Recommendations of the Editorial team
The Most Disappointing Albums of All Time (30): Red Hot Chili Peppers – “One Hot Minute”
A winning streak cannot last forever. And when you’re a successful recording artist with a long career, there inevitably comes a time when fans and critics are disappointed with a new album.
This may be because a big experiment didn’t pay off as hoped. The taste changed quickly. You are suddenly dismissed as a relic of the past. For creating something so bold and innovative that its genius will only be appreciated in years to come. Or that you simply produced a dud due to a combination of physical and creative exhaustion. The unbearable stress of trying to surpass yourself. And perhaps the influence of certain chemical substances.
For truly great artists, a disappointing album can be just a bump in the road to a long, successful career. Bob Dylan has many albums that can safely be described as “disappointing.” And they only made the sequels even 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 span multiple generations.
Rating: Also depends on the time
The American ROLLING STONE has compiled a list of the 50 most disappointing albums in music history. There are some important caveats that need to be made before various armies of fans make plans to set our offices on fire. Or unleashing SWAT teams on our homes. We absolutely love some of these albums. An album can be seen as disappointing the moment it comes out. And later be reevaluated forever.
This mainly has to do with the timing and the critical consensus at a particular point in time. And an album that’s considered B+/A- is still disappointing when it follows a string of A/A+ albums.
Also, a disappointing album from an incredibly talented artist like Radiohead or U2 would be considered a masterpiece if it had been published by almost anyone else. (We had a really hard time deciding to include “The King of Limbs” and “Songs of Innocence” here. But we ended up including them.)
(And if you’re going to storm our houses because we recorded your favorite band here, can you at least do it during the day? It’s annoying when they storm in in the middle of the night. Plus, “The King of Limbs” is damn good. Get a grip, Radiohead army.)
The Most Disappointing Albums of All Time (30): Red Hot Chili Peppers – “One Hot Minute”
In 1994, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Dave Navarro faced two problems that were the exact opposite of each other.
He was a guitarist without a band after Jane’s Addiction disbanded. And they were a band without a guitarist after John Frusciante dropped out during the tour supporting their breakthrough album Blood Sugar Sex Magik.
On paper, this was an alt-rock supergroup. But in reality they had to live up to the legend of the two bands. Anthony Kiedis was also deep into drug addiction and the recordings took months. There were a few outstanding songs like Airplane, but nothing that would make fans forget “Under the Bridge” or “Mountain Song.”
“Aeroplane”:
The Most Disappointing Albums of All Time (30): Red Hot Chili Peppers – “One Hot Minute”
“Navarro’s metallic guitar shredding should have given the Chili Peppers’ punk-tinged heavy guitar funk a little more weight, but it makes it rather ponderous,” wrote AllMusic’s Stephen Thomas Erlewine.
“One Hot Minute” is just as musically ambitious as “Blood Sugar Sex Magik”. But even more unfocused, meaning it offers the least thrills of any of the group’s albums.
For her next album, Californication, Frusciante returned to the fold. And the entire “One Hot Minute” era has mercifully faded from memory since then.