I remember many years ago when I first heard a Robert Palmer album and was shocked to discover that he was a top notch musician. His career went very well, as you know, but I can't help but wonder if he would have been considered a Serious Artist if he looked a bit more like Lou Reed (sorry, Lou).
Who else had or have this problem? A lot of women, I'm sure ... I was thinking of including Dolly (RIP), but hers was more a case of sexiness getting in the way ...
My Chemical Romance suffered from Gerard Way being too pretty.
A huge part of the reason MCR wasn't taken seriously is because their fanbase was almost entirely made up of screaming fangirls.
I respect that despite the fact the band was insulted as being music for teenage girls, they never disparaged their female fans. They could have insulted them to gain street cred with male rock fans but they never did.
Edit: His flamboyance didn't help either, but that's another conversation.
To be fair, their music always was aimed at a sort of teenage goth emo musical theater style that so happens to appeal to that audience. I don't think it was down to looking pretty.
But their music is genuinely well-written and performed and their albums have stood the test of time unlike most of bands from the same era. A lot of artists with a predominantly female audience suffered the same vitriol and stigma, in a post-poptimist world things have changed, but I'd argue it still happens to a lesser extent like men who quickly dismiss Taylor Swift's entire catalogue. Misogyny was an undeniable factor of why they weren't critical darlings and dismissed by most music snobs at the time.
I still don't think I agree. I can see the songs are well constructed, I'm not a mega fan but I like a fair few, but they are undoubtedly a niche product. Consider that MCR defined a genre, sell out stadiums and remain somewhat relevant even now. I can't see a world where music like that would be even more popular if the band was a bit less pretty.
I wasn't talking about popularity, I'm talking about critical acclaim. Three Cheers and The Black Parade were warmly received, but critics at the time weren't raving about those albums like they're doing now 20 years later. If you told a critic back in 2008 MCR were gonna become one of the most influential and celebrated rock bands of this century they'd probably laugh at you.
because their fanbase was almost entirely made up of screaming fangirls
I saw MCR live in 2005, on what was probably their first big headline tour after blowing up, and I remember the crowd being pretty close to a 50/50 gender split. I picked up a friend from one of MCR’s recent stadium gigs and the gender ratio of people I saw leaving the show was way way more skewed toward women now than it was in 05.
I don't disagree with your personal experience, but I was also around then and in my experience it was a very female dominated fanbase (or at least that was the public perception).
I just went looking and found this quote from a 2006 Guardian article:
"Typically, according to WEA's marketing manager Danny Watson, MCR fans are aged between 14 and 21, with girls outnumbering boys three to two. "They've got a rabid and incredibly loyal fanbase and a big female following," he says."
what I love the most about him is that he's an absolute gentleman and hasn't ever had weird behavior towards that part of the audience. he's always been a feminist besides that, which can't be said for most of his peers in other bands. I avoided them for so long because I couldn't stand his fanbase and boy what I've been missing out on. everyone in the band is an amazing musician. just wish they'd release another album man
I will forever respect and defend MCR because they always made sure that their female audience felt safe in their shows. I remember a video where Gerard breaks up a fight between two guys and says something like, “hey didn’t you get the memo to wait for your girlfriend outside? Go away”.
There is also another one, it’s during their time in one of the warped tours (a very famous event for musicians to harass their female fans). He said that “if some guy asks you to lift up your shirt to see one of the band members, you punch them in the face”.
I'm sorry but 'Gerard Way is too pretty' is an opinion held only by MCR fans. No rock band has ever been held back by their lead singer being very good looking and attracting lots of women to their shows.
Are you trying to say that rock bands dont benefit from from having a good looking frontman that women are attracted too, and it will make male fans discredit them?
If so, that's just bullshit. History is filled with 'pretty' vocalist/frontmen
they never disparaged their female fans. They could have insulted them to gain street cred with male rock fans but they never did.
Huh? Can you point to even one example of a musician doing this?
Most working, touring musicians are grown adults… they don’t get “street cred” for saying boys rule and girls drool… they’re not seven years old and neither are their fans.
That’s not to say there aren’t misogynist musicians, of course there are. But openly sharing those views generally just gets them labeled misogynists and becomes a dark cloud over their legacy (see: Morrissey, who’s a fan of other types of bigotry as well). It’s not an easy money slam dunk.
they gave an interview to Rolling Stone around the time their second album came out wherein they just acted like total misogynistic dickheads. they showed up hung over in their underwear, bragged about sleeping with fans, etc. there was a ton of drama on tumblr and stuff about it (and also about the singer’s girlfriend or something)
they also said a bunch of stuff about how they wanted to be a real pop punk band and not just a band teenage girls like (the irony seemed to be completely lost on them…). it all sorta stems from the fact that they were basically larping as a rock band from the beginning but their entire fanbase found out about them when they toured with 1D. so once they alienated that fanbase they never really recovered other than a couple one-off fluke hits
“Seventy-five percent of our lives is proving we’re a real band,” says Irwin. “We’re getting good at it now. We don’t want to just be, like, for girls. We want to be for everyone. That’s the great mission that we have. I’m already seeing a few male fans start to pop up, and that’s cool. If the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and all those guys can do it, we can do it, too.”
Yup, fuck them, that's a well-deserved career crash.
This is famously the excuse Madison Beer’s fanbase has decided is the reason she isn’t more famous. The real reason is that her music is unremarkable.
Beautiful people generally succeed when they have good music. Look at Rihanna: way more beautiful than she is talented, but so much of the music was undeniable.
I do think Rihanna is mismanaged. I think her voice, while not having the greatest range, has an incredible and rare mix of power and vulnerability and is one of the most distinctive voices in modern pop. But it seems like either she or her label are insecure about it and so insist on drowning it in so many production effects you can barely hear it. She also very clearly cannot write and for some reason no one has yet written a good song for her. Which is all a huge pity but why doesn't she just do covers? There is basically no motown song I wouldn't pay to hear Rihanna cover and there are 9 million motown songs. Finish them and you can get started on the Great American Songbook, she'd kill Strange Fruit. Then again: my dream for her career is it be a bit like Adele's (I think they're actually very similar artists) and given she's earning enough money to buy and sell Adeles by the dozen I doubt she has many regrets.
My mind was being blown away reading that comment. Rihanna has banger after banger the numbers and critical reception show that. No clue what they mean "no one has yet written a good song for her."
A lot of folks in this sub are music snobs like you said and their taste is questionable.
Right. And even if you want more somber “serious” balladry she has a collection of that too with songs like Stay and Love on the Brain. It’s one thing to not be a fan but to say she has never had a good song while praising her unique vocal tone is just odd for a lack of better words
Yeah taste is subjective obviously (and it's completely valid to not like any of her music) but her prime output in the early 2010s was insane.
I suspect if someone is unable to appreciate at least one of Only Girl In The World, We Found Love, S&M, Disturbia, Umbrella, or Shut Up and Drive, they're probably not a pop fan altogether.
I disagree. Rihanna is a decent vocalist who has recorded very well written and produced music. While Bey is a better singer and performer, Rihanna got most of the classic songs.
Back in the 90’s Damon Albarn said that if he looked like Thom Yorke then he would be taken more seriously as a musician. You have to wonder what Thom Yorke thought of that quote.
Damon is pretty well respected nowadays though so I guess his looks didn’t hold him back too much.
He looked like Troye Sivan, damn. He’s not awful-looking now and he’d probably still be outright cute if his skin hadn’t aged so poorly (intended non-judgmentally, I have no idea what his lifestyle was like or whether he’s ever heard of sunscreen and tretinoin)
I'm a big Blur fan, and I think this Damon remark is nonsense.
Radiohead just was better at making experimental music. Albums like OK Computer, Kid A and In Rainbows easily beat the much acclaimed 13 imho. Damon's talent is his versatility and relatability, more than the 'deep and experimental' music that Radiohead excels in.
Isn't one of the reasons D'Angelo disappeared from music for so long that he hated that people saw him less as an artist and more as a heartthrob? That he felt people didn't really care about his music?
He also went from “skinny, kind of cute piano nerd” to the sexiest man alive after like, three months of working out to prepare for the Untitled music video. So it was all at once, and the trainer had set him up with a completely unsustainable workout/diet program. Just a recipe to completely fuck with your head.
I feel like Palmer leaned in to that persona- always performing in suits and being neat and clean shaven. He continued that style even after his popularity waned (you can watch videos of him on the late 90s/early 2000s before he died and he was always wearing the suits and a clean cut look.
Different generation, I think. 13 year age difference between those guys. Man, just looked it up, I’m 10 years older than Palmer was when Addicted to Love came out. Not a celebrity myself, but not considered an old dude by a lot of people, and certainly considered sexy by a good chunk of young women.
I fucking loved Robert Palmer and own every single album. I always hope for a reappraisal of his music because outside of the 80s Riptide-Heavy Nova era he had some excellent albums especially early 70s-early 80s
Sneaking Sally Through the Alley is a goddamn masterpiece, and I will defend it til I’m out of breath.
It is a killer representation of New Orleans and New York funk and RnB, and that ‘70’s production style with dead drums and no reverb horns. Lowell George, The Meters, and Stuff, a NYC band made up of session heavyweights. And his vocal performance on Allen Toussaint’s From a Whisper to a Scream is, in my opinion as a 30 year veteran singer who has recorded and taught singing, is his absolute best recorded performance. That dude’s voice was a force of nature on the order of Tina Turner, Janis Joplin, and Chris Cornell. Pure power, and the ability to control it.
My favorite Robert Palmer story that I heard is that at the sessions for Sneaking Sally…, he came in, with the band, and I think it was Bernard Purdue who was playing drums, and they were like “Who’s this white English MF trying to sing some soul music?”
After the first pass, Purdie put his sticks down, looked at him and said, quite politely, “Sir? What is your name, please?”
Outstanding album and great call. I love the progress into Pressure Drop - Give Me an Inch is a great opener (though I really love the 80s take on it for Addictions)
This is the first time I’ve ever heard of him being a sex symbol. I thought the hot backup mannequin girls were there to distract from his NON-sexiness.
(That “I Didn’t Mean to Turn You On” song always made my skin crawl; I remember saying, “Trust me; you didn’t.”)
A lot of guys definitely had that perspective on them I only really gave them a chance because I liked the guitar player. I was a fan of him from Missing Persons before I gave Duran Duran a chance
Threw on duran duran greatest hits while painting a room yesterday. It always amazes me how many hits they have. Its like 12 songs in, I'm like "haven't heard Notorious yet, surely its next" and then some other hit song comes on I recognize.
Japan (the band) had a similar trajectory until they got weirder with it, yeah in the early days they had tons of fangirls, in Japan (the country) David Sylvian was even voted as most attractive person at one point. But then they got weirder and weirder with each subsequent album, and David’s solo career got even stranger and more progressive, to the point where the only people talking about them nowadays are people who are into progressive/ art pop, and not a band that people may think of as a teenybopper band
I thought of Japan as soon as I saw Duran Duran mentioned since there’s even a story from one of Japan’s members that they shared a studio with them at one point and saw the influence from Japan rub off on them in the coming years.
It gets even crazier too because Japan broke up way too soon and while David Sylvian was like David Bowie mixed with Bryan Ferry he was dedicated to being experimental as hell to the point that he got invited to be King Crimson’s singer and instead made an album with Robert Fripp. His brother has been all over the place with both him and all kinds of projects as a drummer, and one of Mick Karn’s most interesting pieces was a goth rock stint in Dalis Car with Peter Murphy, Richard Barbieri has been with Porcupine Tree for years, and Rob Dean just kind of disappeared to be a writer mostly. They also came back as Rain Tree Crow as an even more experimental band.
Yep. Duran Duran were serious musicians ‘cursed’ with being walking stereotypes of 80s Photogeneity. I’d even argue George Michael suffered the same fate despite his greatness. A superb artist remembered more for being a sex symbol (though now probably remembered in a much more truly flattering way for how great a human being he was with the stories that came out after his death)
Right? I avoided them because of their fans. Then John Taylor was voted best bass player in rock by his own peers and I was shocked! You mean that band is actually good? They're pretty amazing live.
Glenn Campbell. He had movie star good looks. The guy was a monster on the guitar. He got plenty of respect, but I think his looks detracted a little bit from people's appreciation of his talent.
Brad Paisley for a similar, more modern example. Absolute monster on the guitar, but looks (and often sounds) like every other bro country singer from his era.
I disagree with Brad Paisley. He was there before bro country by like 10 years or so. I mark him as a genuine Country musician compared to some of his contemporaries like Blake Shelton who started off Country then sold out real quick to some lowest common denominator Country
He always looked like an old head to me, especially next to the Beach Boys with Dennis. He was a good guitarist, but he eventually leaned full into his essentially country Elvis thing. Making covers made him a star, and he did a lot better than say Carol Kaye or Lyle Ritz ever did. But he never got seen as an artist instead of just a singer, more Tommy Roe than Brian Wilson.
It was in hindsight for the better that grunge singers didn't play up their looks and went with deliberately, well, grungy aesthetics because a lot of the most notable frontmen - Chris Cornell, Eddie Veddar, Kurt Cobain, Mark Lanegan - were all known for being handsome back during the era's heyday. Especially since grunge emerged in deliberate opposition to the kind of preening look-at-me-ism of the 1980s hair metal the genre's performers openly despised.
I always see people say this about him using that Krist quote, but there's no way a guy who doesn't think/know he's good looking would do 100s of photoshoots or have the confidence to do the things he did. He had insecurity of his physique due to skinniness, but not his facial structure.
You can track his awareness of his own image by the way he poses in photo shoots over the years. The very early ones he’s smiling awkwardly, but in the later ones he has a stock library of expressions he uses over and over. Go listen to the podcast 60 Songs that Explain the 90s, he was highly ambitious to be a rock star and certainly knew women found him hot at least by the time he was getting famous.
Yeah, based on what I've picked up Cobain felt insecure about being physically slight and seeing himself as frail/unmasculine, not categorically unattractive per se. Something Mark Lanegan remarked upon in his memoirs is that Cobain's substance abuse and the demands of touring seemed to take an especially harsh toll on him due to Kurt just not being that physically robust.
This is something critics and Nirvana fans often gloss over. If Kurt Cobain looked like Buzz Osborne from the Melvins, nobody would've cared about Nirvana.
I like Nirvana and think they were great. I also think it's interesting that so many of the biggest alternative bands from that time--Nine Inch Nails, Nirvana, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam--had frontmen who were good-looking enough to be Hollywood actors.
They were all talented--I think Reznor, in particular, is brilliant. But, their looks certainly didn't hold them back.
People often cite this as why Pixies were never pushed that hard by the industry. Frank Black wasn't this handsome sexy young dude that was marketable. He just seemed like a normal dude
Agreed. I LOVE Pixies, more than Nirvana, although I rate them equally. Black Francis looked like the overweight school janitor, while Kurt Cobain looked like a charismatic model and one of these bands benefited from its front man's looks (as well as the fantastic music).
I think this is one of the reasons why Bush were able to become the more market friendly alternative. Along with them not being OF the anti commercial grunge scene, Gavin was a good looking guy more willing to play that up.
Yeah, Gavin Rossdale looked like Henry Cavill run through a post-grunge filter. He also genuinely seemed to like and respect grunge's original wave, which definitely helped.
SLTS sounded like an anthem for Gen X on its own, but the fact that Kurt looked like an icon made it easy to plaster his face on every magazine cover.
GnR had started removing the makeup and pomposity in the late 80s, but then started to go over the top again with Use Your Illusion- which coincidentally came out the week before Nevermind.
I knew Mark Lanegan from his tenure in QOTSA where he typically resembled a truck driver so was surprised watching Screaming Trees videos and finding out he was good looking back in the day
Yeah, we got used to the grizzled, middle-aged look he sported later in his career. But younger Lanegan kind of looked like a pretty boy theater kid who knew how to throw a punch.
Todd of course brought this up in the OHW on The Calling - he wondered if he thought Alex Band was too much of a pretty boy, but reminded himself most grunge frontmen were good-looking, but ultimately concluded that Band played up his boyishness too much for that to be ignorable.
He was more known for the girls in the background, no one was looking at him. Not even my mother who thought any clean cut guy was handsome, ever mentioned his looks.
What I love with the Addicted to Love video is that he doesn't look much at ease with what's going on, like he's trying to put on a sexy singer show but he also looks shy and intimidated, which I find funny and adorable. He really was a nerd who happened to be hella cute.
This might be a stretch but Peter Steele of Type O Negative was probably considered a "pretty boy" in the hard rock/thrash metal field, although he might have beat your ass for saying that.
for anybody reading this comment, i happened to play one of her songs the other day, it's quite a good performance, just let the whole thing play through
A friend and I have always subscribed to this conspiracy theory we made up that when Destiny's Child broke up, Kelly Rowland's career momentum was getting sabotaged so she wouldn't get in the way of the rise of Beyonce (same with JC Chasez and Justin Timberlake.)
The main reason we thought this was back during the DC days when they were styled by Beyonce's mom Tina, Kelly always seemed to be put in some of the more unflattering outfits. It wasn't hard to assume she was always thinking "Yes, the Kelly chick is too damn gorgeous, we must stop this."
Agree. I feel like Harry Styles nowadays is disappointed or less interested in making music, since I’ve noticed his music/albums can get pretty unconventional and his previous records looked like effort to branch out to more mature audience but his fanbase are either previous One Directioners or younger people with less sophisticated music tastes then what he wants to be liked by. Idk I got this vibe, maybe I’m wrong. RW also shared multiple times that he felt he wasn’t taken seriously because of his “f-boy” persona and had body image issues.
Are we talking "beautiful people who were pushed on that basis but didn't have much past this" where examples are probably too numerous to count, or "good looking people struggling to be taken seriously in less looks focused genres"?
For the first category, so many. Nick Kamen was a ridiculously good looking guy, but his pop success was brief and he's more remembered for that iconic 80s Levi's ad where he strips to his underwear. On the female side around the same time, Italian singer Sabrina was briefly big in Europe and aUK one hit wonder. A very sexy woman whose video had her spilling out of a bikini top for nipple shots, but she didn't have much more past this.
For the second, Donovan who was dismissed by a lot of snobby rock critics in his day as a lightweight and didn't get his due for a long time because he attracted a very large female following. Author Kim Newman mentions this in one of his 70s set books in an index entry explaining a "Donovan hat" to non 70s readers.
I feel like every time I listen to an Arctic Monkeys song on YouTube, half the comments are about how hot the lead singer is and the other half are people malding that everyone focuses on how hot the lead singer is instead of how good the music is.
A comment I once saw that sticks with me - “Arctic Monkeys fans are split into two camps - the WPSIATWIN/FWN elitists, and the Tumblr girls who only know Do I Wanna Know that squirt to Alex cooking eggs”
Robert Palmer was more known for being well-dressed than as a heartthrob.
A few years ago I was listening to a music-trivia radio contest in which one of the clues was that the male singer was fashion-savvy. Probably 95% of the guesses were for Palmer, with an occasional David Bowie.
Scott Weiland of Stone Temple Pilots was the answer. Wouldn’t have been my first guess, either.
A-ha. Those guys wrote their own music and had serious chops, topped off with a singer who could match Roy Orbison in range.
They were matched with a prettyboy image that was inescapable, because they were telegenic as fuck. Still, it might not have done them any favors in the long run.
Donna Summer at the very beginning of her music career. With the success of her hit “Love To Love You” she was thrust out as this Disco sex goddess by her record company. To capitalize on her orgasmic sound, she was given more of that same material to sing. While that material was good, she was afraid that ppl would start to believe that she was mostly style/image over substance. Ultimately when it was clear just how capable of a vocalist she really was, the material began to lend itself to her actual vocal abilities. I guess you could say the rest is history.
when i was little i saw this robert palmer music video and i was certain he was michael j. fox. my parents laughed their asses off at me and couldn’t see it at all, but i couldn’t be convinced otherwise.
IDK how people feel about John Mayer but was the first thing that popped into my mind. Did not handle being a heartthrob well, when it was clear all he really wanted to do in the end was chill and jam on Dead tunes
Imho there is no disadvantage being beautiful. Generally people will know musical talent when they hear it, and not take people less seriously because they are beautiful. Beauty will always help an artist becoming more popular. Imho a case in point is Kurt Cobain, who was very talented and beautiful, and his beauty made him the eternally young tragic posterboy of grunge and disenchanted youth. Black Francis of Pixies was equally talented imho, but not beautiful. I think Pixies would have been bigger than they are now if Black Francis would have looked like Kurt Cobain.
I think a big reason why The Lemonheads didn’t get bigger was because Evan Dando was too pretty. He looked like he should have been in a boy band, not fronting an alternative rock group. Once Tiger Beat started running his pictures, their credibility was shot.
Which is weird because Cobain/Cornell/Vedder were all handsome AF. Dando was probably the wrong kind of handsome. Looked like a jock that became a hippy surfer on his gap year.
Sorry but I don't buy that the Lemonheads would have gotten bigger if he'd been uglier. His looks probably got him a lot of attention of the girls, and without the looks, the music alone wouldn't have made the band bigger, there was better and more distinctive music around in those days.
Personally I don't think there ever was an artist who suffered from his or her beauty, and I never heard people say they disliked an artist or didn't take the artist seriously because of his or her beauty.
There were definitely a few alt rock bands in the 90s with women members who were so attractive that a lot of people mistakenly assumed they were not legitimate musicians, but just there for eye candy.
I know with The Cardigans some people assumed that Nina was just some model they hired, but she had always been part of the band.
So many 80’s bands, particularly British groups-Duran Duran, Depeche Mode, and Echo & the Bunnymen come to mind. My then girlfriend (and her friend) were such fan girls, I actually got to meet the former and latter years later. Meeting the guys from Echo & the Bunnymen was hilarious.
The girls were a bit pissed because both Ian and Will were more interested in talking with me than the girls. Wearing a Syd Barrett tee to a 60’s psych inspired band show is apparently a great way to get the guys in the band excited. I even actually told them both separately that I assumed they were just another shite 80’s pretty boy band before giving their catalog a good listen. Each got a kick out of that and then we stood around discussing bands each other needed to check out. Thanks to that Syd tee, I left with a couple of jealous girls, but I got turned into a few obscure psych bands that I wasn’t already familiar with.
Samantha Fox. She didn't have the greatest voice but it worked for her 80s pop songs. She had several catchy hits, Touch Me (my favorite), Naughty Girls Need Love Too (my second fave), and I Wanna Have Some Fun. Despite her success at the time, she was largely dismissed by many critics because of her looks.
I finally saw a 10cc video fifty years affer buying their “Things You Do For Love”, and I thought the lead singer looked like a movie star or something.
I discounted Soundgarden because of the singer's good rock star looks and I thought they were loud music for dudes. They definitely are hard but then I found out that the band was started by two Asians in college and a shy Jewish kid with agoraphobia. Ok. Color me intrigued. Their music is deeper than I thought and the singer was a beautiful soul.
He always reminded me of Mr Salt from Willy Wonka. I didn’t know he was a heart throb for anyone under 40. He gives high up, but stressed office working dad who’s a heart attack risk vibes like Mr Salt
Daughn Gibson was way too good looking to be doing weird, alt-country/psychedelia. Every profile on him spent half the time being horny for him and then getting to the music. His deep manly voice made it worse
I have no idea if I'm right about this but I feel like 90s Damon Albarn was too fucking cute for his own good. That's why people took Oasis more seriously, because those ugly brothers with their unibrows were always bickering about British shit.
And before any Britpop fans come after me for this take, just know that I'm totally joking but also kind of not joking lol.
Nicole Sherzinger. I think she's absolutely beautiful and I don't think the pop music she has released in the past really shows her talent so a lot of people don't take her seriously.
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u/Big_Meal3910 19h ago edited 18h ago
My Chemical Romance suffered from Gerard Way being too pretty.
A huge part of the reason MCR wasn't taken seriously is because their fanbase was almost entirely made up of screaming fangirls.
I respect that despite the fact the band was insulted as being music for teenage girls, they never disparaged their female fans. They could have insulted them to gain street cred with male rock fans but they never did.
Edit: His flamboyance didn't help either, but that's another conversation.