10 Classic Rock Bands That Ripped Off Themselves

Rock and roll has never run short on people stealing from each other. The old adage goes that it takes a genius to steal, so it's only natural for some bands to wear a little bit too much of their influences on their sleeve from time to time. It's a bit of a different story when you end up stealing from yourself though.

If you've been in the rock world for a while, there comes a point when you're going to want to settle with a formula that works, and many artists have gone through the motions with songs that are a basic redo of what they had done before. From a pure song construction standpoint, these are the kind of songs that these people can write in their sleep, especially when all they had to do was copy and paste the same formula that they did before and putting different lyrics to it.

While there are also bands like AC/DC who seem to just write the same song over and over again, these are the people that are almost self aware of how derivative they're being and are trying to just get by regardless. The new listeners might not pick up on these kind of things, but for those of us dyed in the wool with these bands, this is starting to look a little bit lazy, guys.

By the time Alice Cooper was reaching the early '00s, he didn't really have to prove anything to us anymore. He had already been the standout back in the '70s with his shock rock days and now became the eternal cool guy in Wayne's World, so just let him have his fun with the music that he wants to make. As it turns out though, Alice decided we needed a refresher course on his legacy. It was time to go back to school.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist for you to see that Alice is trying to do with this song what he had done with School's Out back in the day. In the case of this one though, it doesn't really work that well, considering that the guy is in his 60s at this point and sounds more like a scraggly old teacher that has been wasting his life away in school instead of the brooding rock star that sang the original.

Then again, it's nice to know that the man is at least in on the joke that he's trying to sell in this song. From the title alone, Alice knows that he's doesn't have the finger on the pulse of hard rock like he used to, but he's going to be on their side regardless. There might be some definite repeats showing up on here, but as long as the king of shock rock is having fun, is it really that bad of a problem to have?