Greatest Band / Artist Feuds

and, in this battle, the hostility seemed to be more one-sided -- FZ rather liked the Velvets, whereas Reed waited till Zappa was dead and buried before saying nice about him.

The only thing they had in common back then was the hairdo and the spandex, and I don't remember Anthony saying anything about Corey Glover from Living Colour ripping them off, y'know? How 'bout some consistency, Tony?

Actually, I generally hope most inter-artist feuds are manufactured by artists friendly with each other who realize how much publicity they might gain from said "feud". I have lots of trouble believing musicians can be this petty and retarded.

However, I absolutely LOVE the hate-on Em has for Moby and that dog puppet. As if he didn't look like enough of a lame-ass cock BEFORE that incident...

Danzig vs. Glenn-less Misfits

KRS-One vs. PM Dawn

Roger Waters vs. Pink Floyd

(this is entirely fictitious, but wouldn't it be cool if it were true?)

Mogwai vs Rothko - half of the 'gwai decided to make an unprompted and somewhat personal attack on Rothko while reviewing singles in Kerrang of all places. someone designed a 'mogwai: are slint' tshirt in response and a couple of ppl printed ones up specially for the Mogwai-curated ATP festival a few months after.......also Mogwai vs Immense; and Mogwai vs a whole load others too probably, with varying amounts of justification....

i forgot the BJM/Dandy Warhols one too........did they really actually dislike each other though, i know one sent the other bullet/s through the post with the other band's name on supposedly, once, but i also heard elsewhere they were [mutual?] fans as well...

the BJM/dandy warhols feud was a total fake. anton was teaching courtney a lesson in "press manipulation" which courtney totally misunderstood. the bullets with their names on them were real, though. my friend kept them in her basement for years...

if only mogwai's music nowadays were as interesting as their antics ...

Shush Kate, Don't tell them. You still in touch with Pumpkin?
And don't forget DHK VS The Plungers who got embroiled in who wrote Nova Scoiter.
And then there was always BJM Vs SODOM or whatever horrible name they were called.

i think those were within the band. like some guy wanted to kick the bassist out of the band one night he lead him to the woods and axed him in the back. i think the same guy blew off some band member's head with a shot gun, made stew with his brains and a neckles with his skull.
i think that it might have been mortiis because he's in jail (obv.) but i really don't know.

didn't oasis have 7000 rivals?

(I think they were called the Adminstration. Anyone know anything more?)

Oh PLEASE! Could those be any duller and more pointless?

Story 1: Per Ohlin, singer on Mayhem blew his own brains out with a shotgun in 1991, photos were taken upon discovery and managed to get into circulation.

Story 2: In 1993, Varg Vikernes (of Burzum) stabbed Oystein Aarseth (owner of the record label Vikernes had been signed to for a few years as well as guitarist of Mayhem, a band for which Vikernes played bass) because of a business-problem-turned-personal-feud. Media frenzy galore, lots of speculation.

Story 3: A year later, Bard Eithun (of Emperor) gets harrassed by a homosexual man, lures the guy into the woods and stabs him to death.

2) Motor Cycle Wars vs. Dead Teenagers (both DC bands; the rivalry was mostly a joke but when one band played members of the other would try to sabotage the show. MCW's farewell concert ended with all of DT crashing the stage, grabbing the band's instruments and playing a DT song).

The Beatles/Capt. Beefheart's Magic Band
Steve Albini vs. Urge Overkill
Killing Joke vs. Nirvana

Also, I thought that Pavement's diss of Smashing Pumpkins was great.

You did ask.

How widespread is the practice of bands sending other bands christmas cards actually?

Maybe, but when "Amish Paradise" came out Coolio wasn't pleased with the parody (although he had granted permission). Perhaps their posses did lunch, as Weird Al suggested.

PSB still cool on Sparks.

SPARKS PSB FEUD NEWS pic.twitter.com/Xt7WuBukFo

— Ricardo Autobahn (@ricardoautobahn) April 22, 2022

If there's been any direct influence, it's Sparks sounding like Pet Shop Boys on the forgettable "Stop Me If You've Heard This Before" from 1988.

said out loud to myself: yeah neil, why didn't you say that?

haven't seen the sparks thing referenced, but wow did they really do that??

(psb always such an entertaining interview, but i don't keep up. thanks for sharing.)

I missed all that hoo-ha, didn't even see the Q letter at the time. See in the pre-internet days there'd be a beef going on with a band you liked and even as a big fan you could miss it completely.

I wonder what Mark Almond and Andy McCluskey have to say about all of this

*cough* *Marc

boogie boys vs kool moe dee!https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVYy99QDoQw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CM06HTw6xAE

Bizzy Bone vs the entire Three Six Mafia

Buddy Rich vs. everyone else in his band

oooh, that recording of buddy rich cussing out his band is hard to listen to. that one's less funny and more sad.

does "radio personality v band" fit in here? didn't casey kasem have a bunch of superfluous and silly beefs?

and just listing off some random ones that haven't been mentioned yet:

sonic youth v mariah carey
common v ice cube
e40 v notorious b.i.g.
azaelia banks v grimes
robert smith v morrissey

and i know there was an acknowledged beef re: miles v thelonious. but all i know about it comes from miles' autobiography, so there's some missing pieces in the story no doubt.

Robbie Williams v Jimmy Page

I’m not sure if the Miles/Monk one was a feud of long-standing or limited to that one session in 1954 (I think).

It was limited to that one session (yep, 1954), and according to Miles, didn't actually happen. Miles told Monk to lay out during Miles' solos, and Monk did. Addressing rumors of a feud or fight, Miles denied any such thing took place because "Monk could have just picked my little ass up and thrown me through a wall.”

There was some mild Who/Zeppelin beef. The one time they shared a bill (Washington, DC 1969), Townshend introduced the Who's final song by saying something like, "We're sorry for what Led Zeppelin did earlier, spitting all over the place." In a 1975 RS interview Page said, "I don’t really like doing that Townshend number of telling everybody exactly what to play. I don’t like that too much. A group’s a group after all, isn’t it?"

Townshend in 1975:

“Yet funnily enough I don`t really respect that kind of guitar playing. I`ve got no great shakes for Jeff Beck or Jimmy Page. Sure, I love what they do, but it always seems to me that they`re like the Yehudi Menuhins of the rock business. They`re extremely good at what they do, but I`m sure they`d give their right arm to be writers – though not necessarily in my shoes."

Townshend in the early '90s:

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

In 2000, The Black Crowes with Jimmy Page were supposed to open three nights of Who shows at MSG, but pulled out at the last minute because Page had supposedly injured his back. But there were rumors (from those in the Crowes camp, miffed at missing the gigs) that Page bailed because he refused to open for the Who.

But Moon and Bonham were always friendly, and Plant didn't seem to have any animosity towards the Who, opening for them himself in 2002.

Evan Parker v. Derek Bailey
Philip Glass v. Steve Reich
La Monte Young v. Tony Conrad

If “artist” can mean a non-musician: Salman Rushdie v. Yusuf Islam

dead kennedys vs rick wakeman!https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w__wUYxMjYE

dead milkmen vs any bunch of stupid Europeans!https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPCiR_17GGU

There was beef between Miles Davis and Cecil Taylor. They were on the same European tour in 1969, and when I interviewed Taylor in 2016, he told me that he overheard Miles telling his (Davis's) bandmates, "Don't listen to him - he's bullshittin'", which naturally infuriated Taylor. He also claims that he once saw Davis on the street and was walking over to say hello and Davis spit on the sidewalk. So even in 2016, Taylor was still seething about this stuff, and went out of his way to insult Davis to me, telling me that Ellington's nickname for Miles was "Inky." (Taylor was very light-skinned, obviously, and often took pains — including during our conversation — to point out his Native American ancestry.) he also said to me, "Miles never got anything like this" (meaning a Whitney Museum exhibit dedicated to him and his work). In conclusion: Cecil Taylor was a genius, but also a grudge-carrying bitch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FR0thRsgMY

Roger Waters v Pink Floyd

The weird thing about “don’t listen to him; he’s bullshittin’” is that Dave Holland and Wayne Shorter were already fans of Cecil’s. Wonder what their response to Miles was; “Too late, and no he’s not.”

xxp

I think a lot of people in Davis's circle learned to just listen while he was talking, and then forget it once he'd moved away. I have an interview coming up on Bandcamp Daily with Flora Purim where she told me that Davis said to her that Airto Moreira (her husband, for those who don't know) didn't play as well when she was hanging around with the band. I mean, the guy was a gaping asshole a whole lot of the time.

Robbie Williams v Jimmy Page

― Was Hitler a Hobbit? (Tom D.),

my absolute favourite rock-n-pop feud in recent times.

The one time they shared a bill (Washington, DC 1969 Columbia, MD

Yes, thank you for the correction! I was confusing it with the Who’s Georgetown show that November.

David Lee Roth vs. Sammy Hagar

Thanks for the word RE: Monk v Miles!

There was also Miles v Symphony Sid (the feud that spawned my previous radio personality question). I think that one was pretty one-sided, as Miles just didn't like him.

Azealia Banks vs. Everyone

That Radiohead thing when some tool or other mistook their song about the last WW1 vet with a composer, was hilarious.

"Oh, please listen to our new song about Harry Patch'. Fuck you! You brand yourself by brazenly and arbitrarily associating yourself with things that you know people consider cool. That is bogus. That's a put-on. That's a branding technique, and Radiohead have their brand that they're popular and intelligent, so they have a song about Harry Patch.How's the song? Is it 48 notes to the octave? What does it have to do with Harry Patch? Oh, my wife says I am being very rude. She doesn't like me insulting Radiohead. She's afraid they will send their lackeys through the computer to sabotage us. But they needn't worry -- we are a band that sabotages ourselves."

https://pitchfork.com/news/37035-fiery-furnaces-matthew-friedberger-continues-radiohead-fight/

Like most creative musicians, Matt Friedberger is not a fan of Radiohead and most of their chart busters.

Holy shit, the rest of that statement. It's worth reading the whole thing. What a dingus.

Cornelius Cardew vs Karlheinz Stockhausen (fairly one-sided as far as I can tell)

Maria Callas vs Renata Tebaldi

In 1951, Tebaldi and Maria Callas were jointly booked for a vocal recital in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Although the singers agreed that neither would perform encores, Tebaldi took two, and Callas was reportedly incensed.[65] This incident began the rivalry, which reached a fever pitch in the mid-1950s, at times even engulfing the two women themselves, who were said by their more fanatical followers to have engaged in verbal barbs in each other's direction.

Tebaldi was quoted as saying, "I have one thing that Callas doesn't have: a heart"[13] while Callas was quoted in Time magazine as saying that comparing her with Tebaldi was like "comparing Champagne with Cognac...No...with Coca Cola".

Charlemagne Palestine vs Morton Feldman

"When Morton Feldman started he was playing pieces that were twenty minutes long. I was living downtown at the time and someone asked Morton whether his music was part of the "Downtown style." "What Downtown style?" he said, "I don't know anything about any Downtown style.". And so I wrote him a letter, in my own hand, and I said "Morton, you take your finger, and you shove it up your ass! And then you take your finger back out, and you sniff it. Signed, the Downtown Composers community." And when Morton saw me, whenever he saw me after that he would say [a very affronted tone] "No-one! No-one has ever said anything to me like that!" But after that, when he played with John Cage, and whenever he would play, his pieces were two, sometimes three hours long! So you can thank me for that!"

In 1985, Dudley, Jeczalik, and Langan made an acrimonious split from Morley and Horn as well as from the ZTT label.

In a post-split interview for Melody Maker in October 1985, Jeczalik indicated that he and Morley did not get along and that he felt Morley's writing was pretentious. Jeczalik responded to a question about the level of Morley and Horn's involvement in Who's Afraid by saying, "It's difficult to tell. We say approximately 1.73 percent, but it could even be as high as two percent. You see, all that has happened is that Gary and I started something, it was taken away, and we have taken steps to get it back." In the same interview, Dudley indicated she felt parts of Who's Afraid were of dubious quality.

Much later, Morley would comment "When Trevor and I left, (Jeczalik, Langan and Dudley) became a novelty group who had hits with Tom Jones." His disdain for the artistic direction of The Art of Noise once he was no longer involved with it was even more evident in other articles he penned, including the liner notes of the 1986 compilation album Daft (under the name Otto Flake) and a September 2002 article for The Observer.

Cornelius Cardew vs Karlheinz Stockhausen (fairly one-sided as far as I can tell)

The only time I saw Stockhausen talking about Cardew he was very complimentary.