Been meaning to put this one up for a while...

1) The Beatles: I need to start this by saying the main reason they hit number 1 on this chart is that they are so highly praised. I’ve listened to the bulk of their catalog and I still cannot figure out why. In the beginning, they were the world’s first boy band. That’s right, The Beatles are directly to blame for New Kids on the Block, NSYNC, and the Backstreet Boys, among countless others. They then developed their sound into something less poppy and more trippy, but lost something in translation: their ability to play their instruments together. Don’t get me wrong, with the exception of maybe Ringo they were all GREAT musicians on their own, but something truly awful happened whenever they got into the same studio. The best evidence for this is all the Beatles covers: they’re ALL better than the originals! By leaps and bounds! Great songwriters, maybe. Great band, absolutely not.

2) The Rolling Stones: In the rock pantheon, The Stones are nothing more than the poor man’s Aerosmith. They get lots of radio play and inexplicably still sell albums and concert tickets LONG after their prime. But what did they ever write that was so great? Brown Sugar? Start Me Up? I’ll give you Paint It, Black, but that’s about it. And that’s not nearly enough to garner the accolades they’ve received. The plain simple truth is that they wrote “rock standards” and nothing more. The problem with rock standards is that they have nothing to do with the band that wrote them except that they were there first to write them. ANY band could have written them, and would have, given the chance. The Rolling Stones are completely non-influential and irrelevant in the grander music scheme.

3) Radiohead: There is no band ever formed that is more boring that Radiohead. For some reason, there are also few bands ever formed that have sold more records than Radiohead. I remember being in college when one of my friends told me I had to check out the greatest record he ever heard, some Radiohead album. I got halfway through the second track before running from the room yelling for someone to give me something sharp so I could stick it in my ears and end the misery. Beyond that, it’s pretentious as all hell. I think that’s why people listen to it: for the same reason they bought Steven Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. They put it on their shelves, maybe crack it open once or twice, and then feel good about themselves. I need to add on here, as an addendum, Coldplay. I have only this to say: Remember when Voltron came out and your parents got you the cheap knock-off plastic Voltron guys because no one in their right minds spent that much on the real metal Voltrons? Coldplay is plastic Radiohead. And Radiohead is no way near as cool as Voltron. Come to think of it, if I could combine their albums to form one big ass-kicking album, I might buy them.

4) Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave: Talk about your one-trick ponies. Rage’s trick wasn’t even a very good! Tom messes around with a guitar while Zack jumps around and screams a lot. The only reason they got any attention at all is because they tried to act all anti-establishment. A big reason these guys are here is that they made the same album, and nearly the same song (Killing in the Name Of) over and over and over again. The biggest reason, though, is that Tom Morello is the single most overrated guitarist of all time. Are monkeys geniuses when they play with Magnetic Poetry and put profound sentences together? No. And Tom Morello’s not a genius for, after finishing assembling his Ikea furniture, using the Allen wrench on his guitar. He’s so overrated he even drags his new band, Audioslave, into a two-way tie with Rage for the number 4 spot.

5) Grateful Dead et al: The et al is for the rest of their jam band ilk. Phish, String Cheese Incident, Dave Matthews Band, yadda yadda yadda. If you have to be in a certain state of mind to appreciate the music, its not very good. I don’t care how long the band was around and how much critics try to spit shine these turds, it doesn’t matter. The fact is that most of their recordings sound barely rehearsed, let alone polished. It’s disappointing sometimes, because some of the songs sound like they had promise. The bottom line, though, these guys all get far more respect than they deserve.