Top 10 Musical Fiascos of the 90's

Looking back at the 1990's, there was quite a variety of music to listen to during that decade.  There were genres like grunge, gangsta rap, nu-metal, boy band pop, teenie bopper pop, smooth jazz, alternative rock, techno, and so much more.  It wasn't hard to find your cup of tea depending on what kind of music you listened to.

But no matter the decade, you always have the good, the bad, and the ugly when it comes to music.  Of course with this being List Hell, we're gonna focus on the bad and the ugly of 90's music.  Disastrous concerts, annoying hit singles, horrible albums; there was no shortage of crap hitting the fan in the 1990's. 



10. Blaze Bayley and Tim "Ripper" Owens

 

The 1990's was an interesting decade for heavy metal to say the least.  Thrash metal bands of the 80's like Slayer, Exodus, Megadeth, and Anthrax were taking the backseat to nu-metal acts like Korn, Tool, Coal Chamber, and Deftones.  Meanwhile, legendary metal band Black Sabbath finally reunited with its original lineup (Ozzy Osbourne, Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler, and Bill Ward) in the 90's.  However, both Judas Priest and Iron Maiden took a hit that decade when their popular singers, Rob Halford and Bruce Dickinson respectively, left their bands.

Replacing Halford and Dickinson was no easy task for Iron Maiden and Judas Priest.  Whomever the bands chose to replace the vocalists had pretty big shoes to fill.  Talk to any heavy metal fan and they will most likely tell you that Judas Priest and Iron Maiden are the biggest names in metal music and undoubtedly the most influential just like Black Sabbath.  Halford sang in many of Judas Priest's best albums like Screaming For Vengeance, Stained Class, and British Steel while Dickinson has appeared in Iron Maiden's best such as The Number of the Beast, Powerslave, and Somewhere In Time.  

Iron Maiden was able to find Dickinson's replacement with one Blaze Bayley in 1994.  To give Bayley credit, he did perform in another metal band called Wolfsbane where he gained a decent reputation as a metal vocalist.  Meanwhile, Judas Priest was able to find Halford's replacement with Tim "Ripper" Owens.  The funny thing about Owens is that he was the lead singer of a Judas Priest tribute band before joining the very real Judas Priest.  In fact, he was the inspiration for the 2001 movie "Rock Star" starring "Marky" Mark Wahlberg as the movie featured the same route Owens went through in becoming a member of Judas Priest.

Now, were Bayley and Owens horrible vocalists?  Not at all.  Some say both singers were quite extraordinary singers to begin with.  However, business wise, they brought financial down ruin for their respective bands.  Iron Maiden saw their lowest selling album of all time with Blaze Bayley handling vocals while Judas Priest were dropped by their longtime label, Sony Records, while Owens was their vocalist.

Ultimately, both bands let go Bayley and Owens and brought back Dickinson and Halford.  With the classic vocalists back, both Iron Maiden and Judas Priest regained their positions as the leading heavy metal bands in the planet.  Bayley resorted to starting his own solo band and has found mild success on his own.  Meanwhile, Owens was tapped to be the lead singer of Iced Earth after longtime vocalist Matt Barlow left the band.  Ironically, Barlow returned to Iced Earth and Owens was kicked to the curb just like when Halford returned to Judas Priest.  

Again, I do not consider the singing quality of Blaze Bayley and Tim "Ripper" Owens to be musical fiascos.  However, as replacements to perhaps the most popular heavy metal singers of all time, they were definitely musical fiascos from a business perspective.   
  

9. The Macarena 

If you suffered from earworm back in the 90's, there was a good chance this unfortunate song would be playing in your head over and over again.

Like with other dance crazes such as the Electric Slide and Locomotion, the Macarena appeared out of the blue and everyone -- and I mean everyone -- started to do the Macarena.  One thing you probably didn't know about the "Macarena"; when it debuted in the U.S., the song was actually a remix when it first arrived here.  Originally, "Macarena" was just a plain rumba song that was all for fun and games when Los del Rio introduced the song to a dance party in Venezuela.  

However, shit hit the fan when someone thought it would be a great idea to bring that song to an international crowd.  From there, the "Macarena" song was remixed by one-hit wonder Bayside Boys and that's how we ended up with the "Macarena" polluting the entire nation.  Good lord, I cannot tell you how many times I was instructed how to do the Macarena dance during the mid 90's.  While the Macarena dance is not as popular these days, it should be no surprise why the song and dance were ranked as the number one "One-Hit Wonder" of all time.


8. Michael Bolton 

 
If there's one thing I can clearly remember about the early 90's (1990-1993) is that it was pretty cheesy and corny like Fritos in cheese dip.  Reason why?  People started to get into "soft rock" a.k.a. pussy rock.

For some reason I cannot fully grasp, soft rock was all the rage during the early 90's.  Singers like Phil Collins and Sting ditched their bands to capitalize on swooning hipsters and soccer moms during those time in order to cash in on the soft rock craze.  But there was no "greater" musician than Michael Bolton who enslaved the world with a form of rock music that would make kids musician Raffi seem like Slayer.

Believe or not, Michael Bolton was pretty damn popular in the early 90's.  Don't believe me?  Consider the fact he won Grammy awards as Best Pop Male Vocal Performance in the 90's.  That's right; he was considered the most popular vocalist in the world according to Grammy judges in the early 90's.  

Trust me folks; I know people say time does not age well for certain individuals, but in Michael Bolton's case, it's a god damn fiasco when the years go by listening to Michael Bolton's music.



7. Joey Lawrence - "Nothing My Love Can't Fix"

 
SPEAKING of early 90's corniness, our good friend Joey Lawrence was just as bad.  What?  You don't remember Joey Lawrence?  Well all you got to remember about him is he was the dope on the TV show "Blossom" who said "Whoa" like a million times.

During the early 90's, it was not uncommon for sitcom actors to pretend they were big time rock stars.  Uncle Jesse (John Stamos) on Full House was a major rock star while Zack Morris (Mark-Paul Gosselaar) dreamed of forming his own band on Saved By the Bell.  However, Jesse Lawrence, as Jesse Russo on Blossom, took it a step further by not only pretending to be a rock star on a TV show, but made an actual music CD under his real name.

 
It should be no surprise that Joey...err, Joseph as he wants to be called these days, looks like this today:

So Mr. Lawrence; did your love fix whatever it was suppose to?

6. Hootie & the Blowfish

One thing is for certain: Hootie does blow.  While some people say they're one of the best rock/alternative bands of the 1990's; there's no denying Hootie & the Blowfish are flatout corny as hell.

Look folks, I got nothing against an African-American fronting a rock/alternative band.  But when you make the band so obnoxiously bad while other rock bands with African-American frontmen (Living Colour, Jimi Hendirx, and Fishbone) have done it way much better, you know Hootie & the Blowfish sucks.  In fact, you know you band have become a complete joke when your lead man, Darius Rucker, is now doing commercials for Burger King as a country singer who's trying to hawk the chain's new chicken sandwich.

5. Michael Jackson's "Ghost" Music Video

Most Michael Jackson fans agree his "Thriller" music video was hands down the best music video ever produced in the 80's.  But in the 90's, Jackson wanted lightning to strike twice when he teamed up with creepy bastard/author Stephen King to make the music video for "Ghosts".   Unfortunately for Jacko, this Ghosts project wound up to be a big time failure.

For one thing, it's quite obvious Jackson wanted to make this the second coming of his famous "Thriller" music video.  Yes it's extraordinarily long, yes it features the most popular pop singer of all time, yes it has a horror theme to it; but it was by no means the second-coming of Thriller.  I don't think it helped Michael Jackson while dealing with his molestation trial when his music video was all about preteen boys who's wildly fascinated with Wacko Jacko.  Why Jackson had to spend a ton of money for special effects and makeup for "Ghosts" is beyond me when all he needs is just his "natural" look since he already looked like a freak.  Also, there's something eerily ironic about Michael Jackson dressing up as a white, fat, old man for the music video because with his conversion of being a black man to a white one, it's like he was fulfilling a lifelong dream.     

4. Vanilla Ice

Oh dear...this is rather unfortunate.  Not only did Vanilla Ice give white people a bad name in the 90's, but also for the entire human race.

Believe it or not, as a white boy who wanted to rap, he actually opened for N.W.A., MC Hammer, and 2 Live Crew before he made it big.  Even more crazy, his early career mirrored the same of an actual rapper when he was stabbed outside a night club and managed to get signed to a major record contract while in the hospital.  That's pretty damn impressive if you ask me, but for the rest of the sane world, seeing Vanilla Ice roll with his posse was like seeing the biggest wigger in the world pretending to be the best rapper in the world.

I'm guessing we were pretty dumb back then to allow Vanilla Ice to make such an impact in the music industry.  Throughout the early 90's, Vanilla Ice managed to score multiple platinum-selling albums, his own movie, and had his own merchandising blitz no one would have dreamed of.  Also, Vanilla Ice's "Ice Ice Baby" was notorious of sampling music from Queen and David Bowie's "Under Pressure".  While the practice of rappers sampling lines from other rock musicians like 2 Live Krew sampling Bruce Springsteen for "Banned in the U.S.A." and Puff Daddy sampling The Police with "I'll Be Missing You", Vanilla Ice became the whipping boy for such practices.  White rappers like Eminem still manage to be a big fuckin' deal, but seeing Vanilla Ice to make it top of the world in the 90's is like witnessing the "Why did the chicken cross the road" joke being first told.
    

3. Rock and Rap Collaborations

Rock and rap musicians collaborating with each other wasn't brand new in the 90's.  In fact, Aerosmith and Run DMC did it first in 1986 when the two joined forces to remake Aerosmith's hit song, "Walk This Way", from the 70's.  But during the 90's, mixing rock and rap was like putting dogs and cats together.  In order to make amends between the two genres, music execs thought it would be a cute idea to mesh rap and rock into one opus rockus.  Therefore, we wound up with "delightful" mixups like this one with Puff Daddy and Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin.

Let's be honest; seeing rockers and rappers work together was like seeing Israelis and Palestinians coexisting with each other.  They absolutely had no business being in the same room.  Yet, throughout the 90's, we've seen countless rock and rap collaborations.  There have been instances where Ozzy Osbourne and Busta Rhymes dropped beats together,  Black Sabbath learning Wu-Tang Clan ain't nottin' to fuck with, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails laying down some tracks for the late Biggie Smalls, and Anthrax going full gangsta with Public Enemy.  I'm guessing during those years people didn't mind to such collaborations, but with today's society, it's flat out repulsive to see Ozzy Osbourne to hang out with Lil' John in remixing "Crazy Train" with "YEAH!" thrown into the mix. 



2. Milli Vanilli 

You just can't have a list about musical atrocities of the 1990's without Milli Vanilli.  If you don't remember or weren't around when Milli Vanilli became notorious in music lore, let's just say they were the classic example of "never mind the man behind the curtain" in pop music.

Those two guys you see in the picture?  They had no part in the multi-platinum selling album that made Milli Vanilli famous and earned them a Grammy award.  Their only purpose in Milli Vanilli was for stage looks.  The actual people to sing on the Girl You Know It's True record were these guys:

That's right; Milli Vanilli was mostly Brad Howell and John Davis.  If I didn't know any better, I think the reason why they didn't appear and were replaced by Rob Pilatus and Fab Morvan as the face of Milli Vanilli was because of looks.  I don't think the public would be inclined to boost Milli Vanilli to stardom if your group consists of middle-aged men and one of them is overweight, sporting a hideous jheri curl, and wears glasses.

So what happened that the jig was up for Milli Vanilli?  It started back when they were doing a concert at Lake Compounce Theme Park in Connecticut.  Now hold on a minute, an amusement park doesn't necessarily sound like the appropriate venue for a wildly popular band at the time.  It probably makes a lot of sense for Milli Vanilli if this was today, but to say they were performing in front of a crowd at a theme park in 1990 would be like saying Rihanna performing live at Splish Splash Water Kingdom or Taylor Swift playing a concert at Uncle Moe's County Fairgrounds.  Anyway, Milli Vanilli were "performing" when all of a sudden, the tape got stuck and the lyrics "Girl you know it's" kept playing over and over again while Pilatus and Morvan looked like deer in headlights and danced away to the looping track.  While this incident was well-documented in Milli Vanilli's downfall, this wasn't the moment where things headed south big time for the Germans.

That particular moment would occur when one of the lip-synching Milli Vanilli members proclaimed the band as the "next Elvis" and were more talented than Mick Jagger, Bob Dylan, and Paul McCartney in a Time magazine interview.  Shortly after, one of the real Milli Vanilli singers went to the press to reveal that Pilatus and Morvan were frauds and they were the real singers behind the band.  The backlash was immediate and the pressure had gotten too much for our lip-synching duo that they finally broke and spilled the beans.  After their revelation, Milli Vanilli was stripped of their Grammy, dropped by their record label, and all further printing of their hit Girl You Know It's True album was halted.  The biggest kick in the balls to Milli Vanilli came when their record label, Arista Records and BMG Music Group, agreed to an out-of-court settlement as fans were entitled to refunds if they purchased the Girl You Know It's True album and any of their live concerts (including the infamous Lake Compounce show).  Overall, approximately 10 million people were eligible for a refund because of Milli Vanilli.

You know, I think that number should've increased by another million since Milli Vanilli was hanging out with Mario on the Super Mario Bros. 3 cartoon...

I'm certain Princess Peach went ballistic when she heard the news and demanded her coins back.         

1. Woodstock '99 

The original Woodstock music festival in 1969 was clearly the most influential music event that took place in modern music.  It was three days of peace, love, and good ol' rock music in upstate New York in August of '69.  Anyway, take a look at the lineup for the original Woodstock event.

Jimi Hendrix, The Who, Janis Joplin, Crosby Stills & Nash, Neil Young, Santana, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Grateful Dead, Sly & the Family Stone, Jefferson Airplane, The Band, Mountain, Johnny Winter, Sha-Na-Na, Blood Sweat & Tears, Joe Cocker, Joan Baez, Country Joe McDonald, Canned Heat, The Incredible String Band, and more

30 years later, Woodstock would be brought back in 1999.  Was it the same three days of peace, love, and rock music?  Well, take a look at the lineup for the 1999 event.

Rage Against the Machine, Metallica, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Megadeth, Limp Bizkit, Korn, Insane Clown Posse, Bush, DMX, Lit, Buckcherry, The Offspring, Sheryl Crow, Kid Rock, Ice Cube, Los Lobos, Fatboy Slim, The Chemical Brothers, Creed, Godsmack, Sevendust, Jewel, Elvis Costello, Everlast, Dave Matthews Band, Jamiroquai, The Roots, James Brown, Wyclef Jean, Moby, Everclear, Alanis Morrisette, and more

Holy shit, what the hell happened?  We go from Hendrix, The Who, and Creedence Clearwater to Insane Clown Posse, Ice Cube, and L-Limp Bizkit?  Talk about the biggest antithesis in music history. 

While there have been Woodstock revivals before in 1989 and 1994, at least they were pretty much faithful to the original Woodstock event.  The 1999 Woodstock?  Not at all.  The problem was the generation of young people during the late 90's were living in the "MTV Generation".  The "MTV Generation" was corporate-fueled, loud and obnoxious, and kids were willing to spend money.  Comparing Woodstock '69 with Woodstock '99, the only common thing they shared was the name.  

With the original Woodstock in 1969, it was strictly an all-rock lineup, there was a rainy forecast that created mud fields at the venue, it was free to the public, and everyone had a good time.  Meanwhile, with Woodstock 1999, it was a varied lineup of rap, metal, techno, pop, and country bands, there was a heatwave with record temperatures reaching 100 degrees, it cost you an arm and a leg for tickets, and everyone had a miserable time.  The only plus side about Woodstock '99 is that the location was in Rome, NY where the original Woodstock festival was meant to be as the '69 event moved from the Rome location and took place a few miles away at Bethel, NY.  

The biggest problem with Woodstock '99 is that the corporate sponsors depraved all the soul of the original Woodstock festival and replaced it with 5-dollar water bottles, ATMs, and expensive merchandise.  If it wasn't obvious how ill-conceived Woodstock '99 was, consider the fact the festival ended with a riot where MTV crew members were forced to flee and there were reports of rape, arson, and assault that took place throughout the music fest.  I remember seeing Kurt Loder crapping his pants and made it seem like he was in Vietnam. 

As a kid just about to enter high school in summer of '99, I was fascinated by all the hoopla brought by the media blitz behind Woodstock '99.  I can remember listening to my local K-Rock station for coverage of the event and MTV hyping it up to be the greatest music concert of all time.  Now that I look back in 2012, I believe Woodstock 1999 is the biggest musical fiasco to occur in the 1990's.   

After what happened at Woodstock '99, I'm not surprised why most of the world hates Limp Bizkit.  Originally I thought they were just a "shits and giggles" rap metal band, but after hearing reports of rape and vandalism during their set at Woodstock '99, it's no wonder they're universally despised by most people today.