10 Rock Songs That Insulted Other Musicians

For any artist, a song is the perfect way to let out your emotion. Even if you might not be the greatest with words, everything falls away when you let the music carry you to some other place, where you’re completely free to express yourself however you want. Sometimes you want to just blow off steam though, and these songs were practically used as weapons against their fellow musicians.

As catchy as some of these songs are, they may not have been written with the purest intentions, mostly used for tearing people through the mud and letting the world know all of their dirty laundry. There might be a bit of tongue in cheek humor in a lot of these songs, but there’s also a hell of a lot of anger here, with a lot of the songs coming from a pretty genuine place.

This isn’t just petty band drama either. Most of these end up going a little deeper than just not liking someone else’s band, from talking about artists that called you out for something in the press to going after artists for some shady stuff that they’ve done behind the scenes. You can try to walk around any of the issues in the press, but most of the time, the song is the one place where most musicians tell the truth, and they had a lot to confess in these tunes.

Even with a decade removed from Guns N Roses’ breakup, the bridges between Slash and Axl Rose weren’t necessarily ready to be built up again just yet. In the midst of Slash carrying on kicking ass with Velvet Revolver, Axl just kept going down the rabbit hole of his own self worth and eventually coughed up Chinese Democracy, with opinions ranging from apathetic to overwhelming disappointment. Slash had always been used to writing with other people though, and when he decided to have the giants come to him, The Prince of Darkness wasn’t going to mince words about who he was working with.

In getting the basic tracks done for Crucify the Dead, Ozzy took inspiration to write the lyrics based entirely on what he thought of Axl at the time, thinking that he was much more washed up than Slash was giving him credit for. Although the sound of his voice is pretty much your standard post-1990 Ozzy vocals, there is a bit more venom this time around, making sure Axl knows that he has some pretty big problems to answer for over the past few years.

Ozzy wasn’t even the first of Slash’s friends to mention it either, with Steven Tyler from Aerosmith threatening to whip Axl into shape if he didn’t show more respect for his audience. Axl can hide under the GNR label all he wants, but getting called out by the man who wrote Bark At the Moon would be enough to keep anyone on their toes.