10 Rock Songs That Took Shots At Other Artists

It would be a lie if you were to say that everything that rock and roll has ever given us was nice wholesome entertainment. This entire genre was built off of the tagline of sex drugs and rock and roll, so naturally some stuff was going to get a little bit dark sooner or later. On certain occasions though, bands will come to the table with a particular artist in mind.

Going through every single one of these songs, the anger behind the track is more often than not aimed at a real person, either a fellow musician or someone else in the music business. They’re not even trying to hide it half of the time either, framing the entire narrative as a diss track towards their fellow artists or taking the sly way around by putting subtle jabs into the mix that you need to do more deeper digging to really understand.

That’s not excluding band members either, with some of these songs taking jabs at the people in the band and disguising it as something lighthearted. This is one of the few times where it really pays to do your homework on what the song’s about. Because if you don’t, you end up singing along to a song about what a horrible person someone else is.

As far as the biggest bands in the world are concerned, Nirvana's time in the spotlight seemed to end with a pretty abrupt snap. In the wake of Kurt Cobain dying by his own hand in 1994, the rest of the band had to take some time to themselves before even thinking of picking up their instruments again. When Dave Grohl decided it was time to move on though, he still had some choice words for the one who was preserving his old friend's legacy.

Though many musicians have thrown their hat in the ring dissing Courtney Love in one form of another, hearing Grohl seething with anger on I'll Stick Around may be the most nuanced way of going about it. Seeing the kind of connection that she had with her husband firsthand, the line of not owing her anything was a much more scathing statement considering how much of a hand she had in Kurt staying in the tabloids every few weeks when Nirvana was big.

While Dave has claimed to not pay attention to the lyrics in most of his songs during the Foo Fighters' beginning stages, he has certainly hinted that some of these lines are about Courtney, including a few that take jabs about her playing up the more off the walls elements of her personality to keep her in the headlines, which got more and more uncomfortable in the wake of albums like Live Through This becoming one of the popular albums at the time. We may have saw a grieving widow looking to move on from her husband's death, but Dave saw through all of that rehearsed insanity.