacist who killed Mayhem band member Euronymous and claimed it was in self-defense, despite stabbing Euronymous twenty-three times.
• Noir Désir is one of the most successful French rock bands of the nineties, but pronouncing the name of lead singer Bertrand Cantat in France is guaranteed to cause a ruckus since he is mostly known there for killing his girlfriend, well-known actress Marie Trintignant, serving only four years in jail for manslaughter, and then trying to make a comeback as if nothing had happened. After his release from jail, Cantat went to live with his ex-wife Krisztina Rády. Years later, she commited suicide and Cantat was cleared of any criminal suspicions, although many people suggested he had a hand in her death. Later, Noir Désir officially disbanded with the other band members saying they were disgusted with Cantat's attitude and massive ego.
• To most people, The Chicks (previously the Dixie Chicks) are known more for their feud with Toby Keith, and for getting completely blacklisted by country radio after lead singer Natalie Maines criticized then-President George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq by saying she was ashamed to be from the same state as him, than most of their musical output. And even that is known mainly for the controversial "Goodbye Earl", interpreted by detractors as a glorification of murder, than by any of their actual hits.
• Eric Clapton's reputation has been overshadowed by an incident at a 1976 concert in Birmingham, England, where he made several racist and xenophobic comments while drunk, and praised far-right anti-immigrant Parliament member Enoch Powell. While it's widely accepted that Clapton doesn't actually advocate what he said, the fact that he didn't publicly denounce the incident until 2018 made it difficult to ignore. Then in 2020, Clapton drew further criticism when he made anti-vax comments after he suffered adverse side-effects of the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine and accused studies of the vaccine as being "propaganda", publicly supporting anti-lockdown activists, and calling people who have gotten the vaccine "hypnotized". The following singles, "Stand and Deliver" (a collaboration with fellow anti-vaxxer Van Morrison) "This Has Gotta Stop", while lyrically being a vague protest song, is interpreted by many as an anti-vax anthem due to its timing and containing references to his own experience with the vaccine in the latter's case, and in the former's case making a reference to Dick Turpin, notorious 18th century horse thief, wearing a mask.
• In his heyday, Spade Cooley was known as "the King of Western Swing". But today, he's more known for killing his second wife, Ella Mae Evans.
• Argentinean musician Gustavo Cordera was the former leader and vocalist of Bersuit Vergarabat, with whom he reached stardom with the quatrilogy Libertinaje (1998), Hijos del Culo (2000), the double album La Argentinidad Al Palo (2003), and Testosterona (2005), all of which ended with them playing in the stadium of River Plate, which is usually reserved for big bands and is considered the ultimate reward for an Argentinean band, a sign of their popularity. Then Cordera quit the band in 2009 under unceremonious circumstances (with the band accusing him of having a huge ego, and doing a Take That! on their first post-Cordera album, 2011's La Revuelta, in the form of "Afónico"). And then he was the subject of an interview in 2016 that put him on hot water. He was asked about the accusations of sexual assault from other Argentinean musicians such as El Otro Yo's Cristian Aldana and former Attaque 77 leader Ciro Pertusi, and he downplayed the incidents. He ended up receiving a lawsuit from feminist organizations and the national government and had to issue several apologies. It took several years until he was allowed to play in shows, and he kept a quite low profile ever since then.
• Corelia was once a respected Progressive Metal/Post-Hardcore band thanks to their 2011 debut album, Nostalgia, which was extremely well-received by most of those who listened to it. However, starting in 2015, and especially between 2016 and 2020, they became better known for their Indiegogo campaign, which raised over $30,000 for their next album, only for them to seemingly vanish, leading their fans to debate whether the album was stuck in Development Hell, and if the band had just scammed them. The last the public heard of them for nearly four years was them denying the scam allegations in October of 2016. Afterwards, it was radio silence until April 2020, when an unrelated producer impersonated a member of the band, claiming that he'd release the album later in the month. This finally forced the remaining band members to come out of hiding and issue an apology, while also explaining the reason why the album was delayed for so long (severe mental health issues and the departure of a member). A rough demo version of the album, New Wilderness, was finally released in May of 2020, and partial refunds were given to Indiegogo backers, which helped put this drama to rest. Still, for several years between the crowdfunding campaign and the album's release, it was nearly impossible to talk about Corelia's music without starting a debate about whether or not they were scammers.
• "Bogus" Ben Covington is mostly known for how he got his nickname. To elaborate, he used to be known as "Blind" Ben Covington until it was revealed he was only pretending to be blind — an act he started during his days as a busker in an attempt to get more money.
• Tommy "Vext" Cummings was once a respected hard rock and metal singer who was noteworthy for being one of the most famous black men in otherwise extremely white genres, and had become a mainstream face when Bad Wolves took off, but he is now known far more for his outspoken support of now-former President Donald Trump, his public espousing of conspiracy theories regarding Black Lives Matter and claims that racism was "manufactured", and his extremely acrimonious departure from Bad Wolves at the beginning of 2021 (where he claimed that the other members conspired with management to fire him and steal rights to the band and their song catalog that he allegedly owned due to his political beliefs), as well as his repeated attempts to create public spats with the remaining members of Bad Wolves and particularly Doc Coyle, who has maintained that Cummings' firing was a long time coming for many reasons, and that what most of what he has publicly said is an outright lie^note namely his claims regarding writing credits, as it is well-known that John Boecklin wrote the entirety of their debut before Cummings was officially in the band, and is likely still the primary, if not sole writer. It was telling when Ivan Moody (a longtime champion of Cummings and Bad Wolves in general) himself said in no uncertain terms that Coyle's side was the correct one, Cummings was full of shit, his firing was years in the making, and refusing to take responsibility for his actions and painting himself as a persecuted victim was a classic character trait of his.
  • As if that weren't enough, his history of problematic behavior dates back even further than that. In 2008, he was fired from his first big band Divine Heresy after physically assaulting Dino Cazares publicly on stage. It's even been rumored that he not only struck Dino's wife in the altercation, but also that Cazares had to file a restraining order against him after the incident. Though they allegedly made amends in the years since, Tommy still speaks about the incident in a way that suggests he doesn't care about how serious it was.
• American rapper DaBaby (real name Jonathan Kirk) went under fire on July 25, 2021 for making homophobic comments during his performance at Rolling Loud Festival, which resulted in him losing many festival tour dates and his contract with BoohooMAN. Additionally, his featured credit on Dua Lipa's "Levitating" was pulled from many radio stations after the incident and was replaced with the solo album version (with Lipa herself openly criticizing his remarks), resulting in the solo version supplanting the "Feat. DaBaby" version.
• Plácido Domingo, a Spanish opera singer and conductor, as well as one of the Three Tenors, had been one of the most prestigious and acclaimed operatic tenors of the 20th century with a wide and extensive repertoire to his credit, and with significant success as a crossover artist as well. He was also well-known for his efforts to help young opera singers, including starting and running Operalia, an international singing competition that has helped launch the careers of several opera singers. However, his career was damaged severely in August 2019, when multiple women came forward with accusations of sexual harassment that spanned three decades from the late 1980s. Today, while Domingo remains active in performing, it is highly unlikely that he will ever receive the same amount of recognition he had decades ago.
• Jason Donovan:
  • He used to be famous for his music back when he was a young heartthrob singer, but then in 1992, he sued a magazine for spreading gossip about his sexuality. While he did win and he was right that the rumors are not true, many people have bashed him due to thinking that he was homophobic, thus causing his further music to not fare well like it used to. Fortunately, this has calmed down over time, and he didn't alienate all of his fans, but the damage was still done and some people still hate him for this to this day, but it's very obscure nowadays.
  • Some people know him more for the drug binges he used to do back in the 1990s than his music or acting.
• Producer Dr. Luke is much better known for the accusations of sexually assaulting Kesha, and the ensuing legal battle with her, than for the music he produced. On the other hand, Dr. Luke also gets hit with the flipside of this trope: his music is deliberately So Okay, It's Average, so it's not like there's anything one could remember about it. His preference for over-simplified pop is showcased not only by the clients that remained under his control — Katy Perry, Jessie J, and Miley Cyrus amongst others (though Kim Petras, of whom he has worked with, has garnered praise) — but by how Kesha's sound matured dramatically after Sony Music removed her from his oversight.
• If Country Music singer Holly Dunn is remembered for anything other than her Signature Song "Daddy's Hands", then it's probably for her 1990 single "Maybe I Mean Yes". The song was the subject of controversy due to some Moral Guardians misconstruing its lyrics as condoning date rape ("When I say no I mean maybe, or maybe I mean yes") despite the song having nothing to do with such a subject. Dunn withdrew the song, but the damage to her career had already been done.
• Eagles of Death Metal were already notable for being at the center of the terrorist Bataclan massacre in 2015, but nowadays are more infamous for bassist Jesse Hughes' rant against the March for Our Lives student protests where he accused them of using the tragedy to seek attention. This hurt the band's popularity dearly and made Hughes widely hated outside of right-wing circles. He also accused the Bataclan security team of conspiring in the attack, and though he quickly apologized was hit with a lifetime ban when the club reopened a year later.
• Despite remaining one of the most successful and influential rappers of all-time, Eminem has been dogged by accusations of homophobia, misogyny, racism and attention-seeking stemming from his use of homophobic and sexist slurs in his lyrics, his being the biggest selling and most popular musician in a music genre that was once almost entirely black, his parodic Misogyny Songs, and his habit of dissing random celebrities for comedy purposes. While he became more appreciated as a virtuoso rapper after 8 Mile came out in 2002 and swore off using homophobic slurs in 2018, reviewers still obsess over his damaging homophobia, misogyny and rage in the kind of casual "suck-my-dick-bitch" talk that would be considered Beneath Notice coming from other rappers. Eminem himself suggested the fixation on his lyrics was due to his ability to open up white children to African-American culture (in his 2002 song "White America") and hoped in "Sing For The Moment" that the controversy would eventually be forgotten in favour of recognising his skills and the positive aspect of his influence.
• While The Faceless had managed to hide some of their behind-the-scenes struggles with their rising success in the late 2000s and early 2010s, the band gradually began to have a harder and harder time hiding their dysfunction that culminated in literally the entire band save for mainman Michael Keene leaving around the end of 2014. Over the next few years, the band became infamous for their out-of-control turnover, many tour cancellations, and constant and very public drama with former members (including a public spat between Keene and former drummer Chason Westmoreland after the latter Rage Quit right before Summer Slaughter 2017 that forced the band to get a fill-in with less than a day's notice, and infamously got Keene's own mother to join in on a public Facebook fight to defend her son). 2018 wound up being the true nadir of their career, as Keene lost another full lineup and was publicly castigated by former guitarist Justin McKinney, who tore into him for his out-of-control drug issues and refusal to take responsibility or get help, along with his pathological laziness and ingratitude, all of which was echoed by ex-vocalist Ken Sorceron. This was followed by a "performance" at a festival that June where the band showed up hours after they were supposed to, took another hour to set up, and played an atrocious set for only twenty minutes despite being slotted for an hour, followed by a poorly-attended summer headlining tour (including at least one date where they played to less than thirty people by the time they hit the stage). While they took some steps to restore their image over the next year, the image of The Faceless by the turn of the decade was still largely that of a band that embarrassed itself at every opportunity.
• If you've ever heard of the American Nu Metal band Flaw, chances are it's not because of their music, but for these two separate events:
  • After the release of Because of the Brave in 2019, it was discovered that "Wake Up" was plagiarized from an instrumental posted by YouTube musician Douglas Patrick. Eventually, it turned out that a good portion from the songs of this album were lifted from other musicians, and that band had gone as far as to actually buy a song by another YouTuber named Riff Master T and rework it into "Conquer This Climb" without credit. Singer Chris Volz posted a statement addressing the situation, but then, guitarist Tommy Gibbons accidentally outed himself as the main culprit. Even though he apologized, the band parted ways with him, probably as a means of damage control. And despite Chris Volz promising compensation to the affected artists, nothing seems to have been done yet...
  • Chris Volz himself got in hot water after he used the N-word onstage during a concert in Chicago in early 2021. His since-privated apology didn't make things better, as he claimed that the slur he used was not racist, and he also blamed "cancel culture" for the reaction it caused. This incident nonetheless became a case of Role-Ending Misdemeanor thanks to Noble Steed Music halting distribution of Volz's solo album and the two albums of his other band Five.Bolt.Main.
• DJ Alan Freed played a major role in popularizing rock and roll music and even gave the genre its name. But it's hard to talk about him without bringing up his involvement in the payola scandals of the early 1960s, which destroyed his career.
• After the breakup of The Fugees in the '90s, each of the individual members have become enveloped in controversy in one form or another. Wyclef Jean became a pariah after he was accused of misappropriating charitable donations meant for earthquake victims in his native Haiti. Despite the initial promise of her solo career, Lauryn Hill became notorious for her protracted Creator Breakdown and short stint in prison for tax evasion. Finally the third member, Pras, fell into his own legal trouble by conspiring to influence U.S. officials on behalf of the Chinese government, for which he was convicted in 2023.

G-L

• Renaissance composer Carlo Gesualdo is better known for brutally killing his first wife and her lover after catching them in flagrante delicto than he is for his music.
• Russian composer Alexander Glazunov enjoyed a mostly good reputation throughout his lifetime, and in recent years people have started paying attention to his music again, but he is still more known today for his alcoholism than for his music. His reputation as an alcoholic was solidified when he conducted the disastrous 1897 première of Symphony No. 1 in D Minor by Sergei Rachmaninoff that led to the latter falling into depression from the scathing reviews (the Symphony has since been Vindicated by History), where he was accused of being full-on drunk while conducting, not helped by the orchestra being pitifully under-rehearsed for the performance. Dmitri Shostakovich would later say that Glazunov regularly sipped a bottle of alcohol while teaching him. It has never been confirmed if Glazunov really was drunk that day he premièred Rachmaninoff's First Symphony, and an under-rehearsed orchestra premièring a full-scale symphony would be enough to guarantee disaster, but the accusation stuck and has dogged his posthumous reputation ever since.
• Gary Glitter was once a famed glam rocker in the 1970s, with his mostly instrumental song "Rock and Roll, Part 2" being played as a popular cheering song at American sporting events for several decades. Nowadays, however, he is pretty much known only for the fact that he was arrested in 1997 for possession of child pornography, which was then followed by multiple scandals involving him sexually abusing minors. Not helped was his friendship with the disgraced Jimmy Savile, also infamous for similar reasons.
• Good English had once been an up-and-coming girl band in the indie scene of Dayton, Ohio. Today, they are best remembered for their drummer, Leslie Rasmussen, writing a very victim-blaming letter to judge Aaron Persky about her childhood friend, the convicted rapist Brock Turner, who got a ridiculously lenient sentence despite having sexually assaulted an unconscious woman. The backlash from the letter was enough to get them dropped from several festivals and engagements, and the likelihood of the band making a successful comeback today is highly unlikely.
• Jim Gordon, one of the most prolific and well-regarded session drummers of the 1960s and 70s, is unfortunately also known for murdering his mother and subsequently being diagnosed with schizophrenia. Gordon was sentenced to 16 years to life in prison.
• Great White was a well-known hard rock band in the 80s with multiple hit songs. However, during Jack Russell's 2003 tour (where he performed with a backing band named "Jack Russell's Great White", performing both Great White's songs and some of Jack's original work), his tour manager (or Jack and the band themselves, depending on the source) was caught at several venues igniting pyrotechnics during "Desert Moon" (a song which also became permanently overshadowed) without permission of the venue owners. His recklessness with pyrotechnics for the song ended up resulting in disaster when on February 20, 2003 at a show at The Station in West Warwick, Rhode Island the pyrotechnics ignited non-fireproof soundproofing material on the walls around the stage, causing a fire that burnt down the venue and killed 100 people, including the touring band's lead guitarist Ty Longley and WHJY Providence DJ Mike "The Doctor" Gonsalves. The band later split in two several years later - while Jack Russell and his version of Great White (once again called "Jack Russell's Great White", this time for legal reasons) has had a mostly clean record, the Mark Kendall-led "official" lineup would garner additional controversy in 2020 when they performed at an outdoor music festival in Dickinson, North Dakota that had no COVID-19 safety protocols whatsoever (at a time when COVID-19 safety protocols were Serious Business).
• Previously one of the most iconic bands of the late '80s "Madchester" movement, Happy Mondays is nowadays primarily known for the chaotic, fund-bleeding production of 1992's Yes Please!, the massive critical and commercial failure of which was enough to both bankrupt Factory Records (not helped by labelmates New Order suffering heavy delays in finishing Republic) and singlehandedly annihilate the entire Madchester scene just a few years after it began.
• Australian musician Rolf Harris was very popular in both his native Australia and the United Kingdom, and had a career spanning sixty years. Said career came to an end in 2013, when he was arrested by the British police as part of Operation Yewtree. The next year, he was convicted of sexual assault against four underage girls and sentenced to five years in prison. With his honors rescinded and his reputation in tatters, it's almost a certainty that he will be remembered as a sexual predator first and foremost.
• 25 ta Life is still a respected name in hardcore and most likely always will be, but the same cannot be said for Rick Healey, better known as "Rick ta Life". Never a particularly well-liked figure in the scene, he nonetheless earned some grudging respect for his work with the band. By the mid-2000s, however, Healey had become known for his unstable and erratic behavior and staggering array of scene beefs that he always seemed to be adding to, as well as being the reason why 25 ta Life had become a particularly extreme example of a Revolving Door Band. By the 2010s, Healey's work with 25 ta Life had long since been overshadowed by his behavior on social media; "Rick ta Life Memes" had become a legitimate and constantly-growing page on Facebook that also served to chronicle his beefs, and by the middle of the decade, he had two particularly major sources of infamy to his name: a live video where he played without a drummer to a crowd that was in the single digits, and associating with known boneheads and white supremacists, namely Tommy Dice and Josh "Hatchet" Steever. Furthermore, Healey had apparently formed a new band with members of multiple known far-right hardcore acts (including the aforementioned Steever of Empire Falls), which further ruined his name. While 25 ta Life has managed to restore their good name by drafting James "Stikman" Ismean (Fury of Five), Healey's own accomplishments have long since been buried, and while he is clearly mentally unwell and has been for some time, the amount of ridiculous drama that he has caused has erased whatever sympathy people may have been able to muster for him.
• Composer Natalie Holt is a huge name in orchestral scoring, handling such projects as Journey's End and Loki. However, she is best known among the general public, at least in her native England, for throwing eggs at Simon Cowell in the 2013 final of Britain's Got Talent in protest of what she called his "dreadful influence on the music business".
• The long-lived Heavy Metal band Iced Earth has seen their image take a huge blow in the wake of its founder, rhythm guitarist and principal songwriter Jon Schaffer's immersion in far-right libertarian political beliefs, conspiracy theories, and support for anti-government extremist groups since the mid-2000s, which reached its peak when he was discovered to have participated in the 2021 U.S. Capitol attack trying to overturn Joe Biden's electoral victory over Donald Trump, which resulted in five deaths and over 140 injuries. Schaffer was arrested and sentenced to 3.5 to 4.5 years in prison for his participation in the attack, the band was dropped by longtime record label Century Media, and all remaining band members (save for drummer Brent Smedley) quit in protest of Schaffer's behavior, leaving it uncertain if Iced Earth will ever recover.
• Ja Rule is likely better known these days for his top-level involvement in the notorious Fyre Festival than any of his music, and continuing to insist he had nothing to do with the massive fraud that got his partner Billy McFarland sent to prison, despite footage being unearthed of his participation in meetings where the fraud was openly discussed, including a nonsensical statement that it wasn't fraud but "false advertising". He's also remembered for inspiring several classic Pretender Diss tracks from Eminem, 50 Cent, D12 and other Shady Records acts that are credited with ending his time in the spotlight, meaning in hip-hop he's largely remembered as "the fake gangsta whose career Eminem murdered because he called a prepubescent girl a slut".
• Michael Jackson:
  • His career as a whole went through an interesting loop with this. From 1993 until his death, his reputation was eclipsed by allegations of child molestation. His public image improved slightly after being acquitted in court on a second charge in 2005^note the first one in 1993 wasn't taken to court and instead ended with a financial settlement, and after his death in 2009, he was praised again as an innovative and trendsetting musician. However, the allegations still lurked in the background and re-entered the public discourse after the Me Too movement began in 2017, culminating in a new wave of claims in the 2019 documentary Leaving Neverland, which created a massive divide regarding their veracity and how they should affect Jackson's legacy and reputation.
  • Regarding his music itself:
    • Released at a time when he was already in hot water, Jackson's 1996 song "They Don't Care About Us" is best known for the media scrutiny around the lyrics "Jew me, sue me, everybody do me/ Kick me, kike me, don't you black or white me". These lines were accused of expressing antisemitic sentiment, which Jackson denied was his intention. Jackson would ultimately be forced to censor the offending lines with synthesized drum hits, with this version appearing in both music videos and most releases of the song's parent album. Later on, Jackson released a version changing "Jew me" to "screw me" and "kike me" to "strike me". What makes the whole controversy ironic is the fact that it was an anti-racism song.
    • His 2010 posthumous album Michael is almost exclusively known for the infamous "Cascio tracks" ("Breaking News", "Keep Your Head Up" and "Monster"), a set of tracks supposedly recorded with Eddie Cascio in 2007. However, both fans of Michael and several of his family members made allegations that Michael did not actually perform on the songs but instead featured soundalike Jason Malachi. The controversy was further exacerbated by Michael's brother Randy claiming that he and other family members were not allowed into the studio where the album was being completed, implying foul play on the part of Sony Music. These allegations would prompt years of class action lawsuits against Sony and ultimately the removal of the songs from distribution in 2022, with an official statement giving the controversy over the tracks as the reason for their removal.
• Though it faded out after frontman Ian Curtis' death, Manchester Post-Punk band Joy Division were primarily known in their time for the controversy that surrounded their choice of name, which came from the prostitution wings in Nazi concentration camps^note according to them, the name was meant to both troll audiences and invoke memories of Britain's sacrifices in World War II. The band had to constantly clarify that they were anti-fascist and allegedly had to fight off actual neo-Nazis who attended their concerts as a result of the controversy, as depicted in 24-Hour Party People.
• Judas Priest's Dave Holland has had his fair share of both fans and detractors during his tenure with the band. Then he was convicted of sexually assaulting a mentally disabled teenager in 2004, and his reputation went down the toilet to the point where the band eliminated him from the credits when they released the 30th anniversary edition of British Steel in 2010. Though, they would pay tribute to him after his death in 2018.
• R. Kelly was once one of the most successful R&B singers of The '90s, being known for songs such as "I Believe I Can Fly", "Ignition", and "Bump N Grind". Over time, however, he became better known for his marriage to Aaliyah (who was fifteen at the time) and his arrest for urinating on an underage girl, and his subsequent acquittal despite the existence of video evidence. Then in 2019, the Lifetime documentary series Surviving R. Kelly was released, which accused Kelly of running a sex cult and having affairs with several other underaged girls. The documentary's release further damaged his reputation, and he was eventually charged with 28 accounts of sexual abuse. He also didn’t help things by going on a violent, hyperbolic rant in the middle of being interviewed by Gayle King (and at the same time made King a Memetic Badass for just calmly sitting there and not appearing the slightest bit flustered). On September 27, 2021, Kelly was found guilty on nine counts, including racketeering, sex trafficking, sexual abuse of a minor and kidnapping. He was sentenced to thirty years in prison on June 29, 2022.
• Jonathan King had a long varied career as a singer-songwriter, music producer, entrepreneur, and television presenter. Then in 2001, he was accused of molesting underage boys and served three and a half years in prison. Further accusations arose, yet he continues to protest his innocence.
• Death Row Records executive Suge Knight is undoubtedly most well-known for his Ax-Crazy behavior, his alleged ties to the infamous Bloods street gang, his involvement in the Rampart scandal, theories that he was involved in the murders of Tupac Shakur and/or The Notorious B.I.G., and his repeated legal troubles which culminated in a 2018 conviction for voluntary manslaughter.
• Britpop band Kula Shaker is better remembered for the controversy that destroyed their career than their music. Already unpopular with critics for their style and the belief that they owed their career to their lead singer Crispian Mills being the son of Hayley Mills, things went completely pear-shaped when Mills expressed a desire that the swastika would be reclaimed for its positive mystical meanings during an interview. It was then discovered that Mills' previous band, The Objects of Desire, had included a former member of the National Front, who was dating Hayley Mills at the time, and had played at a conspiracy theory conference in London that had also featured notorious Holocaust deniers and anti-Semites among the speakers. Although Mills apologized for his comments and denied supporting Neo-Nazism, the damage had been done and the band wound up disbanding.
• In 2020, country music band Lady Antebellum shortened their name to Lady A during the George Floyd protests, after being accused of racism for being named after the Antebellum South. In addition to mixed reception by the fanbase, this move caught the attention of Anita White, a black singer from Seattle who had been recording under the name "Lady A" since at least a decade before the band was even formed. This led Anita to publicly decry the band for a move that she saw as insincere and borne of white privilege. While the band originally announced they were trying to reach a compromise with White, each of them instead filed a lawsuit against the other in 2020, with White in particular seeking out damages for devaluation of her brand. The controversy lingered into 2021, joining forces with Morgan Wallen's below-mentioned use of a racial slur and the fandom's reaction to the same to spark a discussion about race in the historically white and conservative country music genre. The lawsuits and discussions were ongoing throughout 2021, exacerbated by such issues as both the band's music and Anita White's being listed concurrently on services such as Spotify (which led to a false copyright claim on a song by White under the "Lady A" name). All of this showed in the band's 2021 album What a Song Can Do, which saw by far the lowest sales in their history; the lead single "Like a Lady" performed horribly on the charts, and some critics even interpreted its title and themes as openly antagonistic toward White.
• Tory Lanez's reputation was ruined after allegations surfaced of him literally shooting Megan Thee Stallion in the foot. Not helping matters was the album Lanez released in the wake of this, DAYSTAR, which entirely consisted of him denying said allegations, as well as his 2022 conviction for the aforementioned shooting which faces him up to 22 years and 8 months in prison ultimately became the final nail in his career's coffin. He's currently jailed and awaits his sentencing.
• While Rod Lauren is remembered for his One-Hit Wonder "If I Had a Girl" and for his role in The Crawling Hand, in the Philippines, he is far more remembered for the suspected murder of his wife Nida Blanca in 2001.
• Tracy Lawrence had several entanglements over the years that shaped his career for better or worse. Before his debut album dropped in fall 1991, he survived getting shot four times in an attempted robbery at a Nashville hotel; this incident gave him tons of publicity right out of the gate, and was likely instrumental in the massive success of his debut single "Sticks and Stones". In 1994, he was charged with reckless endangerment after allegedly opening fire on some teenagers who chased him down a freeway, but the charges were later dropped when most of the allegations were proven to be exaggerated, and the impact on his career was negligible. But the final straw came in 1997 when he was charged with beating his then-wife after a concert in Las Vegas, which proved to be a Creator Killer: his then-current single took a nose-dive on the charts, he was ordered to pay $500 to a women's shelter, and Atlantic Records supposedly put a temporary recording ban on him (although Lawrence denied this), and he was absent from the charts for nearly two years. He had a few brief comebacks since then but never returned to his former status.
• Led Zeppelin:
  • The band is at least as known for its litigiousness as it is for being a hard rock pioneer, to the point where prominent independent film directors Brian De Palma, Penelope Spheeris, and Abel Ferrara have nothing nice to say about the band.
  • The band is notorious for "borrowing" from other artists. This piece outlines several examples of the band lifting riffs and even entire tunes from other musicians and being taken to court for it.
  • After the onset of the Me Too movement, which resulted in renewed scrutiny towards rock musicians' histories with underage groupies, guitarist Jimmy Page's musicianship and achievements were eclipsed by the discovery that he had a lengthy romantic and sexual relationship with 13-year-old Lori Mattix. While Mattix made dubious (and in some cases debunked) claims about trysts with various '70s rock stars, the sizable amount of photographic and anecdotal evidence confirming her relationship with Page meant that it would redefine his public image the most.
• Conductor and pianist James Levine had a long and storied career, spending forty years as the music director of the Metropolitan Opera, and also holding leadership positions with the Ravinia Festival, the Munich Philharmonic, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. But his reputation was tarnished in late 2017 after four men came forward claiming he had sexually abused them. Once the allegations broke, Levine was dropped from most of his positions and his then-upcoming performances either replaced him or were cancelled.
• Jerry Lee Lewis, known for "Great Balls of Fire" among other songs, was considered a serious competitor to Elvis Presley at his peak. Nowadays, he's probably best remembered for taking his thirteen-year-old cousin as his third wife, allegations that he murdered his fifth wife, and a persistent rumor that he tried to settle his rivalry with Elvis by hiring a guy to kill him.
• Around The '50s and The '60s, Liberace was once a famed pianist whose popularity played in part with his Camp status, being The Moral Substitute to rock 'n' roll, and a teen idol. Today, he is known less for his music and instead is mostly mocked, including by the LGBT community, for adamantly denying that he was gay. This included several libel suits and him keeping his terminal HIV diagnosis private and not seeking treatment, which he ultimately passed away from.
• American experimental Black Metal band Liturgy are well known for their bizarre and somewhat divisive sound, but probably even more well known for frontwoman Hunter Hunt-Hendrix's bizarre manifesto for the band, which basically posits the band as a philosophical opposite to normal black metal and uses a ton of Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness to do so, which got the band a ton of backlash from black metal fans as being a bunch of pretentious hipsters. The fact that Hunt-Hendrix has at various points opened live shows with very long and tedious PowerPoint presentations concerning this manifesto did not help.
• Claudine Longet, singer and ex-wife of Andy Williams, is perhaps best known for her being responsible for the shooting death of her lover, professional skiier Vladimir "Spider" Sabich, in an Aspen chalet, and the sensational trial that ensued.
• If you're not a devoted fan of Lostprophets, most likely the only thing you know about the band is that its lead singer Ian Watkins was convicted for child molestation and attempted rape of two infants.
• While Courtney Love has had a legitimately impressive music career and was a trailblazer for many future artists, it's not easy to discuss her without bringing up her extremely troubled relationship with Kurt Cobain. Some Nirvana fans have even gone so far as to say she was one of the reasons he killed himself, with others going even further and claiming she murdered him and made it look like a suicide.

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• More people know about Machine Gun Kelly for getting into feuds with Gen-X-aged music icons like Eminem and Corey Taylor, with the general consensus being that he lost them, hard, and then for his saccharine Goths Have It Hard celebrity romance with Megan Fox, than for any of his actual rapping, singing or acting.
• Malevolent Creation is still a big name in death metal, but while many people believe that they have been treading water musically for a while, the general consensus as to why they're not a bigger name even after all these years (aside from some label issues that genuinely were not their fault) is the fact that guitarist Phil Fasciana and former bassist Jason Blachowicz have both become infamous for racist and homophobic comments, Fasciana going so far as to repeatedly drop "nigger" in an interview with metal gadfly Bill Zebub (spoiler: Fasciana is not black) as well as sneaking the word into the lyrics of the song "They Breed" (the song's other verses are also pretty racist, though in a more subtle way). Fasciana is also infamous for telling a story where he claimed to have foiled a robbery perpetuated by a "homeless crackhead" while going to buy chocolate milk, killing the man and apparently being gifted a lifetime supply of chocolate milk at that particular store as a reward. This story was, unsurprisingly, proven to be Blatant Lies by Fort Lauderdale police even as Fasciana still vehemently insisted that it happened. While Malevolent Creation have multiple albums that are still regarded as classics, most metal fans know them less for the music and more for the drama and generally idiotic behavior that has surrounded them for a while now.
• Notorious criminal Charles Manson and his cult, the Manson Family, have caused some songs to gain unwanted notoriety. For instance, numerous songs of The White Album by The Beatles inspired him and his cult to go killing under the belief many of these songs were advocating a race war. They even wrote the song titles on the walls, smeared with the blood of their victims. Similarly, the track "Never Learn Not to Love" from The Beach Boys' 20/20 has gained notoriety because it was written by Manson only a couple of months before he was arrested. The fact that Manson himself used to be a hippie folk musician before starting the cult is usually forgotten about aside from history buffs.
• Marilyn Manson:
  • The band was one of the most controversial musical acts in the 1990s, and their music and stage act resulted in everything from protests at concerts to being blamed for the Columbine massacre. Even rock stations were hesitant to play their music at the height of their popularity.
  • Nowadays, outside of their fanbase, more people know the group for their reputation than for any of their actual music.
    • Manson himself tends to have a revolving door of musicians due to being very publicly difficult to work with (ranging from Twiggy’s first time leaving the band due to refusing to change his hair to pulling a knife on Tyler Bates while on tour), although he has acknowledged his own faults and admitted to his generally poor mental health. Despite this, some of his more public fights, like Rob Zombie and Tyler Bates, have maintained relationships with him despite their conflicts, Zombie touring with him for several more years after their first co-headlining tour led to them fighting both backstage and Zombie raging against him on stage.
    • After several years of quiet, the band once again made headlines in the late 2010s when bassist Twiggy Ramirez was implicated in a scandal as part of the #MeToo movement (with Ramirez leaving the band), which was made worse when Manson himself was the center of abuse allegations from ex-fiancée Evan Rachel Wood and several other women, resulting in a public backlash towards him that resulted in him being dropped from his record label and agency.
• The black metal band Mayhem is difficult to discuss without bringing up how their lead singer Dead would often cut himself during live performances and his eventual suicide; the reaction by their lead guitarist Euronymous to finding Dead's body, which was to take pictures of it (one of which would be released and used as the box art for a live album) and make a necklace out of Dead's skull fragments; the aforementioned murder of Euronymous by Burzum's Varg Vikernes; and drummer Hellhammer's staunch homophobia.
• The career of Country Music singer Mindy McCready, best known for the 1996 hit "Guys Do It All the Time", seems to have been overshadowed by her rather troubled personal life. This includes her many attempts at suicide, arrests, an alleged underaged affair with baseball player Roger Clemens, and successfully committing suicide in 2013.
• British Record Producer Joe Meek was the inventor of many modern bits of studio equipment which are still used today in almost their original forms and is widely considered an electronic music pioneer. Nevertheless, any conversations about him will almost inevitably be dominated by his declining mental health, which culminated in him shooting his landlady dead before turning the gun on himself in 1967.
• Milli Vanilli were once one of the most popular bands in the world. However, their career was obliterated by the revelation that frontmen Rob Pilatus and Fabrice Morvan didn't sing a note on any of their songs and instead, their music was sung by a group of American singers (Charles Shaw, Brad Howell, and John Davis), who were also working with Milli Vanilli's producer Frank Farian. The resulting scandal made their music forgotten about or airbrushed out of the media, and they're now regarded as a joke at worst.
• Morrissey: While allegations of racist/ethnonationalist views dogged him for years, they reached a tipping point after his response to the Manchester Arena bombing in 2017, in which he blamed the attacks on immigration (despite the bomber being British-born), mocked politicians for not condemning Islam, and expressed support for highly Islamophobic UKIP candidate Anne Marie Waters, who her own party saw as too extreme. Since then, it's difficult to bring Morrisey up without circling back to his views on immigration and Islam.
• Mötley Crüe (who are otherwise considered Hair Metal legends and were a gateway band for many metalheads) are far better known among the general public and younger metalheads for their many, many controversies, including celebrity sex tape scandals involving Tommy Lee and Vince Neil, Tommy Lee's marriages to Heather Locklear and Pamela Anderson, the drunk driving accident Vince Neil was involved in that killed Hanoi Rocks drummer Razzle, disputes with other bands such as Steel Panther, and Vince Neil losing his ability to sing in later years (take note that David Lee Roth and Meat Loaf have suffered similar problems to Vince in later years as well, but why metalheads decided to focus on Vince's deteriorating ability and make memes out of it is anybody's guess).
• American black metal band Nachtmystium seemed poised for a breakthrough into more mainstream metal circles in the late 2000s, with a string of successful and critically acclaimed albums beginning with 2004's Demise and substantial coverage from respected metal publications like Decibel, Kerrang!, and Terrorizer. However, over time controversy began to overtake this acclaim: first was the revelation that their 2002 debut, Reign of the Malicious, had seen a limited physical release on a neo-Nazi music label. Frontman Blake Judd disavowed this as a youthful error made in ignorance, which for a time assuaged fans. However, the elevating profile of the band in turn made Judd's drug habits and rock-star personality progressively worse, with the rest of the act becoming a Revolving Door Band as members got more fed up with Judd's antics and many collaborators turning their backs on him: Krieg's Neill Jameson in particular accused Judd of attempting to pressure him to use heroin while the two worked on the Twilight supergroup together. Finally, Judd's addictions began to consume his life, and by the early 2010s he had not only been arrested for theft, but had developed an extensive negative reputation for defrauding his fans for drug money, usually by arranging album presales and selling "exclusive" merchandise that somehow never made its way to the customer upon payment. While Nachtmystium's music is still well-regarded in black metal circles, the project has produced little new material since 2018 and Blake Judd has been blacklisted such that a comeback is probably quite unlikely.
• Negativland are recognized for their pioneering work in sound collage, but much more recognized for pranking the media into believing that one of their tracks had been implicated in a murder^note (to get out of a potentially loss-making tour, they claimed that they had been advised not to play live because their track "Christianity Is Stupid" had inspired a multiple homicide), and the legal battles over their 1991 "U2" single^note (an irreverent cover of U2's "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" built around profane out-takes of the DJ Casey Kasem, which led to U2's label throwing the book at them and the single disappearing into legal limbo for many years).
• Anna Netrebko, a Russian operatic soprano, is one of the most famous stars in the opera world, having performed at many prominent opera houses around the world, notably with the Metropolitan Opera, and is well-known for her progress from lyric and coloratura roles into heavier, more dramatic roles over the years. However, in recent years, she has seen some controversy over her insensitive remarks about sexual assault (said in the aftermath of the James Levine scandal) that were seen as victim-blaming by many people. Another incident that's been seen as rather controversial is her being cast in the title role of the Met Opera's now-cancelled new production of Verdi's Aida in the 2020-21 season; for context, Aida is an Ethiopian princess, and Netrebko, a white Russian, has stated that she won't perform the role without blackface. This practice, intended respectfully and not as a caricature, has been completely normal for non-black singers playing Aida for well over a century,^note Metropolitan Opera artistic director Rudolf Bing even asked light-skinned Afro-American dancers playing Ethiopians to wear dark makeup because they looked white onstage and Netrebko has done it in the past; but it is one of the operatic traditions now being questioned as cultural sensibilities have changed. (Aida may be off the roster entirely until this is all sorted out. In 2016, Music Theatre Bristol canceled their production of the Elton John Aida musical over accusations of cultural appropriation for casting white singers.) While she still has her fans, and her career is still going strong, she has now become a rather polarizing figure in the opera world, in large part due to these views of hers.
• German musician Nico (born Christa Paffgen) is widely recognized as a pioneer for women in rock music, but is just as well known for her drug issues and allegations that she was an open, virulent racist and even possibly a Nazi sympathizer. Not helping matters is the fact that said allegations came out after she died, thus making them virtually impossible to confirm.
• Ted Nugent is probably one of the best-known classic rock artists, notable for songs such as "Cat Scratch Fever", often ranked among the greatest classic rock tracks, and "Stranglehold", which Guitar World has ranked as having one of the greatest guitar solos of all time. However, you'll be hard-pressed to find a discussion about his music on the internet that doesn't eventually turn into an argument about his far-right political views (especially his rabid advocacy of gun rights and his virulent racism), his sexual pursuits of underage girls, and his 1977 High Times interview where he claimed to have dodged the Vietnam War draft by not showering for a week, snorting meth, and soiling his pants.
• Within the West, Sinéad O'Connor was best known for ripping up a picture of the Pope during her Saturday Night Live performance in 1992 while shouting "Fight the real enemy!" The incident caused her a lot of backlash and was cited as a Creator Killer moment for her, with NBC receiving over 900 calls about the performance, before the many allegations of child sexual abuse committed by members of the Catholic Church became commonly known and tarnished its image. To this day, the SNL performance remains one of the first things that comes to mind when discussing her, to the point where the announcement of her death in 2023 was quickly met by discussions about the performance and its aftermath.
• Yoko Ono has been the subject of hate and derision by many people for supposedly causing the split of The Beatles while married to John Lennon. While her work has undergone a critical re-evaluation since the 90s, her name has become synonymous with the idea that bands split up over a member's love interest.
• Mexican pop punk group Panda (aka Pxndx), while successful in their home country, are almost exclusively known outside of it for plagiarizing many of their songs from American bands such as Green Day, Blink-182, and My Chemical Romance, including stolen riffs and directly translated lyrics taken from those bands. The band is almost exclusively known for these plagiarism accusations outside of Mexico, and it remains a permanent stain on their image even in their home country, where they have been frequently booed at festivals.
• Lou Pearlman managed some very successful boy bands, such as N Sync and the Backstreet Boys. But most people know him for running one of the largest and longest-running Ponzi schemes in history. To a somewhat lesser extent, he's also known for allegations that he attempted to molest multiple singers. On another note, while N Sync and the Backstreet Boys have mostly avoided having the same stigma as Lou's other ventures, his other boy bands, such as O-Town, Natural and Take Five, have been doomed to obscurity thanks to being associated with Lou's financial malefesance and molestation accusations.
• Peste Noire, a French indie Black Metal band, was once one of the most prominent acts in France's underground metal scene. This would change, however, with the band's embrace of white power politics and growing ties to Ukrainian far-right groups. Nowadays, the band is far more well known for their racism and connections to right-wing extremists, reaching its nadir with frontman Famine appearing in blackface on an album cover, than for their musical output.
• John Phillips of The Mamas & the Papas is best known for being posthumously accused by his daughter Mackenzie of having an incestuous relationship that lasted for ten years.
• Édith Piaf, once one of the most beloved entertainers in the world, suffered a career slump after World War II, with many former fans refusing to forgive her willingness to perform for the Nazis during their occupation of France. She is also known for having suffered from exceptionally destructive alcoholism which contributed to her death at 47.
• While Ariel Pink has been a critically acclaimed and influential lo-fi pop musician, in recent years, he has become better known for making provocative remarks widely seen as racist, homophobic, and misogynistic, being accused of domestic abuse by his ex-girlfriend and bandmate Charlotte Ercoli Coe, and expressing support for far-right conspiracy theories.
• The Russian Shock Rock girl group Pussy Riot was virtually unknown in the West until two of its members were imprisoned on a vaguely-defined "hooliganism" charge and were reportedly treated quite badly inside; many felt the true motive behind the arrest was an attempt by the government to silence their gay rights activism.
• Although it dissipated after Freddie Mercury's death, Queen's 1984 residency shows at the Sun City resort in South Africa was a huge factor in their American standing tanking in the '80s. The concerts broke a cultural boycott implemented in protest of The Apartheid Era and resulted in the band being fined by the British Musicians Union and blacklisted by the United Nations. While Queen stated that they were apolitical and that they were promised that the crowd would be racially integrated, it didn't stop American audiences from associating Queen with the concerts, to the point where their post-Live Aid European comeback failed to materialize in the region. They did not return to widespread popularity in the US until just before Mercury died, and Roger Taylor would eventually admit in 2021 that the Sun City residency was a mistake.
• Shabba Ranks emerged in the early 1990s as the most popular musician to come out of Jamaica since Bob Marley, with several international hits. Unfortunately, Shabba was also a virulent homophobe who sang numbers where he advocated crucifying and murdering gay people. Interviews also showed he was dead serious about the matter, including a U.K. television appearance on Channel 4's The Word, where Mark Lamarr famously told him "That's absolute crap and you know it." These days, he's far better known for his bigotry than his music, at least outside his native Jamaica.
• Rings of Saturn is a fairly big name in deathcore, but they are more known for their extremely lengthy history of drama and public spats between mainman Lucas Mann and other members, particularly the "half-speed controversy"^note Former drummer Brent Siletto publicly accused Lucas of recording his guitar tracks at half-speed in the studio, then artificially speeding them up, which guitarist Joel Omans later confirmed when he quit in 2014, Lucas' refusal to tour with the band between the summer of 2017 and mid-2019 (allegedly due to his need to testify in court after he was jumped at a show sometime before that), an extremely acrimonious split with Miles Baker and Aaron Stechauner in 2018, a spat with Jared Dines in 2019 after the latter accused him of backtracking his guitar and not actually playing live, the band getting thrown off of Nuclear Blast Records and losing vocalist Ian Bearer within weeks of each other in 2021 due to a dispute Lucas had with the label, and a very poorly-received instrumental EP in 2022 that was followed with a sparsely-attended tour. While the band still has its fans, most of the fanbase has grown increasingly less able to defend Lucas with each incident, and the band is largely viewed as a has-been ruined by his ego and the chaos and drama that surrounds him.

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• Mamoru Samuragochi, once a renowned composer known as "Japan's Beethoven", had his reputation ruined once it came out that he wasn't actually deaf and that most of his compositions were in fact by his orchestrator Takashi Niigaki. If there's anything else Samuragochi is remembered for outside Japan, is his composition of the Resident Evil Director's Cut "Mansion Basement" theme, considered by many fans to be So Bad, It's Good.
• Travis Scott had his reputation heavily damaged after an incident at his own concert, Astroworld, where 10 people died and hundreds were injured due to crowd crush ^note  A phenomenon at heavily crowded events where the pressure of being packed so tightly together results in those affected being unable to breathe while he refused to stop performing even as people were pleading for him to stop the concert and the crowd prevented medical personnel from intervening. While the deaths were also due to the concert’s planners and not entirely Scott himself, the tragedy is what most people think of when hearing his name in the aftermath and it resulted in him being removed from Coachella’s lineup among other things.
• Lee Seung-hyun, widely known as Seungri, had once been the youngest member of Big Bang, the most influential boy band in the K-pop industry up until the mid-2010s. He was also known as "Korea's Great Gatsby" for his extravagant lifestyle (which he had frequently flaunted through lavish parties) and business ventures, which included the Burning Sun, a high-class night club in the Gangnam district of Seoul, which had opened up in February 2018. However, in January 2019, his reputation took a major blow after it came out that he was involved in the Burning Sun scandal, a major sex scandal involving some of K-pop's top stars and crimes taking place at the nightclub. More specifically, he was indicted on charges including prostitution, habitual gambling, and illegal foreign currency trade. In fact, Seungri's playboy party lifestyle became much Harsher in Hindsight when it was discovered that he'd allegedly solicited prostitutes for Japanese investors at his "Gatsby" Christmas party in 2015, and that he had also hired prostitutes for his birthday party in the Philippines in 2017. He ended up leaving both Big Bang and the K-pop industry in the wake of the scandal, and it's highly unlikely that he will ever return to the industry again.
  • An additional casualty of the Burning Sun scandal was Jung Joon-young, who was previously a high-profile figure as a television presenter and the frontman of the popular rock group Drug Restaurant. After the scandal broke out, Joon-young was arrested and later confessed to multiple sex crimes, including rape and secretly filming himself having sex with women, and was sentenced to six years in prison. Since then, he has become known primarily for his crimes and is highly unlikely to ever return to the industry.
• Sex Pistols:
  • The band as a whole is mostly known for trying to play "God Save the Queen" from a barge during the Queen's Jubilee after being prohibited from playing the song on British soil. Much of the bad press was intentional. As was the bad press they received for "Belsen Was a Gas", which was more of the offensive variety.
  • For individual members, there was Sid Vicious, who is more well-known both back then and today for his rebellious attitude, his severe drug dependency, his many run-ins with the law (most infamously the alleged murder of his girlfriend Nancy Spungen), and his death from a drug overdose at the age of 21.
  • Also controversial is frontman John Lydon. Long notorious for his provocative behavior, his affinity for stirring the pot would turn against his reputation in the 21st century when he made a number of right-wing populist statements that contrasted the predominantly left-wing politics of the Pistols' output and fanbase, most notoriously walking back on prior anti-Trump and anti-Brexit statements when both won and embracing them. Since then, discussion on him will typically lapse into arguments about whether or not those statements were sincere.
• Skrewdriver started off as a non-political punk band that had a lot of influence on later Oi! groups. When they broke up in 1979, it seemed like it would be remembered in the same light as other British Punk Rock groups of the time period. But in the early 1980s, former frontman Ian Stuart Donaldson became a neo-Nazi, and reformed Skrewdriver as a far-right white power band with a different lineup (since — understandably — most of the band's other original members weren't interested in promoting such a hateful ideology). This new version of Skrewdriver openly promoted right-wing extremist groups like the National Front and raised funds for them. It was also heavily involved in the racist and anti-Semitic Rock Against Communism movement. Nowadays, hardly anybody remembers that Skrewdriver used to be a non-racist band.
• Sia came under a lot of backlash for her response to criticisms about her movie Music (mentioned in the Live-Action Films page). The first official trailer was met with critical backlash and public outcry from the autistic community due to the casting of her muse Maddie Ziegler, a neurotypical actress, playing the role of the autistic title character. Despite Sia's defense that the reason for not choosing an autistic actress to play the role was because she had been working with Ziegler for so long, critics and activists pointed to how the representation of autism was misguided and harmfully stereotypical, in addition to the film being sponsored by Autism Speaks. ^note An autism advocacy organization that sponsors autism research and conducts awareness on the topic, yet is also very controversial in itself with the autism community as they consider the charity a hate group that promotes the view of autism as a disease, promotes quack "therapies" and eugenics including collecting brain tissue and DNA, and has no autistic people on their board of directors Sia's frustrated outbursts with people criticizing the movie also tarnished her image.
  • This isn't the first time when Sia caused a huge controversy which involved Maddie Ziegler, her music videos for "Chandelier" and especially "Elastic Heart" also tend to be remembered mostly for showing Maddie (who was twelve years old at the time) doing interpretive dances in a flesh-toned leotard. The latter in particular also received controversy for having Shia LaBeouf in a cage with Ziegler, with the former only wearing light-toned shorts, which many interpreted as pedophilic. Sia apologized for the videos and clarified that the two are supposed to represent her self-states fighting each other.
• Frank Sinatra's career was dogged by his rumoured ties to the Mafia, something he always denied, though he was associated with underworld figures.
• Sister Souljah is a rapper and songwriter who often has an extremely sarcastic, "why don't we just blow up the world" presentation, who was a frequent collaborator with Public Enemy — and even a member of the group for a time. But most people know her for suggesting African-Americans "have a week and kill white people" in the aftermath of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, as well as saying "If there are any good white people, I haven't met them" in the music video of her song "The Final Solution: Slavery's back in Effect". It certainly doesn't help that Bill Clinton's famous repudiation of these comments during his 1992 presidential campaign inspired a lasting bit of political terminology.
• The Thai Boy Band Slur is regarded as a pretty average boy band back home. Ask any Westerner that's even aware of their existence on the other hand and what springs to mind for them would be "the boy band that dressed up as Adolf Hitler in a music video". Nazi imagery isn't seen as taboo in Thailand since students aren't usually taught about the Holocaust.
  John Oliver: That is misjudged just from a marketing standpoint. How are teenage girls supposed to pick a favorite boy band member if all of them are the bad boy?!
• Indie rock group the Smith Westerns are solely known for being the band that was performing during the 2011 Pukkelpop festival when it was hit by a severe thunderstorm that toppled the tent the band was performing in and caused five deaths.
• Rapper Soulja Boy is known for two things: his One-Hit Wonder "Crank That", and how he tried to start his foray into video games by selling his own game consoles in late 2018, which are basically cheap Chinese consoles with pirated games sold at a more expensive price. Nintendo were quick to notice Soulja Boy's piracy and sent him a warning letter, and he nearly got jail time for selling pirated games on overpriced versions of cheap Chinese consoles.
• Britney Spears absolutely dominated the music charts in the late '90s and early '00s and started to see a renaissance in the late '10s. However, any discussion of her will be dominated by her very public breakdown in 2007–08 that was so bad, she lost custody of her children and was placed under the conservatorship of her father until 2021, and her lengthy court fight to win independence, including her official testimony where she claimed that her dad was using the conservatorship (which was supposed to have ended in 2009) to control and abuse her.
• Producer and songwriter Phil Spector is less known nowadays for his influential contributions to the music industry than for his history of erratic, violent behavior and the fact that he was convicted for the 2003 murder of actress Lana Clarkson in 2009. So heavily did the latter come to overshadow him that when Spector died in 2021, news outlets described him as a convicted murderer first and a record producer second.
• Outside of the Pop Punk community, the band The Story So Far are solely known for an incident at a 2016 Toronto gig wherein lead singer Parker Cannon dropkicked a stage crasher who was taking a selfie. The incident sparked outrage on social media (keep in mind this was before the selfie trend largely fell out of public approval, mostly in the wake of injuries and deaths that occurred during the taking of "dangerous selfies") and led to the band being banned from the Mod Club (where the gig took place).
• Sugarland's music career has been obscured by the fact that they were the band that was set to perform at the 2011 Indiana State Fair on August 13, 2011 when the stage collapsed, killing seven people and injuring 58 others, and causing the duo to be named in 44 lawsuits relating to the incident.
• Koichi Sugiyama was respected as the composer for the Dragon Quest series' soundtrack... and equally hated for his personal views, including virulent homophobia, denial of Japanese war crimes, and publically bragging about donating his concert profits to nationalist hate groups, as well as refusing to let his orchestral work be used outside of Japan, forcing the Western releases of Dragon Quest games to use inferior-sounding MIDI versions of his music. While the Dragon Quest games themselves are iconic enough to avoid being completely overshadowed, any discussion of their music specifically will attract arguments over his views and whether it's fair or not to separate the art from the artist. Due to him holding the rights to his compositions, Square Enix could not get rid of him without also getting rid of the DQ series' iconic themes, and so he remained employed until his passing in 2021 at the age of 90, at which point many people celebrated the fact that the series was now free from someone with such reprehensible views.
• 1990s country music singer Doug Supernaw has two controversies that overshadow most of his career. First was his 1993 single "Reno", which got pushback from listeners in and around Reno, Nevada due to it using the city as a negative metaphor for an ex-lover. Second was his 1995 cover of the Dennis Linde composition "What'll You Do About Me": some stations balked at its Stalker with a Crush lyrics due to the then-ongoing O. J. Simpson murder trials, and not even a lyrical change in the radio edit helped, so his label instead pulled promotion of the song and dropped him.
• Rapper and songwriter Tay-K achieved mainstream success with his song "The Race". Unfortunately for him, on the same day the song was released, the long arm of the law caught up with him. As it turned out, he'd been involved in a home invasion in Texas where a drug dealer was fatally shot and had been on the lam after escaping from house arrest. He was convicted in 2018 and sentenced to 55 years in prison. To make matters worse, he was indicted in 2019 on a second murder charge, strongly indicating that he'll forever be known as a murderer first and a musician second.
• Lithuanian House Music DJ Ten Walls gained popularity for his song "Walking With Elephants", which peaked at #6 on the UK charts, and seemed to be poised to become a well-received DJ in his own right... only to then shoot himself in the foot with a homophobic post on his Facebook page where he equated homosexuality to pedophilia and called LGBT people "a different breed". Aside from the blatant bigotry, the post was especially (and ironically) problematic due to Electronic Music's long history of being one of the most LGBT-friendly music genres. Festivals that previously booked him dropped him like a hot potato, his agency fired him, and Walls' name became mud thanks to the controversy. Since then, he's apologized for the post and came out with a new album (featuring a transgender singer on some of the songs), but to say Walls has an uphill climb ahead of him would be an understatement at the least.
• Robin Thicke's musical career has been obscured by his 2013 One-Hit Wonder "Blurred Lines" coming off as condoning rape (a Tumblr post featured rape survivors holding up cards with their rapists' quotes on them that eerily echoed the song's lyrics). It only got worse when stories began to emerge that Thicke's Handsome Lech persona wasn't entirely an act and his wife, actress Paula Patton, left him after pictures of him groping a girl in an elevator surfaced, and then he was sued by Marvin Gaye's estate for copying one of Gaye's songs for "Blurred Lines", with Gaye's estate winning the lawsuit. Since then, Thicke's many attempts to get his career back up off the ground have been utter flops and his name is more synonymous with "that rapey song" than anything else.
• Pop Punk Girl Group Tramp Stamps is more remembered for the controversies surrounding them than for their music.
  • They tried to look independent despite a cursory search showing them having industry ties, they didn't seem to understand the punk aesthetics and messages they were going for, and none of them had shown much interest in punk before forming the band. As a result, they are widely believed to be industry plants, or at least viewed as posers. This led to a lot of backlash because they used aesthetics from an anti-establishment genre that holds authenticity in high regards. To make matters worse, two of them were signed to the label of Dr. Luke, who has been accused of abuse, which made their feminist messages look hypocritical.
  • The Tumblr fiasco where they allegedly made a disastrous attempt to pose as Tumblr girls and got chased off the site in a matter of hours. While they really did have a Tumblr blog for a short period of time, most of the infamous posts attributed to them (including fake Sock Puppet accounts) were the work of trolls.
  • Even if people do talk about the music, it's probably to discuss the questionable implications of their lyrics, such as the lines in "I'd Rather Die" suggesting that the female narrator has tried to have sex with drunk guys, and not only is this not portrayed as wrong, but she complains about him not getting it up.
• Aside from their one major hit song "Headstrong", Trapt has become infamous for frontman Chris Taylor Brown's numerous racist and homophobic social media comments, as well as his outspoken (sometimes to the point of vitriolic) support of Donald Trump and the Blue Lives Matter movement, and frequent insults towards his critics. This all came into a head in March of 2020, when he went on a lengthy spree of controversial posts and attacks on others via Twitter, before being suspended in early December 2020 when he appeared to defend statutory rape. Brown then bizarrely re-emerged in late 2021, using the band's official TikTok (and other affiliated social media accounts) to pick fights with several left-leaning users on the site, including some bizarre livestreams where he repeated his claim that his defense of statutory rape was a "joke."
• Ike Turner was once famous for being one of the pioneers of rock and roll (his early 1950s tune "Rocket 88" is widely considered to be one of the first singles in the genre) and was well known for his string of 1960s hit songs with his wife Tina Turner. However, his career was tarnished in the 1970s when Tina divorced him and revealed that he had been frequently violent towards her, earning him a permanent reputation as a wife-beater. When Tina's biopic What's Love Got to Do with It (1993) was released, it only made Ike, who was finishing his prison sentence, a complete pariah among the music community. Nowadays, while Tina has gone onto being one of the most acclaimed singers of her time, it is unlikely that Ike's music career will ever be associated with anything but his treatment of Tina.
• Richard Wagner: Another example of a composer who is widely seen as important, innovative, and influential, yet also notorious for his anti-Semitism. His case isn't helped by the fact that so many Nazi members, including Adolf Hitler, adored his operas. This is the main reason why his work is banned from being performed in Israel.
• As of the beginning of 2021, Country Music singer Morgan Wallen — despite beginning the year with a month-long run at the top of the albums charts with his then-newly released Dangerous: The Double Album — had multiple controversies hanging over him. First was a drunk and disorderly charge in May 2020 at a Nashville bar owned by Kid Rock. Second was footage of him hosting a party in Alabama that flagrantly violated COVID-19 social distancing laws. The latter led to him getting booted off a musical gig on Saturday Night Live, although said post was later reinstated and his performance was even predated by a skit where he made fun of himself for his decision. But the third strike came in February 2021, when TMZ acquired footage of him drunkenly shouting racial slurs at a neighbor. This incident led to country radio and even streaming services dropping his music overnight (which would later be subverted by summertime), his record label suspending him, and the Academy of Country Music withdrawing him from consideration for any awards that year. While Wallen later apologized for his actions on video and on Good Morning America and stated that he had talked to various organizations, this incident helped open the floodgates on a much wider discussion regarding the treatment of race in country music, and immediately placed Wallen at the forefront of such discussions. Although Wallen finished the year with Dangerous being certified double-platinum, it has become all but impossible to talk about him without mentioning the incident. Wallen attracted further controversy when he announced a tour in 2022 and performed on the Grand Ole Opry with labelmate ERNEST (his first onstage appearance since before the video surfaced); this move also caused many to criticize the institution for tacitly endorsing Wallen less than six months after the Opry tweeted a statement against racism on their stage (yet had invited no more black artists than before to perform).
• Roger Waters was the bassist of Pink Floyd who took the reins of the band in the '70s, being responsible for their most critically and commercially successful material before leaving in 1985. While Pink Floyd is still best known for their music, Waters himself is better known for his on-and-off feuding with his former bandmates, frequent accusations of antisemitism thanks to his vocal support for Palestinian liberation in Israel (not helped by remarks on the Israeli government that paralleled antisemitic rhetoric, which Waters claimed was unintentional), and his support for Russia during the Russo-Ukrainian War. The latter especially came to define his reputation after the second leg of the war began in 2022 thanks to him espousing pro-Russian narratives, leading to many people calling him a mouthpiece for Vladimir Putin.
• Without mincing any words, Kanye West is extraordinarily attracted to drama, and although it's unknown how much of his behavior is genuine, a possible result of bipolar disorder or another mental disorder, or just him trying to get a rise out of people, it's still a major turn-off for many.
  • The 2009 MTV Video Music Awards are almost solely known for West interrupting Taylor Swift's acceptance speech for Best Music Video by a Female Artist and saying Beyoncé should have won instead.
  • In early-to-mid 2018, he attracted backlash after posting several pro-Trump tweets. This was a deep problem as Trump is overwhelmingly unpopular among the African-American community, which also makes up a large chunk of rap and hip-hop artists. To make matters worse, he then made comments implying that he considered slavery a choice, suggested the abolishment of the 13th amendment, which abolished slavery, met with Trump in the Oval Office, and made an announcement that he planned on running for president in either 2020 or 2024^note  he would run in 2020 and concede defeat a few days before Joe Biden won, but he has indicated that he will run again in 2024. (though said announcement predated the aforementioned events). This caused even those who tolerated West to turn their backs on him. He has sometimes gone back on his Trump support and related comments, though.^note It's worth observing that several other rappers who endorsed Trump, like Lil Wayne (who is black) and Lil Pump (who is white), did not face the same backlash for it as Kanye did — it's largely assumed Wayne was just sucking up to Trump to get a presidential pardon, and nobody respected Lil Pump enough to be disappointed by his actions.
  • But even then, that was nothing compared to 2022. The earlier parts of the year saw West in a bitter feud with his ex-wife Kim Kardashian's new boyfriend Pete Davidson, wherein West openly harassed him, including leaking private text messages on his Instagram, and released a music video for his The Game collaboration "Eazy" (which had previously attracted controversy for its cover art of a skinned monkey) wherein Davidson gets buried alive and decapitated by West. The resulting album released during that time, Donda 2, which was released exclusively on Kanye's Stem Player in an unfinished nature, primarily focused on his divorce from Kim and his bitterness towards Davidson. In early October 2022, West faced further controversy after donning a shirt with the "White Lives Matter" slogan during Paris Fashion Week, and even moreso from that month onward with antisemitic comments (including praising Adolf Hitler and denying the Holocaust), resulting in terminations with many of his sponsorships and collaborations with companies such as Vogue, CAA, Balenciaga, Gap and Adidas and major demand to remove all of his music from streaming services online a-la R. Kelly.
• Kris Wu, a Chinese-Canadian actor, singer, record producer, rapper, model and former member of Korean-Chinese boy band EXO, was once one of China's biggest musical acts. As of 2021, however, Wu is accused of raping as many of 30 victims, some of whom were minors at the time. On August 16, 2021, he was formally arrested over allegations of rape.
• XTC: Discussions on the controversy surrounding the overtly pro-atheist content of "Dear God" tend to eclipse any talk regarding the song's artistry, composition, and its status as XTC's one hit in the United States. It's also overshadowed XTC in general for the mainstream US. Bring their name up to the casual American music fan and they'll think "Oh yeah, the guys who did that anti-God song". It doesn't help that a deranged XTC fan held a school faculty hostage while playing the song over its public-address system, indirectly tarnishing the band for many people.
• Yellowcard soured their reputation in 2019 when they not only sued Juice Wrld for allegedly copying the melody of their 2006 song "Holly Wood Died" for his breakout hit "Lucid Dreams," but moved forward with their lawsuit after his death in December, which received a huge backlash and even a #FuckYellowcard hashtag on Twitter to criticize their behavior. Even though they eventually ended the lawsuit in July 2020, Googling "yellowcard" still immediately brings up "yellowcard lawsuit" as a suggestion and the YouTube video for "Holly Wood Died" has a staggering number of dislikes.
• Steve Yoo Seung-jun was one of South Korea’s highest selling artists in the late 90s and early 00s, selling over 5 million albums. In 2002, the singer renounced his South Korean citizenship to become a US citizen. This was allegedly done to dodge military service, even though he had repeatedly pledged to carry out the duty. The move sparked a public uproar, and the government banned him from entering the country. To this day, (South) Koreans still hate him with a passion and he is mostly known and remembered for his career-ending scandal.

Works

• The One-Hit Wonder song "867-5309/Jenny" by Tommy Tutone became best known for having wreaked havoc on people who actually had that phone number, enduring endless prank calls until many opted to have their numbers changed.
• "Weird Al" Yankovic's 1996 song "Amish Paradise" is largely remembered for starting a feud between him and Coolio, who was angry at Yankovic for not getting permission to parody "Gangsta's Paradise" from him and believed Yankovic's irreverence disrespected the serious, anti-gang message he wanted to convey. Yankovic and Coolio would eventually patch things up, with Coolio expressing regret and admitting he overreacted due to feelings of wounded pride, but it had the long-term effect of Al seeking permission from the artists themselves rather than intermediaries from that point forward. (Coolio would later admit he found Amish Paradise quite funny as well).
• The Black Crowes' 1994 album Amorica garnered significant controversy for its cover - a woman's bikini-clad crotch taken from the 1976 bicentennial issue of the pornography magazine Hustler. The band anticipated controversy with the cover, due to the American Flag Bikini, but were flabbergasted that the pubic hair visible in the image was what people and retailers (like Kmart and Walmart) were offended by. The band relented by issuing an alternate cover featuring the American flag bikini against a black background. The album is now known mostly for the cover controversy than for the music on it.
• The 1944 song "Baby, It's Cold Outside", written by Frank Loesser, was a holiday favorite for several decades. Over time, however, it has suffered severe Values Dissonance, as changes in the social landscape make it sound more like it's about date rape — the line "Hey, what's in this drink?" (initially just referring to alcohol) becomes especially troubling.^note The song is actually Fair for Its Day even though in the original score, the female character is called Mouse while the male is called Wolf. The complete lyrics make it clear that the female singer wants to consent, but is forbidden by the social conventions of the time. Instead, she takes matters into her own hands by "failing" to be Above the Influence. This was an extremely common psychological trick used by both men and women. Furthermore, in the public debut of the song in the 1944 film Neptune's Daughter it was performed twice, the second time with the woman as the aggressor and the man as the resistant one. In 2018, a radio station in Cleveland agreed to stop playing the song entirely after a massive letter-writing campaign. This soon expanded into a nationwide conversation with numerous other stations holding polls about whether they should also stop playing the song. The majority of them ended up being against the ban. A year later, John Legend and Kelly Clarkson released a version with updated lyrics stressing the woman's choice to stay or go, which was widely mocked on both sides of the issue for being too forced and on-the-nose.
• "Baby Koopa Is Crying" by Diego Quintero is known less for its music, and more for triggering copyright claims on gameplay videos of Super Mario Bros. and Super Mario World due to its use of samples from those games. (The fireball and jump sounds from Super Mario Bros. played on loop over a drum beat make up most of the track, and nearly the entirety of Super Mario World's castle music is played unedited.)
• The Verve's hit 1997 song "Bitter Sweet Symphony" is notable for the lawsuit brought by Alan Klein, former manager of The Rolling Stones, over the sampling of the Stones' song "The Last Time", which Klein owned the rights to. The lawsuit determined that The Verve excessively used sampling, which resulted in the song being credited entirely to Jagger/Richards, with The Verve receiving no royalties from subsequent airplay. It was not until 2019, long after Klein's death, that the songwriting credits were reverted to the original composer, leader vocalist Richard Ashcroft.
• Even today, Judas Priest's "Better By You, Better Than Me" from their 1978 album Stained Class continues to be overshadowed by the infamous "subliminal message trial" regarding the 1985 suicides of two men who were listening to the album at the time. However, the case was dismissed in 1990, with the finding that any subliminal messages within the recording, should they actually exist, were not responsible for the men's suicides.
• Chely Wright's "The Bumper of My SUV" is known mainly for the controversy over members of her fan club calling in requests for the song, and posing as friends and family of military members in doing so.
• Fear of this was what caused Ice-T to remove "Cop Killer" from Body Count's 1992 debut album, Body Count, as he felt that the controversy over its lyrical content had eclipsed its musical merits.
• Jethro Tull's 1987 album Crest of a Knave is mostly remembered for its surprise nomination and win for Best Hard Rock/Metal Performance at the 1989 Grammys, a move that shocked even the band themselves (who were absent at the award ceremony due to a suggestion made by their manager) and was met with plenty of outrage from viewers who felt neither the album or the band were even "hard rock" and didn't fit on a category that featured AC/DC, Iggy Pop, Jane's Addiction, and Metallica as nominations. In response to the controversy, the Academy discontinued the category in favor of seperate awards for hard rock and metal performances for next year's ceremony.
• Eels' 2000 album Daisies of the Galaxy is known among the general public solely for the fact that George W. Bush tried to get the album banned because he believed it was peddling obscenities to children, due to its childlike cover art◊ and the song "It's a Motherfucker".
• Kesha's 2012 song "Die Young" is today primarily remembered for the fact that it was released shortly before the elementary school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. Because of this, several radio stations temporarily pulled the song from rotation because they feared the title would remind listeners of the twenty children who "died young" that day, despite the fact that the song wasn't even about dying young, as well as the fact that the song was already past its airplay cycle before said school shooting.
• The music video for Lady Gaga's "Do What U Want" is noted for its violent and sexual content, which would ordinarily be par the course for Gaga's repertoire... were it not for the fact that the video guest-starred R. Kelly and was directed by fashion photographer Terry Richardson, both of whom have been accused of sex crimes, and includes a scene where Kelly's character gropes Gaga's. Their involvement was overwhelmingly criticized as being in poor taste, especially as Gaga is known for her activism for gay rights and rape victims, causing many to label her a hypocrite for being willing to work with Kelly and Richardson; the video was eventually scrapped, but not before footage of it was leaked via TMZ. Lady Gaga herself regards the song as an Old Shame, calling it an example of how "explicitly twisted" her mind was at the time and vowed to have the song removed from iTunes and all other streaming services following the release of Surviving R. Kelly, a documentary detailing the allegations against Kelly.
• The 1981 song "Down Under" by the Australian band Men at Work was a hit in its native country, as well as topping the US charts, to the degree that many today consider it to be an unofficial Australian anthem. However, it is also remembered nowadays for the messy lawsuit from Larrikin Music in 2009, over the use of melody from the popular Australian children's song "Kookaburra". The court case, which Men at Work lost, ruled that the song's composer, lead vocalist Colin Hay, has to pay royalties to the copyright holder. Hay suggested that the stress from the lawsuit resulted in the death of his father and the suicide of his bandmate Greg Ham.
• The Pogues' 1987 Christmas hit "Fairytale Of New York" has become better known in recent years for its offensive lyrical content, particularly the terms "slut" and "faggot", and the debate about whether or not the song should be censored for radio play. Like with Mark Knopfler's attempt to justify the usage of the latter word in "Money for Nothing" (see below), Shane MacGowan tried to justify it by claiming that the song was sung from the point of view of a character who is supposed to come across as homophobic.
• Paul Simon's 1986 album Graceland tends to be discussed less for its artistic merits as a production and more for the fact that Simon visited South Africa to produce it, at a time when an international cultural boycott was being held against the nation to protest Apartheid. In his own defence, Simon stated that many of the South African musicians he worked with were opposed to Apartheid, and that his visit was not approved by the South African government, but the controversy remains.
• Though it was a No. 1 hit in the US, Jennifer Lopez's 2001 single "I'm Real" doesn't go discussed without bringing up the dispute with Mariah Carey over the rights to a sample of Yellow Magic Orchestra's 1978 cover of the Martin Denny song "Firecracker". Specifically, Carey had been cleared to use the sample for her own single "Loverboy", but following her acrimonious divorce from Sony Music executive Tommy Mottola and departure from Columbia Records, her old label instead gave the sample to Lopez for "I'm Real". Carey was thus forced to use a sample from the song "Candy" by Cameo instead, and the "Firecracker" version ultimately went unreleased until 2020, by which point Carey was back on a Sony-owned label. As a result of just how ugly the whole situation with the sample was, discussion of "I'm Real" is typically eclipsed by the "Firecracker" spat (said incident also tends to define talk about "Loverboy" as well, but "I'm Real" tends to be hit harder as a result of it being released with the YMO sample first).
• Mungo Jerry's 1970 song "In the Summertime" was a massive hit at the time, peaking at over 30 million copies sold which makes it the third best-selling physical single of all time to this day^note Only Bing Crosby's 1942 recording of "White Christmas" followed by Elton John's "Candle in the Wind 1997" have sold more physical copies in record history. However, it has become difficult to talk about the song without acknowledging that its lyrics include the words "Have a drink, have a drive"^note The lyrics actually don't explicitly reveal what the drink is — it may or may not be a non-alcoholic summer drink like orange squash, and legally, the crime of drinking and driving only applies to alcoholic drinks. Nevertheless, the implications are troubling. Famously, the song was featured in a 1992 advert for the Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives campaign that ended with the song slowing down disturbingly before showing a fatal car accident caused by drinking and driving.
• Pearl Jam's "Jeremy", based on the real life story of suicide victim Jeremy Delle, is hailed as one of their most famous songs and was one of many during the '90s that helped bring the band into mainstream attention. However, it's difficult to talk about the song without bringing up its music video, which infamously featured a young boy shooting himself in front of all his classmates.
• The remix of "Karate Chop" by Future and Lil Wayne, while managing to top the charts, is better known for a controversial line in the song that uses Emmett Till ^note A black teenager who was brutally lynched in 1955 after he was accused of flirting with a white woman in a grocery store, whose case was a major influence for civil rights activists as a metaphor for "beating [a] pussy up".
• The 1980 song "Kill the Poor" by Dead Kennedys is a scathing satire of those among the elite who would rather resolve poverty by killing poor people instead of giving them the education needed to make a decent living. The song is considered a classic of the Punk Rock genre, but it is also well-known for attracting a Misaimed Fandom of neo-Nazis to Dead Kennedys' concerts back in The '80s—who had missed the song's satirical nature, thought the band members were actually advocating killing the poor, and were offering their support for that reason—much to the anger of both fans and the band members, leading the latter to pen the song "Nazi Punks Fuck Off" to let the world know that neo-Nazis are not welcome at their concerts. Taking "Kill the Poor" at face value is still a major Fandom-Enraging Misconception to this day.
• Dire Straits' 1985 song "Money for Nothing", despite being one of the most recognizable hits of the MTV generation, has fallen victim to this trope for its use of the homophobic slur "faggot", and the debate about whether or not the song should be censored for radio play (the censored version usually omits the entire second verse rather than trying to censor the individual slurs). Mark Knopfler has tried to justify the use of the word by saying that the song was sung in character and was meant to be a mocking portrait of someone who would be ignorant and prejudiced enough to use that kind of language (despite the fact that Knopfler earlier responded to criticism by calling both LGBTQ+ and straight persons who critiqued the song for using the slur "stupid" in a Rolling Stone interview). Nevertheless, Knopfler has performed an alternate version on occasion that uses the less offensive slur "queenie" instead.
• Beethoven's "Ode to Joy"^note Originally a poem written by Fredrich Schiller in 1785, it was set to music by Beethoven for the finale of his Symphony No. 9 "Choral", which premiered in 1824, of all things, is considered controversial in Zimbabwe because the tune had previously been repurposed by the repressive white-minority regime (when the country was known as Rhodesia) into a national anthem. This initially caused a diplomatic furore in the 1980s when Zimbabweans heard European embassies playing the "Ode to Joy" (Europe's official continental anthem) during annual Europe Day celebrations.
• It's difficult to bring up Elvis Costello's "Oliver's Army"—considered to be one of his greatest songs—without acknowledging that its lyrics include the words "white nigger". The song was inspired by The Troubles and is critical of the socioeconomic components of war, but is still embroiled in controversy over the aforementioned lyrics. Costello's usage of the n-word during a drunken rant in 1979—the same year "Oliver's Army" was released—doesn't help matters. Costello fans and critics will defend the use of the word as part of the song's "anti-racism" message to no end, but the controversy has largely overshadowed the song.
• The song "Omae wa Mou" by artist Deadman 死人^translationsimply "dead person" became a huge hit on YouTube when it was first released in 2017 and eventually made its way onto Spotify to top its charts. However, in 2019, it became far more known for the controversy it started in regards to the content it used and the artist himself. The song used a sample of the track called "Tiny Little Adiantum" from Toho Bossa Nova 2 by Shibayan Records, which became the main point of contention for copyright infringement and led to the eventual takedown of the song shortly after. However, it's revealed that the takedown was caused by a misunderstanding over the flawed content ID system, and after some diplomacy, the song was eventually put back on Spotify. The incident generated a debate over what constitutes as a remix or straight-up plagiarism, especially within the Touhou Project fanbase where Shibayan Records is more well-known.
• The russ song "Playboy 2017" by Solguden and Mannen is mostly remembered for getting a lot of backlash when its lyrics were accused of promoting misogyny and rape, with the line "If you're 13, you're in" in particular facing heavy scrutiny. The artists and russ group who commissioned the song initially tried to defend it by claiming the "if you're 13..." line was trying to say "even 13-year-olds can have fun", not to imply sex with 13-year-olds (which was hard to believe when the next line was about the "you" giving the narrator a blowjob), and that the song as a whole was meant to parody the oversexualized russ culture (which smelled of a Parody Retcon). Although the artists later changed the infamous lyric to "if you're 17, you're in", the russ group decided to fully distance itself from the song following the controversy.
• The Pet Shop Boys' 2002 album Release is best remembered among people who aren't Pet Shop Boys fans for the song "The Night I Fell in Love", which depicts a homosexual encounter between the narrator of the song and his rap music idol, who is implied to be Eminem, after a concert. While everybody interpreted it as a Take That! to Eminem for allegations of homophobic lyrics, Neil Tennant denied it was and claimed it was actually inspired by Eminem's claims that the homophobic lyrics were actually from the point-of-view of his alter-egos and not him. Nevertheless, Eminem responded with the answer song "Can-I-Bitch", wherein he and Dr. Dre run the Pet Shop Boys over.
• "Return to Innocence" was Enigma's most successful international single, but it's hard to talk about without bringing up the legal battle resulting from it sampling "Elders' Drinking Song" by Difang and Igay Duana, a Taiwanese aboriginal performing couple. In Enigma's defense, producer Michael Cretu incorrectly believed the Duanas' recording was in the public domain, but the controversy remains.
• The Rite of Spring by Igor Stravinsky is universally praised for being a milestone in classical music and music in general. Yet the infamous story of the riots during its premier will forever remain associated with the piece.
• It's difficult to bring up "Rock N Roll Nigger" by Patti Smith, despite being one of her most known hits, due to its problematic title and the fact that the song's subject revolves around the word being another word for "rebel" or "outsider".
• Henry Gross's song "Shannon", despite reaching number six on Billboard's Hot 100, is today best remembered for being requested by a man from Cincinnati as a Long-Distance Dedication to his dead dog Snuggles on the September 14, 1985 edition of America's Top 40. Said Long-Distance Dedication came right after "Dare Me" by The Pointer Sisters, and Casey Kasem was unhappy about it, to say the least.
• Pretty much all discussion about the 2014 U2 album Songs of Innocence revolved around its distribution method, in which it was automatically added to all Apple users' libraries — and thus, for owners who have automatic downloads switched on, immediately downloaded to their devices without their consent. To this day, you'd be hard-pressed to find an opinion on the album's musical quality from anyone other than professional reviewers, with most people instead arguing whether it was creepy for Apple to tamper with their customers' music libraries, or whether complaining about receiving a free album is the epitome of First-World Problems.
• After The Cheetah Girls broke up, Kiely Williams released her debut single "Spectacular", which is about a woman binge drinking, having unprotected sex with a stranger and loving it. It quickly became controversial for portraying these behaviours in a positive light, and it didn't help that it's easy to interpret the lyrics as a celebration of rape — the protagonist was so drunk that her consent was questionable at best, and a few lines suggest that the guy intentionally got her that drunk and possibly drugged her. Eventually, Williams had to respond to the criticism, claiming the song was actually intended to bring attention to the issue of women getting intoxicated and having unprotected sex, but because it didn't exactly go out of its way to show the negative consequences, many people didn't buy it. Since then she hasn't released any music (ignoring the 2018 leak of her unreleased single "Make Me a Drink", which was expected to be her solo debut).
• In hindsight, it's become rather difficult to discuss much of David Bowie's 1976 album Station to Station without bringing up two major things surrounding it. The first is the gigantic Creator Breakdown Bowie suffered during its production; his cocaine addiction, which had been worsening at an exponential rate throughout the first half of the 1970s, had reached its peak at that point, resulting in a psychotic breakdown and Bowie having zero memory of the album's recording. The second element that's become tough to ignore is the album's central character, the Thin White Duke, specifically the fact that Bowie became Lost in Character while touring to support Station to Station and ended up making multiple pro-fascist statements — the exact opposite of his actual beliefs — on live television. The events shocked Bowie so much that they directly motivated him to head to Berlin to rehabilitate and refrain from adopting any more stage personas. Surprisingly enough, critics, fans, and the general public all forgive him and agree Bowie was Lost in Character, rather than actually meaning his positive statements on fascism. The large amount of circumstantial evidence supporting the former interpretation (much of which is discussed on the main page for the album) probably helps in this case. But even though Bowie himself recovered from the controversy, Station to Station has not, and most likely never will.
• "Sugar Walls" by Sheena Easton (which was originally written by Prince) is best known for being placed at No 2. on the "Filthy Fifteen" (behind "Darling Nikki", another Prince song), a list created by the Parents Music Resource Center, the group that would be responsible for the Explicit Content label. The reason? Its sexually explicit lyrics (which is not surprising, considering that much of Prince's work is sexually explicit in nature).
• It is nigh-impossible to talk about Ozzy Osbourne's "Suicide Solution" without bringing up the fact that it allegedly inspired the suicide of 19-year-old John Daniel McCollum in 1984, the subsequent lawsuit against Osbourne by John's parents, and the debates over whether the song is pro-suicide.^note The song is actually about alcoholism and the negative impact it can have on one's mental health.
• Outside of his fanbase, Neil Young's 1988 album This Note's for You is solely remembered for the music video for the titular track, a Black Comedy satire of several pop stars, including Michael Jackson. A battle of egos between Young and Jackson over the video happened when MTV banned the video from airplay after legal threats from Michael Jackson's attorneys, then worsened when Canadian channel MuchMusic continued running it to fulfill CanCon requirements, leading MTV to reconsider their decision and put it into heavy rotation, and giving it the MTV Video Music Award for Best Video of the Year for 1989. Not helping is that the video ended up being Harsher in Hindsight following Jackson's death.
• Jason Aldean's 2023 single "Try That in a Small Town" is best known for the controversy its music video got for being filmed in the Maury County Courthouse in Tennessee, which is infamous for being the location where the lynching of Henry Choate occurred in 1927, interspersed with footage of rallies, looting and riots featuring police officers, thus leading to many accusations towards Aldean and his management of releasing a pro-racism and pro-lynching song. This controversy helped allow the song to top the Billboard Hot 100, becoming Aldean's first song to do so on that chart.
• John Lennon and Yoko Ono's debut album, Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins, caused a great deal of scandal upon its 1968 release because it featured them both fully frontal naked on the album cover. This aspect completely overshadowed the actual content of the record, which is basically experimental noise. Even today it is far better known for the nudity on the cover than the recording itself.
• Aaliyah's final posthumous album Unstoppable is more widely known for the reception its lead single "Poison" featuring The Weeknd received prior to the album's intended release date, with the song underperforming in the charts. "Poison" was also met with backlash due to the poor quality of Aaliyah's vocals compared to The Weeknd's^note Mike Dean, who produced the single alongside two other people, released an updated version of the song less than a day later with much clearer vocals on all digital outlets., with Aaliyah's fans calling the song "disrespectful" and stating that it tainted her legacy. Perhaps as a result of the controversy, Unstoppable has yet to come out.
• Rocko's hit song "U.O.E.N.O.", featuring Future and Rick Ross, is probably better known for the line sung by Ross that was believed to condone date rape ("Put molly all in her champagne/She ain't even know it/I took her home and enjoyed that/she didn't even know it"). This caused the dismissal of Ross as a Reebok spokesperson, the cancellation of concerts, and the censorship of this line on most formats.
• Scorpions' 1976 album Virgin Killer became more known for the original album cover (featuring a naked young girl in a sexual pose with her genitalia covered by shattered glass) that then-guitarist Uli Jon Roth looks back at as an Old Shame than the actual music on it. Even when the band ended up recalling it and replacing it with a portrait of themselves, the controversy surrounding the original cover has obscured any of the album's musical merits. The album also put Wikipedia in hot water decades later when the UK-based Internet Watch Foundation blacklisted the image as child pornography, but said ban only served to pique the curiosity of those who risked their reputation just to know what all the fuss was about. The IWF lifted the ban three days later, likely as the image was used for scholarly purposes to comment on the controversy rather than to attract paedophiles or condone the practice of erotica involving minors (Wikipedia does have images of naked minors such as that one infamous photograph of a pregnant little girl, but while said imagery is there for the aforementioned scholarly commentary rather than as an act of gross exploitation towards children, the practice of hosting them gained some controversy when co-founder Larry Sanger expressed concern over the hosting of potentially obscene images of children or illustrations depicting children, which Jimmy Wales promptly deleted albeit controversially as it was carried out without community consensus).
• Bob Marley's 1976 song "War" is better remembered as the song Sinéad O'Connor was singing in a 1992 episode of Saturday Night Live when she suddenly tore a picture of Pope John Paul II and shouted "Fight the real enemy!", protesting child abuse by the Catholic Church, at the end.
• Brad Paisley's 2013 album Wheelhouse reached #1 on Top Country Albums and produced two big country hits in "Southern Comfort Zone" and "Beat This Summer". But the general public remembers it solely for the album cut "Accidental Racist", a duet with LL Cool J that bore a misguided message about black vs. white struggles, and was critically panned for its ham-handed and offensive lyrics even by people who agreed with it.
• Taylor Swift's 2019 single "You Need to Calm Down" is about shutting down haters in general, but the parts that reference the LGBT community (its official lyrics spell "glad" like GLAAD, a prominent LGBT rights organization, a brief stanza shutting down anti-gay protesters, and promoting a pro-LGBT petition) and the music video's use of many LGBT celebrities have caused discussion about the song to mainly be about its LGBT themes, especially since it dropped in June, the official LGBT pride month. This discussion mostly revolves around whether Swift's activism is genuine or if she's cheapening the cause by relating it to the hate she gets as a celebrity.

Events

• Any concert that becomes the site of a serious accident or acts of violence tends to be best remembered for said event, regardless of how famous the music artists playing were (occasionally, the music artists playing will be best remembered for performing at said event as well). Notable examples include The Who in Cincinnati in 1979, Guns N' Roses at the Riverport Amphitheatre, Limp Bizkit at Woodstock '99^note Who actually played the day before the riot and weren't even there when it happened, but video of the rowdy crowd during their performance of "Break Stuff" was still used in the news reports, Great White at the Station nightclub in 2003, Sugarland at the Indiana State Fair, the Smith Westerns at Pukkelpop 2011, Goodbye to Gravity at the Colectiv nightclub in 2015, Eagles of Death Metal during the November 2015 Paris terrorist attacks, Ariana Grande at the Manchester Arena, Jason Aldean at the October 2017 Las Vegas country music festival shooting and Travis Scott at Astroworld Festival.
• Linda Ronstadt's concert tour in support of Get Closer eventually ran into this in 1983 when Ronstadt performed at Sun City in Apartheid South Africa, breaking the cultural boycott. This prompted a big backlash among both her peers and the press, with many people interpreting the move as Ronstadt expressing support for Apartheid, though Ronstadt disputed this and said there wasn't any political element to the move.
• The Rolling Stones' performance at Altamont in 1969 is better known for one concertgoer being stabbed to death by a member of the Hells Angels (who were acting as security) while the Stones were playing (immortalized in the climactic penultimate verse of American Pie) than for anything else that the Stones did at the concert — or indeed, anything else that happened there. It goes to the point that not only do some accounts imply that the Stones were the sole band at the concert when actually there were various acts,^note Specifically (in order of appearance): Santana, the Flying Burrito Brothers, Jefferson Airplane and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, with the Stones taking the stage as the final act. The Grateful Dead were also scheduled to perform following CSNY but declined to play shortly before their scheduled appearance due to the increasing violence at the venue. but also omit the fact that there were three additional deaths (albeit accidental ones).^note Two caused by a hit-and-run car accident, and one by LSD-induced drowning in an irrigation canal.
• Smash Mouth's performance at the 2015 Taste of Fort Collins festival in Colorado is now remembered solely for an incident where some audience members threw bread at the stage where the band was playing, which lead singer Steve Harwell responded to by breaking from his set and going into a three-minute angry and profanity-filled tirade where he threatened to beat whoever was responsible. While Harwell later apologized for overreacting, it's safe to say that his rage is all that particular festival is remembered for.
  • Their 2020 concert in Sturgis, South Dakota, where the band not only performed against the advice of doctors trying to limit the spread of Covid 19 but didn't require masks and even openly mocked the fears of the disease, is now widely known for the potentially hundreds of cases of the disease that resulted from the night and is now classified as a "super spreader" event, leading to many fans to disavow the band completely.
• This was one of the bigger factors in Kevin Lyman's decision to end the Warped Tour. While a festival tour of that magnitude is going to have problems here and there, the increasingly young and female nature of the audience, coupled with the culture of the emo and especially the scene era of the tour, had given rise to many musicians who had members who used their position to sexually exploit young fans, and by the early 2010s, jokes and comments about the Warped Tour being a haven for predators were commonplace, and it was not uncommon for at least one or two allegations against a performer on the tour to be made per year. This all came to a head in 2015 when Lyman's waffling on the presence of Front Porch Step (the solo pseudonym of Jake McElfresh) and YouTuber Austin Jones (both of whom were mired in controversy for systematically grooming and exploiting young fans, and, in the case of McElfresh, sexually assaulting them) attracted an incredible amount of bad press (up to the point where Hayley Williams even tweeted about her misgivings with the tour due to the amount of controversy surrounding that year and the uptick in incidents as a whole); while both were eventually thrown off the tour, the damage was done, and "Warped Tour" had largely become synonymous with "diddler paradise" in the cultural consciousness. While Lyman never publicly admitted it, the final few years (particularly 2017 and 2018) had numerous acts that tended to attract older audiences, and the word in the industry was that he was so tired of controversy and bad PR that he was willing to skew towards older audiences and potentially lower turnouts if it meant not having to deal with another year like 2015.

Other

• Katy Perry's first episode as a regular judge in the American Idol revival was overshadowed by the moment she kissed a 19-year-old male hopeful, who was quite uncomfortable after that.
• Larrikin Records held a pretty clean record from its foundation in 1974 to the end of the 2000s, but that all changed in 2009 when managing director Norm Lurie decided to sue the Australian rock band Men at Work for their 1981 hit "Down Under" containing a flute riff that sounds suspiciously similar to "Kookaburra", written in 1932 by Marion Sinclair and still under copyright ^note It has since come to light that Larrikin Records have been settling legal disputes with sheet music publishers who mistakenly believed "Kookaburra" is in the Public Domain long before the lawsuit against Men at Work, but they happened behind the scenes and so didn't draw attention from the press. Lurie made the decision to sue after the ABC quiz show Spicks and Specks asked a music trivia question, "Which children's song appeared in the song "Down Under"?" with "Kookaburra" being confirmed as the correct answer. The lawsuit was seen as completely unfair to the public and especially to Australians where "Kookaburra" is an important modern folk song. Much of the general public had believed the song was Public Domain, and Sinclair had never enforced its copyright, not even while "Down Under" was a hit (she died in 1988). Nevertheless, the court ultimately ruled in Larrikin's favour and ordered the band members pay 5% royalties backdating to 2002 and from all future earnings to them. Greg Ham, who had played the flute riff in "Down Under", felt devastated for getting the band members in financial difficulties and slipped into depression. In 2012, he was found dead, with his close friend Colin Hay confirming he was still suffering from stress from the court case. Larrikin Records is now almost always associated with pursuing profits above all else at best, and at worst are accused of manslaughter.
• Johnny & Associates, founded by Johnny Kitagawa, was known for famous J-Pop boy groups such as Arashi, V6, Hey! Say! JUMP, KAT-TUN, Kinki Kids, SixTones etc. They're also known for being strict in releasing their talents' music outside Japan. But they're also well-known for the sexual abuse allegations that Kitagawa did which goes way back in the late 1980's. In 1999, a Japanese magazine Shūkan Bunshun published an expose regarding Kitagawa's activities; unfortunately, Kitagawa's agency filed a lawsuit against them citing defamation. By then, regardless of the allegations, Kitagawa was a beloved public figure and it was believed that the lack of coverage from the Japanese mass media was due to his influence over them. And it continued after Kitagawa's passing in 2019. However, everything changed in April 2023 when the BBC released a documentary entitled Predator: The Secret Scandal of J-Pop, which focused on Kitagawa's sexual abuse allegations. Because of this, Kitagawa's scandal is now exposed internationally and a month later after the documentary's release, former Johnny's Jr. member Kauan Okamoto revealed in a press conference that he had been sexually abused by Kitagawa since he was 15 years old. This led to many of Kitagawa's victims speaking out as well. On August 2023, an independent investigation probe revealed their findings that Kitagawa repeatedly committed sexual abuse since the early 1970's. As a result, many companies canceled their sponsorship with Johnny's talents, and Julie Keiko Fujishima, Kitagawa's niece, stepped down as CEO. On October 2023, the agency would also undergo rebranding, removing Kitagawa's name, which led to the creation of Smile-Up (which would handle the compensation for Kitagawa's victims) and Starto Entertainment (which would manage the remaining talents who were under Johhny's). Even though Kitagawa himself never faced justice for his actions until his death, his name, reputation, and legacy have been destroyed.

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