Countdown 100: Bands that got megahyped that failed spectacularly...

42. Robbie Williams (in the USA)
41. Nikka Costa

40. The Souther-Hillman-Furay Band

39. Rosie Vela.

Nikka Costa's a good one. She had a ton of money thrown at her more than once iirc. What was her claim to fame again?

38. O-Positive (1990; Epic) | "Most popular artists aren't interested in doing anything worthwhile. I don't want success on any terms. I don't care about being a guy in leather pants with no underwear. We just play what we like, we don't try to write songs for anyone else. We haven't really worried about how we're going to be received."

Imagine that.

sophie b hawkins got the most hype ive ever seen in the uk, 3 or 4 weeks a row on top of the pops all for getting no higher than #23.

Nikka Costa is the daughter of Don Costa (arranger for Sinatra etc...)

Sophie B. Hawkins is mortally otm #1.

i just cant recall any more hype in the 90s on anyone else

Wow, no mention of?

37. Jimmy Ray

its one thing being hyped up by the nme to a 100,000 readers at most, but sophie b hawkins was on adverts, every chat show, every music show, every commercial radio/r1 A playlist ,all the papers, those totps performances despite not even being in the top 20 and it still didn't crack the top 20.

Ha completely forgot about Jimmy Ray - he was all over MTV for about two weeks.

Hmm. Everyone else who has a kid and a job has to get by somehow.

well, she did get by!

polyhex says sophie b hawkins had two top 20 hits - i remember both (and still play "damn i wish i was your lover" occasionally), had no idea of the hype though! i guess it's similar to the florence & the machine hype now...always thought florence was a c-rate SBH.

ha, speaking of F&tM, my wife is now obsessed with them/her after the VMAs this year, going so far as to call her performance the best of the evening

36. Max Q

xp: I think that there were a number of mainstread media calling f+tm the best performance of the evening too.

mainstream

lots of industrialish stuff in the wake of NIN that got sorta this treatment, but not enough hype to get them a number imo (lookin at you spahn ranch, etc.)

(stabbing westward & filter?)

Filter was actually successful, though

Stabbing Westward... well they had their fans

those were both reasonably large bands with hits, HGN.

xp

Actually maybe Sister Machine Gun and/or Machines of Loving Grace are the best examples of what jjj's talking about?

Stabbing Westward had a couple of big radio songs on the first record.

theres a slurry of grunge/ska failures too to be mined for gold here, speaking of which

35. Goldfinger

Gravity Kills maybe? I dunno, that kind of stuff is never really hyped over here (NIN aside, obv).

xposts

hahaha i just remember course of empire. that didnt go well.

lol I have a Gravity Kills CD5 that I think I've played once

swing industrial fusion HOW CAN IT POSSIBLY FAIL xpost

so dan & jj fell bigtime for lol major label industrial @ college?

this surely isn't a secret to, like, anyone?

nah i worked at a record shop so i got to watch it fall flat on its face over and over again

I thought you guys were old enough to fall for the non-false industrial that scraped the barrel, lol

btw, I am remembering why I played my Gravity Kills single only once:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8S0_DppB14

actually Stabbing Westward's major singles were on their second album. "Ungod" was the first one, and didn't have any. So that's even more a suggestion that the hype helped build them from unknown to MTV darlings methinks.

essentially the years between 1988 and 1996 were essentially one long industrial freefall combined with rave/trip-hop/new jack swing detours

34. Warrior Soul

Horrible sub-par Britpop corner:

33. Northern Uproar
32. Heavy Stereo
31. Powder

Wow, didn't know Stabbing Westward had a album before the famous one.

hey no slagging off warrior soul now industrial butthurt boy!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaDsh0IZ020

um

i must confess, i got the 1st stabbing westward album. I have never heard a single thing that came after it. They had no hit albums here.

what the world really needed was Queensryche set to a marching band drum cadence (xp)

i was actually trying to decide between warrior soul and powermad tbh

30. Infectious Grooves

can we all agree that Gravity Kills sucked

omg POWERMAD

xp: to quote Obama, YES WE CAN

how about Powerman 5000?

29. The Quireboys

remember when it looked like Jamiroquai was going to fall into this category ;_;

you're reminding me of an subgenre of music I was happy to have forgotten