(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)

No artist can stay on a person’s good side all the time. From the moment you try to put a message into a song, there’s bound to be at least a few people who lash out for saying what you feel. Sometimes, that angry mob does have a point, though, and artists like Guns N’ Roses have done their best to distance themselves from the dogs of their catalogue.

That’s not to say every song must have a questionable lyric sheet. Some of the tracks might be controversial for the music alone, leading to the band either avoiding that part of their catalogue or hardly acknowledging it, as if it’s some cursed object that would come to life if anyone dared to speak its name.

Then again, artists are more liable to put their foot in their mouths than make some drastic change, and more often than not, artists have found themselves getting into trouble because of what they said. Either because of the real-life repercussions of their actions or the possibility of destroying their own reputations, these songs ended up fading out or dramatically pushed to the side to ensure they weren’t in the public eye anymore.

Even if someone is a diehard fan of these artists, they would even have to admit that they may have bit off a little more than they could chew when going out on a limb like this. All good music comes from controversy, but there’s a fine line between being a bit more edgy than normal and just trying to troll someone.

10 songs disowned by artists:

10. ‘Misery Business’ – Paramore

Songwriting as a teenager is a lot different from writing as an adult. You can get away with a lot more when you’re younger, and some of the finer details being a little bit off tends to be a strength half the time. Since Paramore was in it for the long haul, though, people started to see the problems within one of their biggest hits.

Despite ‘Misery Business’ being a genuinely brilliant piece of pop music, the lyrics are a different story. Whereas everyone has gone through their first taste of heartache in high school, Hayley Williams playing the role of someone looking to get her ex back by calling her romantic rival nothing but a whore isn’t necessarily the best way to tackle those emotions.

It turns out that Williams felt the exact same way, even announcing from the stage that the band wouldn’t be playing the song anymore because of how problematic it became. Considering that the band has continued to persevere throughout their tenure and is still one of the most prominent names in rock these days, they seemed to figure out the best way to get around not playing your biggest hit…just make more hits.

9. ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’ – Billy Joel

The idea of liking Billy Joel alone could stand as a controversial opinion in music circles. Joel might have an impressive knack for catchy melodies, but the attitude behind his music will never make anyone look cool when they blast his music in the middle of a crowded area. There are highlights, sure, but even Joel can admit when a song like ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’ is hot garbage.

It’s hard to really fault Joel for this one, though, since it was predominantly written as a history lesson. When going through all the problems he had seen during his upbringing, half of this song is just him droning on about every single problem in the world before throwing together a chorus that sounds half-finished in the demo stages.

While it’s not the greatest comparison to call the song one-note, there’s really no other word for it when half of the verse is him literally holding on to one note for far longer than he should. Luckily, Joel has even seen the error of his ways this time around, going so far as to start the song before stopping it sometimes during shows. Other offenders may have been worse for music, but none of them hit the earworm button quite like this.

8. ‘Exit’ – U2

U2 has always been a lightning rod for controversy, and not in the way that they probably would like. As much as Bono may think himself a radical who gets into controversy because of what it says, it’s usually because he ends up looking absolutely ridiculous after the fact, either through talking about politics or harshing someone’s buzz when they’re just trying to hear ‘I Will Follow’ at a concert. There’s nothing that’s going to take Bono away from his soapbox, but even he understood continuing with ‘Exit’ probably wasn’t the best idea.

Although this is one of the few tracks on The Joshua Tree not to become a major hit, it did get a bit of notoriety when it became the source of inspiration for a serial killer. Despite his justification for the song being transparently flimsy, the idea of their music being used for something so heinous was too much for Bono, eventually retiring the song from their live set-up until they played the album in its entirety.

Considering the band has always been about the prosperity of humankind, the events that are now tied up with ‘Exit’ are too tainted to ignore. U2’s music is supposed to make you feel like you can take on the entire world, but what can do with ‘Exit’ now that it’s associated with the killings of innocent people?

7. ‘A World Without Heroes’ – KISS

KISS would probably love the idea of people thinking they were controversial back in the day. The band already had the circus angle going for them, so getting press from people who thought they actually were rock and roll space aliens was practically the icing on the cake. There was more than one way for the band to drum up bad press, and ‘A World Without Heroes’ was every wrong step for the shock-rock icons.

Convinced that the public somehow needed to know how smart they were, Music from the Elder is already one of the most befuddling listens in the rock canon. After trying to bring depth into their music, the band looped back around to make music so transparently pandering that they practically sounded like a garage band trying to play Yes for the first time.

The crowning moment has got to be this ballad, where Gene Simmons sings about the need for heroes in the world as the slow sounds of strings sing behind him. It might have been believable with the right context, but seeing this lumbering Demon trying to be soft and tender is almost too hilarious for words. Also, if you’re not already dead inside when listening to this, just know that one of the co-writers of this song was Lou Reed. You’re welcome…and I’m sorry.

6. ‘Creep’ – Radiohead

Radiohead have had a career that most art-rock bands would only dream of. They may have had their growing pains period, but that was always towards something bigger, and by the time OK Computer, everyone was on the hype train for Radiohead, whether the band wanted them on or not. No one can outrun their past, though, and ‘Creep’ has been both the most high-profile Radiohead song and the anchor around their neck.

Compared to other rock bands who would relish having their first hit, the band would grow to despise what made them so popular in the first place. Since many Radiohead fans know what to expect these days, this is sad Britpop by numbers, especially towards the end, where Thom Yorke flexes his vocal chops and ends up somewhere between Kurt Cobain and Jeff Buckley in the chorus.

Those vocal role models certainly are good places to start, but Yorke washed his hands of the song pretty quickly, only pulling it out on rare occasions live and hardly mentioning it outside of a few cheap jabs. ‘Creep’ should be a little bit more celebrated amongst the Radiohead camp, but it’s hard to defend when its only claim to fame is being the song that got their foot in the door.

5. Load – Metallica

Metallica could have gone anywhere after making The Black Album. They may have had the metal crowd turning their back on them, but I’m sure they were crying with all the new fans they had earned after ‘Enter Sandman’ found its way to the top of the charts. Just when they could capitalise on their success one more time, the band baulked and decided to drop a few loads on us.

Cheap jokes aside, Load was immediately dismissed by metal fans back in the day because of how different it was. While the band didn’t really switch things up too much from what they had done on their previous outing, nothing could have been more of a sin than them posing as alternative-leaning hard rockers in their videos and bothering to actually get a haircut in the meantime.

James Hetfield has seemed to stand by projects like the Lou Reed album Lulu and the ultimate trash fire St Anger, but even he could admit that this was a weak offering, eventually saying that it was the perfect example of them trying to whip anything into good shape. The Metallica of old was still in there somewhere, but for those who listened to nothing but metal 24/7, this was the equivalent of a preacher who decided to become a Satanist on a whim.

4. ‘Freedom’ – Paul McCartney

Paul McCartney has been one of the poster children for not drumming up controversy ever since he started. Sure, John Lennon might get into some rough patches during his career, but how is the ‘Cute Beatle’ who seemed to hang out with the straights of the world half the time going to get under someone’s skin? McCartney does know how to speak his mind, though, and when he decided to extend a hand for peace, the audience ended up changing the meaning of his song.

After seeing the Twin Towers fall on 9/11, McCartney thought the perfect thing to do would be to make a charity single about fighting for those who couldn’t fight for themselves. When the Bush administration started heading off to fight in Iraq, though, the sentiment of fighting for the right to live in freedom wasn’t really what McCartney had in mind.

Since the entire song seemed to be taken over by the ultra-right brand of political music fans, McCartney really reeled back on the song, eventually retiring it from live performances when performing in the US. There are a million ways for artists to rub people the wrong way, but in the case of McCartney, there’s a good to be made that the fans ended up making the song more controversial than he did.

3. ‘Big Man With a Gun’ – Nine Inch Nails

During the 1990s, everyone and their mother was bound to share their two cents about censorship. The scandals around artists like NWA were still fresh in people’s minds, and every concerned mother was in Washington demanding to make sure that Little Jimmy’s music was safe to play among her church friends. So when an industrial rocker with jet-black hair started singing a song glorifying drugs and misogyny, the alarm bells were bound to go off.

Which is exactly what Trent Reznor wanted. When he put together The Downward Spiral, Reznor made it abundantly clear that he wanted to make something that would not mean someone halfway, which meant having a song glorifying the excessive lifestyle. Though ‘Big Man With a Gun’ was meant as a parody of gangsta rap, no one really got the joke, leading many to believe that this guy was just a sexed-up psychopath out for blood.

Reznor may have appreciated his right to free speech, but he did understand that he wasn’t in the right when putting on the album, later wishing that he could have removed it because he thought that the song wasn’t very good. It’s never easy to stomp on someone else’s art, but as far as Reznor was concerned, this was the first time the shock value outweighed the actual content he was looking for.

2. ‘Woman is the ****** of the World’ – John Lennon

John Lennon was never afraid to speak his mind, even if he knew he might hurt some people. In fact, if you look at solo hits like ‘How Do You Sleep’, he was more than happy to make songs if he knew that it was going to hurt someone by the end of it. For every good Lennon song, there is also a political song, though, and you know the song is controversial when we’re not even putting the full title on the entry.

When working with Yoko Ono on Some Time In New York City, Lennon was trying to write about the kind of hardships that came from women. Though the title phrase was coined by someone else, that didn’t stop Lennon from shouting it from the top of his lungs whenever the band played the song live, which falls less into the category of subversive and veers more towards offensive halfway through.

While Lennon does make some decent points in the song, trying to equate women’s struggles with racial slurs is a lot more misguided than he probably realised. Since Lennon met a deaf ear the minute the song came out, he broke away from Yoko for the first time, eventually spending his “lost weekend” getting as far away from his activist leanings as possible. Compared to other songs that have one or two questionable lyrics, you know a song hit the wrong note when it forced the artist to not talk about politics for years at a time.

1. ‘One in a Million’ – Guns N’ Roses

For a band that was meant to drum up controversy, one could certainly do worse than Guns N’ Roses. Their lyrics aren’t Cannibal Corpse, so you weren’t going to have to worry about grotesque songs about killings or the internal demons that feast on flesh. You were going to hear some racial and homophobic slurs…a lot of them, too.

Even though GNR Lies was supposed to be an excuse for the band to relax a little bit and play a handful of acoustic tunes, ‘One In a Million’ was one of the most questionable movements any major rock band made. As opposed to singing about the harsh realities on the street, Axl Rose decided now was the time to take on a character, which involves him saying many words that your dear author will not repeat on this site.

Despite playing a character, Rose still sounds like he’s on the verge of a breakdown, as if he’s some deranged homeless man on the side of the road shouting this stuff at you as you wait for a taxi. Maybe that was the point, but considering that Slash was wildly offended and the band never played it live, maybe this a song that should have never made it past the demo stages.

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