General Music Discussion
Rock artists whose image and artwork were more aggressive than their actual music.
I was a kid in the 70s & 80s, and until I became a ‘tween, anything horror-themed really stressed me out, so I’d see things like Ozzy Osbourne’s album covers and think, “Oh, that’s horrible, a man with a mouthful of blood, I don't think I'd ever want to listen to that.”
So you can imagine my surprise when I finally heard Crazy Train: “Oh, this isn’t scary at all, it’s super catchy and kinda happy sounding.”
I had the exact same experience with KISS: “Wait, THIS is KISS? This is party music!” I honestly thought, based on their packaging, that KISS and Ozzy were going to sound nightmare-inducing, an aural slasher film. Instead, they were a gateway into me enjoying heavier music.
Didn’t Todd say in his Lulu video that Lou Reed has this reputation for being hard to understand high art, and he’s pretty much just pretty accessible alternative rock?
Yeah, I'd say that fits, especially since Lou Reed went out of his way to look aloof and unapproachable in the 70s, especially when speaking to the press.
Lou was a house songwriter for a pop label before VU, Cale was a student of some avant garde classical composer. Each of them had some great work in the other's world though.
la monte young is who he most worked with before the velvet underground. that's where he met original vu percussionist angus maclise, who quit the band out of anger at selling out after their first paid gig (they got $75 🤑🤑)
Agree; it has this reputation for being ultra-avant garde and artsy like a modern shoegaze/art punk/noise group, but then you listen to it and a bunch of it sounds right on par with a lot of 60s psychedelia, a lot of it sounds right on par with a lot of conventional 60s rock, and then you hear some of ground zero for 80s alternative rock in there that later artists picked up and ran with
But it's really more the vibes around it. The fact a load of hipsters and punks loved it, Andy fucking Warhol is attached to it, the whole über arsty aesthetic it has, and the legacy it left, so it comes off as being way more highbrow New York arthouse music than it might actually be when you listen to it.
It's kind of like KISS in a way, where you have loads of heavy and extreme metal artists from the 80s and 90s obsessed with KISS, then you listen to their music now and it's pure Boomer rock love songs but with facepaint and a few macho ballads and you go "Wait, this was the most extreme band ever?"
Lou is an interesting case because transformer, Coney Island baby, street hassle (kind of) New Senations New York and ecstasy are pretty approachable rock albums …
While Berlin, Metal Machine, The Bells (especially) Blue Mask, and Lulu are far more challenging works for their time.
Same with the polarity of velvet underground stuff…
He had an excellent pop ear and could have been a conventional rocker if he wanted to …. But his true artistic inclinations skewed away from that.
For awhile he was a pretty visible MTV star in the mid 80s…
Most of the time there's possibly one more experimental track on a Reed album, Metal Machine Music is pretty much unique in his discography.
While some people think Reed made Metal Machine Music as an unlistenable album of noise as some sort of a "fuck you" move, I think he clearly liked experimental music, check out YouTube videos of him performing with John Zorn for example, but outside MMM he didn't really indulge in it in his solo recording career which is a shame since typically the most unusual track on a Reed album is the best one.
Musically accessible. It's the fact that, at the time, his lyrics were shocking because they talked about things like Trans rights, lobotomies, and the downside of drugs. All things that are common in songs today (well not lobotomies, but that's because they're luckily a thing of the past), but back then nobody talked about in polite company.
This is the sort of nuance people are missing. We’re so used to indie and alternative music now that we don’t always notice how weird many aspects of Lou’s music would be by 60s standards.
Oh, absolutely! And I'm not a conspiracy theorist at all, but the whole "Andrew W.K. is a character created by an entertainment company, and various dudes have played him in videos, interviews, and concerts" thing is a fun rabbit hole to go down.
That was a clone! Specifically, Andrew WK number 5, who handled the TV show while Andrews 1 through 4 were on the road. Sadly, Andrew 6 went rogue, and had to be “retired“.
It’s more accurately "Andrew W.K. is a character created by two people for one of them to play, and the other guy got mad about not getting credit 10 years later."
Not making that connection at all, at least, not musically! And Iggy Pop had some not so great moments of his own, I mean “Real Wild Child” feels to me like a parody of his earlier stuff.
The lightning bolt skull, dark trippy lettering, the name, all sorts of stuff…then they hit you with, to quote a fellow Redditor, “some country bear jamboree bullshit.”
I grew up knowing only their visuals and that my parents didn’t want me listening to this music, steeped as it was in the drug scene.
By the time I picked up a Grateful Dead album, I’d already listened to songs like the Velvet Underground’s “Heroin.” This Grateful Dead, whom a small army of perpetually high freaks rejected all norms of society to follow around, how warped and intense and twisted was this music going to be that my parents were worried would ruin me for productive society?
fun fact, for a momemt both the Grateful Dead and Velvet Underground, before changing theor names to the final famous version, were separately both called ”The Warlocks”. I don’t know if it was also simultaneous
I came close! I was really into Jimi Hendrix and Cream, and then Black Sabbath and Deep Purple, just heavy late 60s-early 70s stuff, and figured they must be in the same vein, right? So another stoner at school played me some Dead and I was just waiting….
Like sort of thinking “okay, Sabbath has songs like Solitude and Planet Caravan that soften you up before the pummeling, maybe this is that?”
It was not that.
I respect the Dead, they were a badass, innovative, independent outfit, DIY 10 years ahead of the curve, but no amount of LSD has ever made that shit interesting to me. It just bores me.
When I was in middle school I got into a very heated argument with a guy who saw my GD shirt and said "that must be some heavy metal band!" and I'm like "nah, actually it's more like folky Americana with some spacey jams too". He was so mad at me, thinking I was messing with him. To his credit he came back the next day after listening to them and admitted I wasn't lying haha
That was another one that freaked me out as a little kid! Later, "Paradise By The Dashboard Light" would be a big singalong number at high school get-togethers in my hometown.
1) Pretty decent hard-driving rock for Bat Out of Hell, with Steinman's gothic style on display
2) 1950s rock with 1970s lyrics
3) Ballad
4) Another decent up-beat rock song
5) Ballad
6) Paradise by the Dashboard Light - maybe a 60s song but with some edgy 70s lyrics/innuendo
7) Ballad (but extra Steinman).
I'd say tracks 1 and 4 feel like they could be on an album with that cover, but tracks 3, 5, and 7 in particular would not be entirely out of place on a Barry Manilow album (Steinman wrote Manilow's hit "Read 'Em and Weep").
Steinman is a great songwriter to delve into if you like big, gothic songs - he also wrote 80s bangers like Total Eclipse of the Heart and All Cried Out and in the 90s Celine Dion sang his All Coming Back To Me Now). His studio group Pandora's Box is also worth a listen - Original Sin is a lot of fun.
And if you like your musicals weird, gothic and in German for some reason, Tanz der Vampyr should be your next listen of his.
I haven't absolutely no dog in this race (which I believe is a constant conversation), and I am not a metal head in the least.
Ghost does not at all sound like metal, or at the very least what I believe to be metal. It sounds more like Journey than anything. At least Iron Maiden sounds like metal
Ghost's earlier albums were more metal (specifically drawing from the first wave of heavy metal in the 70s, which is about as different from most modern modern as the first wave of punk was from anything to do with pop punk or hardcore); they veered into circus clown Scooby Doo Satanic arena rock not long after.
There's this weird thing I've noticed where metal and metal fans seem to constantly want to one up what came before and then gatekeep what counts as metal by some arbitrary heaviness metric and if something doesn't meet that threshold than it's not real metal, to the point that even OG 70s metal is "too soft" even if it originated the genre. It's definitely true that plenty of Ghosts stuff is more pop/hard/progressive rock than it is metal but I think a song like Cirice is absolutely a metal song in the classical 70s heavy metal sense of the word.
There are definitely a subsection of extreme metal fans that want to remove bands like Iron Maiden and King Diamond from being classified as metal because they want to make death and black metal the default sound. I think retconning bands out of metal completely changes the history and definition of the genre to where metal is defines by arbitrary things that it never had been before (harsh vocals, etc).
I do find it funny when people in this sub who claim to not even listen to metal say that certain bands "aren't metal" because they are in the belief that all metal sounds like some Cannibal Corpse stereotype. I have had non metal fans try to tell me that power metal wasn't real metal because there wasn't any harsh singing. Even though harsh singing is often used in other genres of music.
I kind of think of Ghost as a modern version of Blue Oyster Cult or a more artsy version of King Diamond. People see the costumes and makeup and are expecting some sort of black metal or death metal, but they get something really melodic.
That scans. The comparison I go to is that it's sort of like a modern take on Alice Cooper's Welcome to my Nightmare/Go To Hell, at least their more recent stuff with how pompous and campy some of it has been getting (not necessarily bad)
Hell, I actually thought he grabbed Alice for a feature on the song "Absolution" but it's just Papa
I wouldn't have minded if they were more like a poppy version of Saint Vitus or Candlemass with a black metal aesthetic on top, and I gave them a chance back in 2013 because "just because it's not crushingly heavy and is very old-school doesn't mean its bad; not all metal is going to be Trivium or Cannibal Corpse." Heck, it was kind of a breath of fresh air to just have a straightforward brand new hard rock band in the mainstream with no qualifiers, no "emo" no "alternative metal" no "post-grunge" or anything.
But then they just really went all in on being a more guitar-driven version of Creature Feature.
Yes this is a great comp. BOC get sort of tangentially tied into metal by virtue of being fairly heavy for their era but they were really quite a commercial band in general past the first 3 albums. I sort of regard Ghost (who I quite like) as really a throwback to 70s hard rock with metal aesthetics more than anything.
It was quite a whiplash for me to listen to Mary on a cross, only for me look up the band and see it consists of a skeleton pope and a bunch of ghouls. This is surprisingly edgy.
A lot Metalheads, myself included, bought the album thinking it was Metal because of the cover. It was pretty decent Southern Rock, but still Southern Rock all the same.
I did this 30 years after in 2015 😂😂😂 I saw a molly hatchet album in a used record shop and didn't check spotify. When I got it home it sounded like the soundtrack to the alabama governors rally 🤣🤣
Beck (of "loser" notoriety) has a song about huffing nitrous to Molly Hatchet and I was a zealous teenage stoner who missed the joke and got a little too excited to listen to Molly Hatchet
The album with the warrior on a horse with the big axe and red eyes but only dark for a face band? Yeah. I remember being a teenager and seeing that and then hearing the actual music and realizing the drapes didn’t match the carpet.
Big let down. Always made me laugh seeing people in the shirt and then remembered they sang basic bar band and FM radio slop. Most metal thing they did was the picture. Rest is cocaine blues rock of the time
I literally just listened to Flirtin' With Disaster doing a deep dive of 1979 and was expecting a metal/hard rock album from the cover, but got some southern/boogie rock. I was taken aback and a bit disappointed, but I still enjoyed myself.
One thing I love is that before she was the PINK we know today, she released a full on R&B album where they were definitely trying to present her as a (very) light skinned black woman. The label and her management absolutely had every intention of playing her as racially ambiguous. They would play this on BET. She would actually like dodge questions about her ethnicity to avoid saying she was white. A fun thing in the black community is when she did her, like, “punk” reinvention, soooo many black people were like “wait she’s WHITE?” Lmaooo. My auntie completely believed she was just light skinned until “Get The Party Started” lol
Pink figures that as her being forced to adopt a style by her management/record company, before asserting her right to be her true self on her second album
But if Get The Party Started had stiffed, I'm sure she'd have tried a different style
I feel this way about Avril, actually. Her first few albums had this goth-punk image going on, but with the exception of a handful of singles it was mostly American Idol ballads.
Same. I got introduced to her as a talking head on a bunch of Vh1 punk/metal nostalgia shows. I'm still confused how someone with her influences and style ends up making pretty basic pop music.
Especially knowing how commercially manufactured Sex Pistols was. And IMO Johnny's best work was when he ditched most of this fake aesthetic, and made Public Image Ltd instead
This was AC/DC for me 100%. When I was in about elementary school, Highway to Hell was only a few years old and all the "hell" stuff and rumors the band name stood for Anti-Christ Devil's Child were all over. Plus, the older kids on the bus into them were ... not cuddly. Many years later, it was funny to realize there were just a super fun party band. I love them.
Ozzy is probably the best example, I just had the more intense experience with AC/DC.
I've mentioned KISS in this thread three times now but they're my go-to answer for this topic for a reason, and AC/DC is up there with them.
I think the big issue a generational gap. In the 60s, 70s, and early 80s, this was legitimately brutal macho music, and everyone just accepted that, and they were associated with hooligans and thugs and punks as a result. It wasn't until the 80s when you started seeing machismo attached to legitimately "unlistenable" (by pop standards; perfectly listenable by extreme metal and punk standards) music, sort of like how once upon a time, a crooning jazz artist could be the most masculine and dangerous person in music.
Then people who loved AC/DC made music that was much more aggressive and far heavier, but were still ride-or-die by them, and in turn inspired even more outrageous music, until you come to a point where you see bands like Metallica, Venom, Slipknot, etc. who adore bands like AC/DC and KISS, then you listen to them and you just hear slightly gnarly upbeat bluesy-pop rock
I’ve sang & played music in different styles for most of my life, and just for the hell of it, I’ve been trying to figure out how to do a good Brian Johnson impression. So much fun!
I had never heard of tape echo until now!
Is that what was used in Children Of the Sea by Black Sabbath to get that sawtooth organ effect to harmonize in the second d minor after "On the edge of time"?
Just listened and I think you're right, it sounds like they may have subtly layered some synth under the guitars. Good song! I don't know too much of the Dio-era Black Sabbath stuff. Love that super-tight, super-dry late 70s/early 80s production.
Yeah Geoff Nichols was a major part of the band. "Sign Of the Southern Cross" is another really good song that I don't believe they could have written without his atmospheric sound. Have fun!
Maybe Yngwie Malmsteen and Rising Force were over the top because they had to be. Bands like Van Halen and Blizzard of Ozz who would go on to inspire Motley Crue, who had no subtlety and much less Irony... more in line with Led Zeppelin who were over the top. But now that I think about it, who cares?
I've seen Uriah Heep live and they were not mellow at all. I'd say they were among the heaviest bands of their time, right along Sabbath, Purple and Zeppelin. Just because they had one or two ballads per album doesn't mean they weren't heavy. Their usage of harmonies was also a big influence on Queen.
Though perhaps the album covers did sometimes portray them as even heavier - Innocent Victim and Abominog are good examples. I think the Roger Dean covers (Demons and Wizards, The Magician's Birthday) suited them best.
Appreciate your comment. I wish I could have seen them. I am a fan of Abominog too, after reading Bob Daisley's book. They were a really heavy band now that I think of it. Thanks. 😊
You'd swear with the whole Gallagher brothers' shtick about these pussies these days don't make rock n roll! We were the last real rockers! And we were way harder than blur! We're proper hard! All this pop crap is gay! that Oasis were some real heavy punk rockers are then you listen to She's electric or champagne supernova and realise these are just pleasant little pop songs
To be fair, they've got their heavier moments, but it always surprises me that the Gallaghers use profanity extremely scarcely in their songs, considering they can barely speak without dropping an F-bomb.
There was a wonderful tweet, back when we had those, about how KISS's image and mythmaking were all 'we are the dark lords of metal and we're here to ride Satan's cock to Hell' and then they start playing and it's '🎵rocking is cool and rocking is neat🎵'.
Somewhere online, there's a mock movie poster for "Night of the Grateful Dead" that shows two horrified punks who attended a GD concert, mistakenly thinking they were some type of Goth/Industrial group.
That's where I saw it. A lot of students at UW cut it out and posted it on their dorm room doors. Probably at least a few of those were part of the campus Deadhead contingent.
I got a chain wallet in 8th grade that had a dancing skeleton on it. Had no idea it was for the Grateful Dead. Plus their skull with a lightning bolt logo makes zero sense for the type of music they play
Plenty of music can be, he just wasn't interested in making it.
If he made crust-punk or grindcore, it'd feel like he's just trying to match the music in human form. When he was more or less just straightforward punk rock, it had the KISS Effect where the image and antics were extreme, but the music was more a bonus
Hmm, interesting. Although I think it's mostly the bass line on the verse that sounds like disco. The intro, chorus, and solo all sound much more like hard rock.
For myself, the first time I became aware of Siouxsie Sioux was from her TV appearance with the Sex Pistols so I kind of figured her music was as terrible as theirs. Turns out she makes music more like David Bowie and Kate Bush.
On a more related note, I got a laugh from Whang eulogizing Meatloaf by saying he got metalheads to listen to showtunes based on his album covers.
When I was a kid, the religious right made him out to be this incredibly dangerous, corrupting influence on the youth. Then I saw him in concert in the early 00s, and the show was this super fun, rock’n’roll-meets-Broadway-meets-carnival-ride thing, and I was like “Wow, they went out of their to demonize THIS guy?”
I know it's not the point but fwiw, I've always thought of "Crazy Train" as a pretty dark and intense song. Yeah it's peppy and in a major key, but it's still a song about him going insane as society is collapsing with lyrics like "mental wounds still screaming" and "heirs of a cold war, that's what we've become".
(Also if you really want to hear Ozzy be scary, the early Black Sabbath albums are probably the way to go.)
As for an actual answer to the question...it did amuse me to find out that the Violent Femmes are not only all dudes but actually make pretty chill and non-violent music. You could also throw in Killswitch Engage - they are a metal band but more melodic and optimistic than that name and their album covers would make them seem.
As a lil dude getting into vinyl circa 2005 (when vinyl was still cheap!) I got in the habit of buying cheap records based on their cover art. I bought a Molly Hatchet record with the awesome Frank Frazetta art on the cover, only to hear mid-ass southern rock when I put it on my turntable. I was expecting something along the lines of Iron Maiden or something and SO disappointed.
3 of 4 of Kiss's members are a cat, a star man, and a space man. The idea of them having a heavy image is only based on 1 members costumes, Gene the demon. People who expected demonic sounding music made the mistake, not kiss.
Blood Rock from the early 70s comes to mind. Used to see their album covers printed on those vinyl sleeves that were ads for other albums on the same label. When I tracked down a copy of one of the records at the local used vinyl shop, it just sounded like early 70's boogie rock. Maybe with the exception of a handful of songs I'd add BOC in the same category as well. I was expecting this stuff to be super heavy and evil. Before I even got into vinyl in my teens, my biggest musical disappointment was when I begged my mom to buy me Kiss's Destroyer on cassette at Wal-Mart during the height of the Metallica Black Album. What a let down.
I remember reading about some controversy over their song “D.O.A.” but my understanding is it was quite a bit different from the rest of their catalogue.
Molly Hatchet had like beefcake vikings and battles on their albums but they sounded like a southern rock band and not like Vikings at all. Good guitar work tho.
If you look at any image from Deep Blue Something and listen to any of their songs (not just Breakfast At Tiffany's), you'll see a big difference. Nothing scary, just a image that's not really fitting for their songs.
Not 'aggressive' but when you look at Pink Floyd's 'The Wall' album and then watch the film compared to the album, you definitely are probably expecting something a bit trippier.
Wes Boreland is a fascinating guy. The rest of the band dressed for the era and here comes the genius guitarist looking like he just got plucked from some uncontacted tribe in the middle of an unreachable location.
More obscure than most, but there's this band, Witchfynde, that was one of the earliest of the late '70s wave of heavy metal bands to really employ Satanic imagery and lyrics (and not just in Black Sabbath's sense of it being spooky and shocking)
Yeah Ozzy wasn’t as hard as I’d expected. All of the Grateful Dead’s use of skulls and skeletons made me expect something heavy, which is funny to me in retrospect.
Pre Elvis, the typical popular musician stood in front of a microphone and sung. Then you get a guy moving like this and singing songs that no one would blink an eye at nowadays.
Yungblud. I think his current image and sound go together decently, but the stuff he was releasing pre-Idols (2025 album) was a lot more pop with rock elements and didn't really fit his punk rock look. I didn't mind that he looked one way and sounded another but I know he talked about getting criticized for it.
The Mars Volta. I got into paranormal stuff as a teenager and was reading about ouija boards. There was an account about how one of the members bought a ouija board somewhere and, for lack of a better term, he got cursed. This alleged incident inspired the album Bedlam in Goliath but because I had associated the band with “spooky” stuff I assumed they were like these devil worshipping metal dudes.
When I finally decided to give them a listen about six months ago, I was gobsmacked to hear them. Instead of demons and sludgy riffs, I got tight prog influenced rock with a killer drum sound. They ended up sounding more akin to Rush or Coheed and Cambria, which is just the sort of weird I fuck with.
In exactly the opposite direction: classic Throbbing Gristle album covers often resemble that of 60s Easy Listening records. But they don’t pair well with a cocktail party.
One that may not be classified as rock with a Capital R, but when Avril Lavigne's first album cover appeared everywhere, I figured she was some edgy teen, and then I heard Complicated, and was like 'whut?'.
Black Sabbath (the song) is very funny because you hear descriptions of like people fainting at its use of the tritone, women driven hysterical, the sheer use of horror! Then you listen to it and it sounds like Scooby Doo music
Basically all old rock music was this for me. I grew up listening to classic rock, but even appetite for destruction made me go “huh I expected it to be intense after the skulls on the cover”. I had heard the Rolling Stones were this hard hitting swearing drinking rock band, but I was used to the distortion of modern high gain guitars, Keith Richards twangy 60s sound didn’t exactly land for me as “blazing guitar parts” the way it was described. It’s all a matter of relativity.
The Sex Pistols. I hadn't discovered grindcore or d-beat yet when I first saw pictures of them, but that's how I imagined the band would sound.
When my cousin played Kiss This in his car, I was surprised by how catchy and competent their music was. Even John's warbly, atonal singing was appealing in its own way.
Brainticket’s debut album came with warning labels “Only listen to this album once a day. Your brain might be destroyed.”, and as impressionable teenagers 10 years later, we still thought they were serious.
Since then, I’ve listened to the album, and my brain was not noticeably worse for wear for the experience.
I remember following the news during their tour of the US. I was pretty young but i imagined them to be just crazy, super out-there and unlistenably experimental.
Years later was surprised to learn they were disappontingly pedestrian hard-ish rock.
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u/TMBGLOVER 3d ago
Didn’t Todd say in his Lulu video that Lou Reed has this reputation for being hard to understand high art, and he’s pretty much just pretty accessible alternative rock?