10 Amazing Rock Songs That Divided Bands

It's always a bit of a challenge to keep everyone in a band on the same page for an entire album cycle. You always want to follow your muse, and sometimes it gets a little bit complicated trying to make everything fit under one singular album theme. If you think that's bad, imagine what it's like with an album that no one else in the band wants to make.

After years of writing concept albums, Styx were burnt out on writing story driven songs before Dennis DeYoung approached them with an idea: an ambitious rock opera about robots. Though the actual subject matter was already flimsy, everyone tried to bring their own spin to it, with fairly limited results. As much as the entire record Kilroy Was Here divided the band, Mr. Roboto really is ground zero for everything going wrong, being somewhere between cringy and so bad that it's good depending on what part of the song they're in.

This was a time when MTV started to get a little bit more interesting though, so this might have been cutting edge at the time. From the lens of 40 years later though, this is the kind of sci fi rock story that only the dorkiest of rock fans would want to get down on. In the years since, Styx have reunited, only with DeYoung not at the helm and rarely performing any pieces of this song live. Compared to the other divisive songs from bands, this is one of the only times that the band has tried to will the song out of existence.