Yes, I want to stick up for Bruce Springsteen as well. He's just famous for the wrong songs. His dark songs are often works of genius.

Absolutely agree. The River is a heartbreaking song, the anthems I can take or leave.

Atlantic City too.

All Goodman is impeccable to me. Best of the Asylum Years (Vol I and II) give a great overview. My 2 favorite abums were Somebody Elses Trouble and Santa Ana Winds but you really can't miss with any of them.

Peter Frampton - Frampton Comes Alive. I definitely wouldn't call this under appreciated, but possibly a little forgotten.

Hole's Live Through This is slightly underrated, I'd say. It's well known, but I've been listening to it lately and that is a great album.

Lol this Xmillions.

2nd place off the top would be Aerosmith.

Overrated: ACDC and Madonna

It is impossible to overrate Bon Scott-era AC/DC

Yeah I didn't mean Bon Scott ACDC just post Bon Scott. I guess I should have made that clear.

Agree with both of these, U2 and Aerosmith being overrated. I do love the song 'One', however. One of my favorite songs ever.

Are you saying Back in Black is overrated? I don't think post BIB AC/DC is rated high enough to be overrated.

Yes, but this just may be the people I'm in communication with, who insist that album among some of their others (even there more recent stuff) are elite. I'm not saying everyone values them highly but the perception I've seen locally and more abroad to be quite favorable of the band.

Madonna and U2 aren't really my genres but they're two of the last acts I'd associate with the world overrated. If you started rating them in the 90s then maybe I can see it but both had their prime in the 80s. By the time they got to making "One" and "Vogue" they jumped the shark (even if they made a lot more money).

If you were often stuck with pop radio in those days you'd have been happy to hear either come on. A kid can only take so much "Kokomo," "Easy Lover" and "Shake You Down."

I am in full agreement with this sentiment.

A ton of artists with long careers went from underrated to overrated. How you categorize them probably has more to do with where the artist was in their career at the time you came across them. And how familiar a person actually is with the older material. Muse for example was incredible early on, Origin album wasn't even a US release.

Tom Petty is rated just fine. It's astounding what he can do with 4 chords. I have his debut, Damn the Torpedos, Full Moon Fever & Wildflowers and they're all good. There's a lot of great material that didn't catch with radio. I should probably buy more.

An underrated Petty album is Long After Dark.

I fear to tread here after the results of the GOAT band thread, but overrated - the Beatles.

I'm not going to launch into a huge tirade, but rather let the Guardian newspaper speak for me - Fab Four? Drab four more like.

Other overrated bands / artists include...

Oasis
The Smiths / Morrissey
Elton John
Paul Weller

Oasis overrated for sure. That whole mid-90s "Britpop" thing was a bunch of slime.

Re: Beatles, I was going to post something to that effect. However, I reconsidered because their influence was so huge. They were the bridge between whatever they listened to in the 50s and rock 'n roll since then.

Their music, OTOH, didn't age well. Who really listens to 'Love Me Do' or 'I Wanna Hold Your Hand' these days? Besides 'Eleanor Rigby' and few other songs, I never want to listen to the Beatles. They're basically a 60s boy-band in pop-rock format.

So, yeah, go ahead and bring it. I can take it.

Very few people listen to love me do again and again. A ton of people listen to Rubber Soul onwards again and again. Especially musicians.

Yes, it is. It never gets mentioned, probably because it was considered kind of a commercial disappointment, especially after Damn the Torpedoes and Hard Promises. It deserves to be heard.

Only because those screaming Beatlemaniacs grew up to be housewives. Taken in context of their time, especially here in the states, where they were considered threatening, at least until the Animals and the Stones came along, they were hardly One Direction or Justin Bieber. Or, to keep in context, Fabian or Frankie Avalon. They had some street cred, and a little research would readily illuminate that.

Still...not sure what such cultural criticism has to do with their music, though.

I have no idea who wrote this, but he or she's a goddamn idiot. One could refer to Astral Weeks as easy listening, if one wanted. It certainly doesn't stomp. But this jackass is confusing noise and menace for intensity and effectiveness.

The writer here clearly wants a stance, and if it doesn't come on his terms, he/she dismisses it entirely. What a ****ing moron.

Part of the reason there's always some bite-in-the-ass jonesing to take on the Beatles is because they don't listen to anything except what gets trumpeted the loudest. This album, which sounds quaint today, was influential, and, as such, often gets high ratings on those "greatest of all time" polls.

But it sounds far less quaint than, say, Their Satanic Majesties Request, or even Tommy. And we don't discount the fine work of those artists just because they "experimented" a little.

That album, innovative as it was at the time, is hardly indicative of what they had to offer. Psychedlia was never the Beatles stock-in-trade. But this album was so readily accepted by the "Summer of Love" crowd that it always gets lumped in, and given heft it doesn't deserve. It hasn't worn well, and I think it's their worst album. But "worst" is a relative term, and judging the band's output only on one album shows a serious lack of insight, if not honesty.

First of all, listen to the Hamburg tapes, or the rooftop concert. They rocked, although they tended to eschew bombast in favor of melody. Hell, listen to Let It Be...Naked. They rocked just fine.

Now, they may not be what some are looking for. It's not Slayer. They may not "rock" on the terms you wish. They did it on their own terms. Great artists do. But saying they "never even rocked" shows not just a transparent lack of historical knowledge, it illuminates a savage aesthetic cluelessness.

Once again, conflating bombast and effectiveness is a telling sign; it tells me that whoever penned this drivel for The Guardian hasn't a clue as to what they're talking about, but won't let that get in the way of making a "bold" statement. What a crock of ****.

I'm not a huge Beatles fan. Haven't listened to an album in years. And, if one wants to call them "overrated", that's their opinion. You don't like 'em, fine. On a certain level, I can understand that.

But to do so, for the bull **** reasons listed here?

**** that noise.