10 Artists That Changed Music Genres (And Everyone Hated It)

You're always playing with fire when you decide to switch between different genres. Even though you may think that you have a natural love for the kind of music that you make, there's no telling whether the fans are going to go along for the ride if you end up not measuring up in another genre. And when these artists took that gamble, they had fans lined up to air their grievances.

Not only are these looked at as some of the weirdest genre switchups of all time...they're also some of the most hated records that the music world has ever given us. For most of the fans, this was the antithesis of everything that these acts stood for, going against the grain and giving us some of the most lackluster hooks that they have ever thought of in their career.

Then again, are all of these really that bad? Don't get me wrong, some of these may have been blatant cash grabs, but that doesn't mean that it has to be absolutely terrible from back to front. So let's take a look through these drastic switches that these artists made and see if they're actually worth the hatred that they got. They may have turned heads back in the day, and sometimes they would turn the occasional stomach as well.

For most of their career, Muse have never really been that far away from the electronic side of rock and roll. If you go back and listen to albums like Black Holes and Revelations or Origin of Symmetry, you can hear Matt Bellamy flirting with the digitized style of rock and roll, either with synthesizers in some places or the layers of effects that he put on his guitar. When they actually decided to take the deep dive though, fans were shellshocked the first time they heard The 2nd Law.

During the time when dubstep was making its first steps into the world of music, Muse seemed to be following its lead by having songs that were a lot more electronically abrasive than before. They weren't exactly subtle about the change either, with opening single Madness having Matt's voice covered in electronic enhancements. While some of the fans who preferred the more rock side of their sound may have been pissed, this was actually the logical next step for where the band was going.

They had already done pure electronic tracks like Undisclosed Desires on the Resistance, and the electronic tracks on here are a lot more fleshed out, like the different textures on Isolated System or creating a synth rock song from the ground up on Follow Me. It's not like the guitars have gone anywhere either, as Matt still breaks out his six (or occasionally seven) string for songs like Supremacy and Animals. Muse have always been known to shake things up, and this album was just another example of them taking some risks.