5 Artists Who Stopped Sucking Out of Nowhere

Doing a 180 degree turn in your opinions about an artist or work of art can be intensely satisfying. Here are my five biggest 180s on artists I once thought had absolutely no value.
5 Artists Who Stopped Sucking Out of Nowhere

I love being surprised by new things. I don't mean like puppies or an invitation to Hustler's Barely Legal Pajama Party for Vaguely Known Bloggers. More like developments that change my mind after it's already made. It's good for the soul, and a defense against cynicism. That might be hard to believe considering how opinionated some of my columns and videos are, but some opinions are just invitations to be proven wrong.And that's true not just for real world concerns, but also in the realm of pop culture. Doing a 180 degree turn in your opinions about an artist or work of art can be intensely satisfying. The first time I heard Faith No More's "Midlife Crisis" and Chris Isaak's "Wicked Game," I felt like I was dying. Both songs made me physically uncomfortable, and I distinctly remember shutting off the radio on FNM and actually leaving the record store for Isaak. (Oh -- for our younger readers -- a record store is a place where, as a teen, I failed repeatedly to find chicks willing to have sex with me.) But by the third or fourth listen, something clicked and both songs became all-time favorites of mine.

5 Artists Who Stopped Sucking Out of Nowhere

The video, however, I liked right away.

With artists, it's a little different. The change usually comes for me after a specific performance I call the 180 moment. It's a defining event big enough for me to do an about-face on all my previous opinions. Here are my five biggest 180s on artists I once thought had absolutely no value.

Neil Patrick Harris

To me, Neil Patrick Harris was always Doogie Howser, M.D. -- a vaguely irritating boy actor on a show I rarely watched. It never occurred to me to think of him as anything other than a child star who would go away for 10 years before popping up briefly on TMZ in a tragic drug overdose story.

5 Artists Who Stopped Sucking Out of Nowhere

"I decided to follow up my 'Doogie Howser, M.D.' performance with a daring role as the inhabitant of a chalk outline."


The 180 Moment: Harold & Kumar Go To White CastleIn 2004, I went to Blockbuster and rented Harold & Kumar go to White Castle after hearing it was good despite all appearances to the contrary. (Oh -- for our younger readers -- Blockbuster was a store where, as a young man, I failed repeatedly to find chicks willing to have sex with me.) In any event, all the buzz was true, and Harold & Kumar ended up being one of my favorite comedies. But that's not the important part. The big story was Neil Patrick Harris's portrayal of Neil Patrick Harris as a drug addicted, womanizing thrill junkie.

5 Artists Who Stopped Sucking Out of Nowhere

Sometimes cool people disable embedding. The link's above. Sorry.

The performance was great on so many levels. Even as mere stunt-casting it would have worked; innocent boy actor is actually a bad ass. Harris could have said his lines, hit his marks and delivered laughs. Instead, he created a performance so memorable, it demanded to be repeated in two sequels. Instead of watching Harris and saying, "Oh, I get it, Doogie likes to fuck," you believed he was a bad ass womanizer, and it was completely inconsequential that Harris was openly gay. Not only a great comedic turn, but hopefully inspirational to any gay actor who thinks they can't come out because the audience won't accept them in straight roles.

Justin Timberlake

For a long time, I had a fairly large amount of disdain for Justin Timberlake in the same way I would hate any soulless performing monkey that made millions. I saw no difference between, the N'Sync teen star and the little kid doing country on
Star Search. Both were just wind-up toy singing whores.


The 180 Moment: Hosting Saturday Night LiveIn 2003, Justin Timberlake hosted Saturday Night Live, and I had to throw out most of those opinions. True, N'Sync was still pop garbage he spewed for lots of cash, but he was not the talentless, blonde automaton I thought he was. Two skits made that clear. The now-classic "Omeletteville" skit and his performance of Robin Gibb on Jimmy Fallon's Barry Gibb talk show.Sure Timberlake sang and danced with great aplomb in the "Omlletteville" skit, but more importantly, he looked like a giant douchebag. I had no idea this petite pretty boy would be on board with making fun of himself, and that helped change my opinion as much as his killer comedic performance.

ARK P ers GRAN ra Dbont Litter

One giant, douchey egg-suit. See how easy it is to win my love?

As a huge Bee Gees fan, The Barry Gibb Talk Show is one of my favorite SNL
skits of all time. Mostly, I love it for Fallon's performance which shows the unfairly maligned Barry Gibb as a force to be reckoned with while simultaneously equating the Bee Gee falsetto with rage. But Timberlake's portrayal of Robin Gibb (get well) as a hapless simpleton also shattered my disdain and convinced me that not only could he act, but he'd spent many hours listening to the Bee Gees.

Soundgarden

I'm a huge Soundgarden fan. I love Chris Cornell and the boys so much they've basically ruined loud music for me; it just seems pointless to listen to any other band. But it wasn't always that way. My first exposure to them was the mention of their name: Soundgarden. Mmmm. Sounded ethereal and prog rocky, appealing instantly to my lame suburban sensibilities. I was eager to check them out. What I got was this:At that point, I relegated them to the dumb ass, punk rock junk pile as mindless cretins. That was my mistake. First off, I had no idea that song was called "Big Dumb Sex" and was mocking the "hey let's fuck" sensibility of some dance music. More importantly, the best was yet to come. The 180 Moment: Temple of the Dog
In 1991, I first heard "Hunger Strike" from Temple of the Dog -- a tribute album to the late Andrew Wood of Mother Love Bone. The one-off project featured Soundgarden's Chris Cornell and Matt Cameron with Stone Gossard, Mike McCready and Jeff Ament of Pearl Jam. The song, quite literally, stopped me in my tracks and made me change direction until I found where the music was coming from. (Spoiler alert: God. It was coming from God.)The album redefined how I thought about songwriting and rock vocals. Soundgarden's Badmotorfinger, featuring "Outshined" and "Rusty Cage," was already out at the time, but I had ignored it, writing it off as more "Big Dumb Sex" noise. But Cornell's songwriting and vocals on the more mellow and soulful Temple
couldn't be denied. I played the CD over and over. (Oh -- for our younger readers -- CDs are things I listened to as a boy after failing repeatedly to find chicks willing to have sex with me.) After hearing Temple
, I went back to Badmotorfinger and realized all that same songwriter craft was still underneath the more aggressive arrangements. I'd sold Soundgarden short. Thankfully, I did my 180 before Superunknown came out so I was in full blown fan mode when the greatest album of the '90s arrived.* *To Radiohead fans: maybe OK Computer is better. To Faith No More fans: maybe Angel Dust is better. To Nirvana fans: You're adorable!

Brad Pitt

Many of you probably think of Brad Pitt as just a mere elder statesmen of hotness who seems like a pretty cool guy after turning in some bad ass performances in movies like Fight Club and 12 Monkeys. But at the start of Pitt's career, he was all primed to be a mere pretty-boy, no-talent cheeseball. In fact, that's exactly what I thought he was. And it was hard to blame me. His appearance in Thelma and Louise
as boy candy and his starring turn in A River Runs Through It added up to little more than Baby Robert Redford Lite.

5 Artists Who Stopped Sucking Out of Nowhere
Getty

"See? Even in this silly hat, I sure am pretty!"

The 180 Moment: Kalifornia
If you've not seen Kalifornia there is a simple remedy for that: see Kalifornia. In this 1993 movie, Pitt plays a racist, abusive, white trash sociopath who spends most of the movie looking like he smells really bad. Pitt is greasy and hairy and genuinely terrifying. At that moment, I knew Pitt was a real actor -- not just because he played against type incredibly well, but because he clearly did not care if he looked disgusting. And considering I can still remember the hole in his filthy gym sock more than 15 years later, it was quite a performance. My hatred vanished, but just in case there was any lingering doubt, his performance as the stoner roommate in True Romance
that same year just sealed the deal.

J.K. Rowling

This one's a little different. Mostly because I never hated J.K. Rowling as much as I thought she and the Harry Potter series were just wildly overrated. Also, I changed my mind gradually without a defining moment. But I'm including Rowling (at the top of the list no less) because she changed my mind in a very profound way and even influenced me as a writer.Back in the late '90s, I started hearing about this children's book that grownups were reading called Harry Potter. As my testicles had already descended by that time, I decided to forgo the reading experience. I also distinctly recall seeing noted literary scholar Harold Bloom criticize the books on Charlie Rose
for being derivative. I started watching the movies and thumbing through the books. I had to agree with Bloom. The influences were obvious. Harry Potter simply couldn't exist without Roald Dahl, Monty Python, J.R.R. Tolkien and even Franz Kafka (compare Ms. Umbridge's torture pen with Kafka's In The Penal Colony
).
The 180 Moment: There Wasn't One ReallyThe turnaround for me was so gradual I can't place it on a certain book. Like I said, I never hated Harry Potter. I just thought it was overly praised because I could check off all the borrowed elements. But with each book and film I began to realize that even though the installments contained elements from earlier works, there was more to Harry Potter.Yes, the muggles are just like the terrible adults of Roald Dahl fiction; the foul-tasting magical candies come right out of a Monty Python skit; and wearing a horcrux that must be destroyed while worrying about its own corrupting influence on your soul sounds a lot like Tolkien's one ring to rule them all. But those elements are not why people like Harry Potter
. Instead, the Harry Potter universe is filled with rules that are constantly broken in the interest of equity. Time and time again, Harry and all the likable characters of Hogwarts break the letter of the law to fulfill the spirit of the law. The best kind of wish fulfillment made all the better by the intensity of the defeated evil.Indeed, compare Frodo's trip to Mordor while wearing a corrupting ring with Harry Potter's wearing of the horcrux. Frodo knows that carrying the ring is his burden. That it cannot be passed to another. Although Harry is facing an evil as great as Frodo's, he shares the burden by altering the wearing of the horcrux between his two companions. Yes, the similarities are apparent, but it's the distinction that holds Harry Potter's specific charm.

5 Artists Who Stopped Sucking Out of Nowhere
Getty

"Hi. My name's Daniel Radcliffe and I smile much more broadly than Harry Potter in real life."

J.K. Rowling taught me that using influences in a novel is a lot like using sampling in music. It's absolutely fine to lift riffs and hooks from other songs as long as they are referential building blocks of your work instead of being the appeal
of your work. For example, the "When Doves Cry" sample is the only good part of MC Hammer's "Pray." The "Under Pressure" riff is the only good part of Vanilla Ice's "Ice Ice Baby." But take a song like "Jackass" by Beck, built around a sampled loop from Them's "It's All Over, Baby Blue." It stands completely on its own terms. Rowling liberated me so much that when I wrote my serialized novella Notes from the Internet Apocalypse, I had great fun incorporating elements from Douglas Adams, Herman Melville, Franz Kafka, Dennis Lehane, Chuck Palahniuk, George Orwell, David Bowie, George Romero and Scott Kosar, confident they were only cultural shortcuts enriching the story instead of stealing its individuality. So yeah, sorry, J.K. I was wrong.Subscribe to the all-new HATE BY NUMBERS. Also follow Gladstone on Twitter and stay up to date on the latest regarding Notes from the Internet Apocalypse. And then there's his website and Tumblr too.

For more from Gladstone, check out 5 Popular Phrases That Make You Look Like an Idiot and 5 Satirists Attacked by People Who Totally Missed the Point.

Scroll down for the next article

Must Read

VIRAL ON CRACKED

A WEEKLY
NEWSLETTER OF
JOKES + TRIVIA

Forgot Password?