10 Worst Sellout Rock Albums Of All Time
9. Core - Stone Temple Pilots
As the '90s started to hit their stride, most bands needed to hop on the grunge bandwagon in order to gain any traction. No matter how good you thought your material was, you weren't going to get anywhere unless you put on the flannel or wrote downtempo songs about despair. While Stone Temple Pilots stood out as a decent grunge act, their career going forward makes Core sound dated in retrospect.
Make no mistake, songs like Plush and Creep still hold up today as perfectly good rock songs, but this record has 1992 smeared all over it. Sure, the guitar crunch on these songs are well worth it for any alt rock fan to sink their teeth in, but the early '90s wasn't short on bands with baritone singers who wanted to write introspective material.
From the way the guitars are dialed in to the soulful yarls coming from Scott Weiland, most of the album seems to be screaming "WE WANT TO BE PEARL JAM!" It's almost a shame for STP to start out this way, given that they were able to distance themselves from the genre and make kickass music on Purple and Tiny Music... Stone Temple Pilots certainly didn't deserve the amount of flak they got from the grunge faithful, but this isn't necessarily the note you want to start out on either.