What happens when you survive the excesses of rock star hedonism and outlive your own
popularity? Some stars know the answer to that question all too well. Here are a few
rock stars who don't seem to realize their career has peaked.
Courtney Love released an iconic grunge-rock album at the end of her doomed marriage to
Kurt Cobain: the ironically titled Live Through This. Over the course of their relationship,
Love's band Hole became immensely popular. All of a sudden, it seemed like Courtney Love
was everywhere, and she was coming for you.
"What's the biggest misconception about you?!?!"
"That I'm not educated. And that I'm not clean."
Several years after Kurt Cobain's death, Hole returned with the 1998 release, Celebrity
Skin. The catchy title track was co-written by another grunge giant: Smashing Pumpkins'
Billy Corgan. Love and Corgan were also lovers at the time, and they later feuded over songwriting credits.
Love's post-Cobain, post-Hole life has reportedly remained chaotic and destructive. In HBO's
2015 documentary Montage of Heck, the singer admitted to using heroin while pregnant. Love
seems to be constantly reckoning with her drug abuse in public, making numerous TV appearances
while seemingly under the influence.
Despite these appearances, it's highly unlikely you can name a Hole song written in the last
fifteen years. Maybe fans got what they wanted and never wanted it again.
Marilyn Manson's Kiss-level theatrics vaulted him to rock stardom with consecutive platinum
albums in the late '90s, followed by a dip to gold status in the early aughts. Manson's
output never waned, but his goth-kid fanbase clearly moved on: His 2017 LP Heaven Upside
Down only sold 52,000 copies. Maybe evil has become a little too status quo in recent years.
Of course, Manson's ghoulishness was always more about optics than rock, and he certainly
hasn't completely fallen out of the public eye. He started making headlines again in
2020 after an alleged 24-hour cocaine bender with troubled movie star Johnny Depp.
According to the Daily Mail, Depp's ex Amber Heard claims the two cantankerous party-people raged like
rock stars one night in 2014, and then they reportedly dropped off Depp's daughter Lily-Rose
at school.
Depp admits that he and Manson used drugs together, and that they indeed dropped off
Lily-Rose...but he denies that these two facts overlapped. The takeaway here? Manson may
still be raising hell in the tabloids, but his recent records have been cast into the
dark pit known as The Dollar Bin.
Remember the MTV reality show The Osbournes? Ozzy Osbourne appeared to be remarkably out-of-it
during the program's three-year run in the early 2000s. When he mumbled and shuffled
around his Beverly Hills home, it was mainly played for laughs…but these antics belied
the rocker's serious drug addiction. In 2018, his wife Sharon revealed to Metal Hammer:
According to his 2011 memoir I Am Ozzy, the rock legend has been in and out of rehab several
times over the years. In 2020, he made a somewhat lucid appearance on his wife's daytime show,
The Talk. He opened up about his recovery from spinal surgery after a fall in his home
and a series of other serious health problems, including a stint in the ICU, where he battled
life-threatening pneumonia. During the taping, he managed to utter:
"I'm getting better. It's a slow process but I'm getting there slowly but surely."
Perfectionism is often the enemy of art. As you probably already know, Axl Rose took a
gasp-worthy 17 years to follow up the monster success of Gun N' Roses' Use Your Illusion.
We're all for having a little patience, but that's rather beyond the pale, no? The band's
double-sided 1991 epic did sell over 39 million copies, which is definitely a tough act to
follow…but 17 years?
And then, finally, we got the new album: 2008's Chinese Democracy was well-received by critics,
but it didn't sell nearly as well as the band's previous efforts. Perhaps this had something
to do with the fact that the band's iconic guitarist Slash was replaced by someone who
wears a KFC bucket on his head.
Insiders claim Chinese Democracy was nearly completed as early as 2001, a mere decade
after the band's peak. But Rose was reportedly still unsatisfied: He tinkered and toiled,
and allegedly only released the album because he was running out of money. That might go
some way in explaining the disastrous rights deal with Best Buy and Myspace, deals that
basically tanked sales, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Poison was one of the sillier hair metal bands of the mid-to-late '80s. The group peaked
in 1988 with the mega-hit album Open Up And Say...Aah!, which includes smash singles like
the never-not corny ballad "Every Rose Has Its Thorn." Frontman Bret Michaels was sitting
pretty at the time. Very pretty, indeed.
Later on, he enjoyed something of a career renaissance, and it was quite an entertaining
one. His VH1 reality-dating series Rock of Love was addictive and ridiculous. No, he
didn't actually find real love on the show, but he managed to exude a good-natured macho
charm. At the end of the day, his small-screen comeback was entirely watchable. And that's
to say nothing of his star turn in Celebrity Apprentice 3 in 2010. We'd also be remiss
not to mention his performance on The Masked Singer, in which he was memorably disguised
as a large humanoid banana.
"I gotta tell you I would've done anything to get here. This is the most awesome show.
I've never had such a great time."
"Aww! I love hearing that!"
"...you all rock!"
In 2020, Michaels published his memoir Auto-Scrap-Ography, in which he recapped his life, talked about
life in the fast lane, and opened up about his struggle with type 1 diabetes. Guess what?
The book's small hardcover run reportedly sold out. People who bought the book were
automatically entered to win a custom "Every Rose Has Its Thorn" guitar and a $100 gift
card to the official Bret Michael merch store. If you're interested, you can still go there
to purchase all sorts of delights, including "Bret Michaels Roses and Thorns Cologne."
Use it sparingly and it might tide you over until the next musical release. Maybe.
Can you remember when you first set your eyes on legendary rocker Steven Tyler? Or when
you first came to learn about his many, many, many scarves?
Perhaps it was back when he was an American Idol judge for two seasons in the early aughts.
Or maybe you became acquainted with his strutty, cocksure ways thanks to his rock band Aerosmith.
He sang passionately about rag dolls, the fact that Janie got her hands on a gun, and
other unseemly adult matters.
So what's Tyler up to these days? Now in his seventies, he shows little signs of slowing
down. You may have recently seen this Twitter post in which he told the world:
Here, you'll find Steven Tyler and his main squeeze Aimee Preston attending Tyler's 3rd
Annual Grammy Awards viewing party. And perhaps you caught sight of Tyler performing live
with supergroup Hollywood Vampires in 2019 alongside the likes of Alice Cooper.
Perhaps not.
There were rumblings that same year that Aerosmith was working on new material, but that little
nugget doesn't seem to have been widely reported. Meanwhile, we've been waiting for a sequel
to this classic Skittles ad:
"Your Skittles portrait."
"That is E to the Z, oh-twiddle-Dees-GUSTING."
"You haven't heard me sing 'Diddly Ding' yet."
In 2017, Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan was described by Mashable as an "alien
lookalike," but it's the rocker's tall tales that are truly extra-terrestrial. In fact,
Corgan mysteriously told Howard Stern that same year,
In that interview, he went on to describe a friend who physically morphed into a non-human
creature right before his very eyes, but he didn't want to get too into the nitty-gritty
for some reason. He claimed,
Corgan has changed quite a bit since the mid-nineties, when he was at the vanguard of popular, moody,
and artistic grunge rock. At the time, he was also at the vanguard of extremely pregnant
pauses.
"There's just such a general state of negativity right now."
He dropped five platinum and multi-platinum records from 1991 to 1999. Then in 2000 came
the Smashing Pumpkins album with the marble-mouthed title Machina/The Machines of God. It was
the band's first effort to sell less than a million copies since Smashing Pumpkins'
debut. Sales have fallen below gold-status ever since. It's a shocking transformation
we just can't explain.
Do you still love Ryan Adams? He's dropped 25 super-sappy studio albums since his debut
Heartbreaker in 2000. Despite being something of a critical darling, mainstream success
has rather eluded him: He's never scored a single number one Billboard hit.
As you probably know, Adam's music tries to delve deep into themes of romance, heartache,
and every matter of the heart you can name...But is he as lovey-dovey as his subject matter
suggests? In 2019, The New York Times published an explosive report that alleged Adams had
pursued some unseemly interactions with some of his young fans. An alleged online correspondence
between Adams and a 15-year-old girl was particularly unsettling. Adams reportedly wrote to one
alleged victim,
In 2019, Adams issued a public apology, tweeting:
Adam's ex-wife Mandy Moore clearly wasn't buying it. In fact, she told The New York
Times that Adams was psychologically abusive during their seven-year marriage, stating that,
"Music was a point of control for him."
Along those same lines, Moore told Today in 2020:
Younger audiences might only know bad boy rocker Tommy Lee from the middling Netflix
film The Dirt, in which he was improbably portrayed by Machine Gun Kelly.
"Yo best man let's go! I got a wife waitin'! C'mon!"
Though you'll still want to take a Silkwood shower after viewing the film, The Dirt avoids
the actual dirt on Lee le subject matter, especially Lee's his chaotic 16-year romance
with actress and model Pamela Anderson. Throughout the doomed romance, the couple had two sons
and engaged in more than a few exceedingly public scandals.
In a grim turn of events, Lee was sentenced to six months behind bars for felony spousal
abuse in 1998. From the outside looking in, it was an astonishingly ugly relationship
between two rather attractive people.
In 2010, Anderson swore off the former Mötley Crüe drummer for good. After that, Lee has
made some rather unusual life choices…like getting this face tattoo, in the tradition
of Post Malone.
Meanwhile, Motley Crue hasn't released new music in over a decade, and perhaps we can
learn to live with that.
Gwen Stefani looks just as gorgeous as she did back in 1996. But her ex, Bush frontman
Gavin Rossdale, evidently isn't feeling quite so fresh. Asked by The Guardian to describe
the most embarrassing moment of his life, Rossdale ruefully answered:
Rossdale's band broke out in the mid-nineties thanks to catchy ballads like "Glycerine".
And their quiet-then-loud formula earned them legions of fratty fans. Bush kept going platinum
until the year 2000, but starting with 2001's Golden State, the hits stopped coming. Nevertheless,
he could regularly be seen on the red carpet with Stefani, who he wed in 2002.
The couple split in 2016 after 13 years of marriage. Rossdale had allegedly been unfaithful,
and tabloids had a field day. One US Weekly cover was memorably emblazoned with the headline:
"He Cheated With Their Nanny!"
Numerous sources claim Rossdale carried on that affair for three whole years. Stefani
reportedly got suspicious after seeing an intimate photo of Rossdale and the nanny on
a hike together. In 2016, she told Cosmopolitan,
Believe it or not, Bush released an album in July 2020 called The Kingdom, but it failed
to cause much of a stir. In its one star review, Rolling Stone wrote that,
But on the bright side, one star is better than none.
Check out one of our newest videos right here! Plus, even more Nicki Swift videos about your
favorite celebrities are coming soon. Subscribe to our YouTube channel and hit the bell so
you don't miss a single one.