Kid Rock’s crude slurs, Jared Leto’s strange “gifts”,
and Ted Nugent’s eye-raising beliefs. This is just the tip of the iceberg
on a list of musicians who really need to take a chill pill in the music biz!
How do you go from swoon-worthy sad boy to the veritable poster child of toxic masculinity?
John Mayer pretty much wrote the playbook. It started with a string of high-profile
relationships and then him discussing those relationships in graphic detail,
and then dropping a racist slur for good measure.
Mayer's offenses have been widely publicized, largely because the women in his life got fed
up with him. In 2010, the singer-songwriter used a Playboy interview as an opportunity to
really go into detail about his time with Jessica Simpson. As he put it,
"Sexually it was crazy. That’s all I’ll say. It was like napalm, sexual napalm."
Although Mayer eventually apologized for his comments, Simpson told Oprah Winfrey that she
refused to forgive him. Soon thereafter, Taylor Swift released her breakup ballad "Dear John."
She never said that the track was specifically about Mayer, but the lyrics were unnerving enough
that he complained to Rolling Stone about them. He's since shed his bachelor image,
but only because he had to. As he put it on Instagram Live in 2018:
"I get rejected a lot and I-"
"What do you mean, now, like since you turned 41?"
"Well, no, since I became just like, uh, PR poison."
Hey, at least he's self-aware.
Jared Leto has come a long way since his teen heartthrob days on My So-Called Life,
but it hasn't all been pretty. Unfortunately, the 30 Seconds to Mars frontman has fielded
sexual harassment allegations for decades. The oldest one can be traced back to 2005
when a then-33-year-old Leto was allegedly in New York City's Meatpacking District on the
lookout for teenage models. In recent years, the likes of Dylan Sprouse and
Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn have publicly accused him of similar
behavior. And that's not even mentioning the stuff that Leto himself has admitted to.
While promoting Suicide Squad back in 2016, the actor told E! that he
sent his co-stars used condoms and anal beads. He also sent Viola Davis a bullet,
which was threatening enough that she reportedly considered pulling out some
pepper spray to use on him. This was supposedly all a matter of his Method acting routine. Leto
eventually claimed that his pranks were meant as a bit of a goof and that most
of the stories weren't really true. As he told Entertainment Weekly in 2021,
"99.9 percent of what people read is bull----."
There was a time when Travis Scott was perhaps most famous as Kylie Jenner's baby daddy. He's
since become a household name on his own merits, but not exactly for the right reasons. The most
notorious moment came in November 2021 when at least 10 people died from injuries they
sustained during his Astroworld festival in Houston. The rapper was accused of continuing
to perform even after attendees sustained serious injuries. Footage of him doing the
robot as paramedics were resuscitating fans certainly didn't help his case.
And that wasn't the first time that Scott had faced legal trouble for similar incidents. A
lawsuit had previously been filed accusing him of inciting a crowd into a frenzy during a 2017
concert prior to a man named Kyle Green being pushed from a balcony and becoming paralyzed.
Scott also pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct after encouraging people to rush the stage during
a show in Arkansas. And his former manager Shane Morris has claimed that the rapper basically left
him for dead in a recording studio while he was having a seizure. As he put it in a TikTok video:
"Travis Scott is the worst person I worked with in my entire career in music."
When David Crosby passed away in January 2023 at the age of 81, he left behind a vibrant
musical legacy. That included his solo career, his pioneering work with folk rock group The Byrds,
and most famously, as one-quarter of the iconic supergroup Crosby, Stills,
Nash & Young. Crosby also spent decades embroiled in addiction, before a prison
sentence and a liver transplant spurred him to clean up his act in the 80s. As an addict,
he was notoriously difficult to deal with. Once he was sober, he was apparently still no picnic.
At the time of Crosby's death, two CSNY members were no longer speaking with him. Neil Young
cut off all contact after Crosby called Young's future wife, actress Daryl Hannah,
"a purely poisonous predator." And in 2016, Graham Nash told the Dutch magazine Lust for Life,
"I don't like David Crosby right now. He's been awful
for me the last two years, just f---ing awful."
But Crosby was apparently unaware about his reputation. In the 2019 documentary David Crosby:
Remember My Name, he revealed that one of his Byrds bandmates still held a grudge decades
after he and the rest of the band unanimously fired Crosby. As he put it,
"Roger McGuinn hates my guts."
Crosby offered a blunt assessment of why he was so universally disliked by
those he worked with by positing that he had a "big ego" and "no brains."
Morrissey burst onto the music scene in the early 80s as the frontman for
The Smiths before embarking on a solo career. Over the years, he's made headlines for his
insulting comments about various public figures. Regarding Elton John, he said,
"Nobody's interested. He should just go away."
He also once called The Cure's Robert Smith "a fat clown with makeup weeping
over a guitar," and he referred to Live Aid founder Bob Geldof as "a
nauseating character." But perhaps none of Morrissey's controversial remarks were more
incendiary than his views on immigrants. As he infamously opined to NME in 2007,
"England is a memory now. The gates are flooded and
anybody can have access to England and join in."
After he was accused of racism,
Morrissey responded with an interview on his website in which he said,
"But of course, we are all called racist now, and the word is actually meaningless."
"What is that? Who is this person?"
Years later, Morrissey sued NME for libel, claiming that the interview was edited to
make him appear racist; NME subsequently issued an apology of sorts. Meanwhile,
he's also supported a far-right British political party known for its anti-Muslim stance,
described the Chinese as "a subspecies," and defended both Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey.
Mike Love has been a member of The Beach Boys since the band's formation in 1961.
In 2012, his reputation as a jerk was encapsulated by a Vice headline that read,
"Mike Love is Kind of an A------."
And as David Crosby once tweeted,
"Mike Love is, in the opinion of almost every musician I know, a s---head,
most assuredly has no talent at all, and, as you can probably tell ...I just don't like him."
Among the most egregious of Love's alleged misdeeds was suing his bandmate Brian Wilson
for songwriting credit on Beach Boys hits for which Love supposedly made minimal contributions.
"I don't like Mike Love at all."
"He's too egotistical. Can't be around the guy. Five minutes around him, that's all I can take."
And when the Beach Boys were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988,
he trash-talked the likes of Billy Joel, Mick Jagger, and Elton John. But Love sees
himself a little differently. As he put it to The Guardian in 2013,
"I think there are a lot of fallacies about me."
The feud between squabbling brothers and Oasis bandmates Liam and Noel Gallagher is among the
most legendary in music history. After the band broke up in 2009, Liam pointedly neglected to
mention Noel while accepting an award on behalf of the band the following year.
Then in a 2017 interview with The Independent, Noel blamed Liam for everything. As he put it,
"I never fought with Liam at all. Liam was fighting with himself. Right now,
he is picking a fight with himself somewhere. I don't suffer fools in any f---ing sense at all,
but I suffered him more than maybe I should have done."
That opinion is certainly supported by the insulting things that Liam has said
about various people. In 2013, for example, he called British pop star
Robbie Williams "a f---ing fat f---ing idiot." He also reportedly ticked off
Idris Elba during an encounter at the 2013 NME Awards, although Elba downplays reports that
they nearly came to blows. But in an interview with GQ later that year, the actor declared,
"F--- that idiot."
However, Elba and Liam seemed to be on good terms when they
both appeared on The Graham Norton Show in 2017.
"Me and Liam have squared away."
"Yeah. We had a little falling out or fight."
"Cause he threw my hat across the bar."
"No, you started it."
"No, you did."
The bad blood between Pink Floyd's Roger Waters and his bandmates has been ongoing since he parted
ways with the group in 1985. That was because Waters sued the other members over their continued
use of the band's name, claiming that the group was, quote, "a spent force creatively." However,
he did admit in a 2013 BBC interview that he'd since come to regret his actions.
Decades later, Waters and Pink Floyd guitarist Dave Gilmour continue to hurl barbs at each other,
with their spat reportedly getting in the way of a half-billion-dollar deal
to sell the Pink Floyd catalog. As Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason observed to Rolling Stone,
"I think it's really disappointing that these
rather elderly gentlemen are still at loggerheads."
Waters has also taken serious heat for his controversial comments about Israel,
as he equated the nation's treatment of Palestinians to the way Jews were
treated in Nazi Germany. He invited more controversy for comments he made
to the German newspaper Berliner Zeitung in 2023, when he pondered,
"Is Putin a bigger gangster than Joe Biden and all
those in charge of American politics since World War II?"
Kid Rock rocketed to stardom in the late 90s after
blending rock and rap in the hit single "Bawitdaba." Over the years,
he's also earned a reputation for obnoxious comments and generally boorish behavior.
In 2021, for example, he was captured on video delivering a rant that included a
homophobic slur. A year earlier, he and professional golfer John Daly defiantly
refused to wear face masks while attending a presidential debate during the height of the
COVID-19 pandemic. He's also been accused of misogyny, particularly after suggesting that
Taylor Swift's Democrat-leaning political views were spurred by her desire for movie stardom.
And in an infamous onstage incident, Kid Rock drunkenly suggested that Oprah Winfrey
and Joy Behar could perform a lewd act on him. Audience members called him a racist,
a sentiment that wasn't exactly quelled when he
defended his use of the Confederate flag in a 2008 interview with The Guardian.
"God forbid, you say something a little bit wrong, you're racist, homophobic,
Islamophobic, this, that, and the other. People need to calm down."
In her memoir Love, Pamela, Kid Rock's ex Pamela Anderson wrote
that their marriage ended abruptly after they attended the premiere of the 2006
movie Borat. She made an appearance in the film, but hadn't told him because
she wanted it to be a surprise. And it certainly was a surprise, as she wrote,
"[He] stormed out, calling me a w---- and worse."
Ted Nugent hit it big in the 70s with a string of hard rock hits like "Cat
Scratch Fever" and "Stranglehold." But in recent years, his music has taken a back
seat to his incendiary comments about a variety of hot-button issues. Nugent
is a fervent supporter of the National Rifle Association, and one comment he
made about school shootings really raised eyebrows. On Newsmax's The Joe Pags Show,
the rocker blamed poor nutrition for America's epidemic of school shootings. As he put it,
"Check out what we are feeding our children and you will find the answer to this calamity."
Nugent is regularly mocked for his obnoxious comments, such as when he offered his conspiracy
theory on the pandemic shutdown during a Facebook video in 2021, as he asked,
"Why weren't we shut down for COVID-1 through -18?"
In general, Nugent is not shy about sharing his controversial political
views. He reportedly called Barack Obama "a piece of s---" and once declared on Facebook,
"[Hillary Clinton] hates everything good about America!"
However, Nugent's self-described patriotism is at odds with his past as a confessed draft dodger,
as he admitted to High Times in 1977 that he stopped showering
for a month and then defecated in his pants prior to his physical.