Recommendations of the Editorial team
A strand of success cannot last forever. And if you are a successful recording artist with a long career, the moment in which fans and critics are disappointed is inevitably disappointed.
This can be because a large experiment has not paid off as hoped for. The taste changed quickly. One is suddenly dismissed as relic of the past. That you have created something so bold and innovative that your genius will only be recognized in the coming years. Or that you simply produced a dud, due to a combination of physical and creative exhaustion. The unbearable stress of wanting to exceed yourself. And maybe the influence of certain chemical substances.
For really great artists, a disappointing album can only be a little bump on the way to a long, successful career. Bob Dylan has many albums that can confidently describe as “disappointing”. And they only made the successors more impressive and interesting. The same could be said of David Bowie, Madonna, Jay-Z, Stevie Wonder, the Rolling Stones and other artists whose careers include several generations.
Evaluation: also depending on the time
The American Rolling Stone has put together a list of the 50 most disappointing albums in music history. Some important reservations have to be made before different fan armies make plans to set fire to set fire. Or to let go of SWAT teams on our houses. We absolutely love some of these albums. An album can be considered disappointing the moment it comes out. And later re -evaluated forever.
This has to do with the time and critical consensus at a certain point in time. And an album that is considered a B+/A- is still disappointing when it follows a series of A/A+albums.
In addition, a disappointing album would be viewed as a masterpiece by an incredibly talented artist such as Radiohead or U2 if it had been published by almost everyone else. (We made the decision to record “The King of Limbs” and “Songs of Innocence” here, but made it really difficult. But ultimately they recorded.)
(And if you storm our houses because we have picked up your favorite band here, you can at least do it during the day? It’s annoying when you storm in the middle of the night. “The King of Limmbs” is also damn good. Tear together, radiohead army.)
The most disappointing albums of all time, 42: U2 – “Songs of Innocence”
Let us clear something very important here: “Songs of Innocence” didn’t even deserve a tiny part of hate and mockery that it had to take in 2014 when U2 made the inexplicably stupid decision to load it free of charge on every iPhone on the planet.
If the single “Every Breaking Wave” had come out in 1992, it could have been a big hit. “Song for someone” is a wonderful love song of Bono’s wife and “The Miracle (of Joey Ramone)” is a warm oral to the punk icon.
And even if in 2014 they had done something as perfect as “Attention Baby” or “The Joshua Tree”, many people still reacted to the iPhone stunt with anger.
U2 can still play in stadiums when they are on tour, but most young people have little use for them. The band’s grandiosity simply scares them off. And unfortunately “Songs of Innocence” does not come to the best works of U2. It was the wrong album at the wrong time, and it added great damage to the U2 brand, whether rightly or not. (We are of the opinion that it was mostly unfair.) And it disappointed pretty much everyone apart from the most loyal members of the U2 cult.