9. Butthole Surfers
The black comics of rock music. Butthole Surfers, the druggy alt-rock band that was a favourite of Kurt Cobain, took the tropes of noise rock and made them hilarious with a typical stoner sense of humour and a tendency toward chaotic and ridiculous stage performances. Gibby Haynes, Paul Leary and King Coffey, the group's ever-present members, are three of the most immature but utterly brilliant individuals around. It tells in the Surfers' sound. They started out as the noisiest, gnarliest and most unpredictable punk band around, deliberately avoiding any form of conventional song-writing in favour of fuzzed-out, f*cked-up pieces of noise and feedback. Their lyrics, as you'd expect, were utterly nonsensical and often deeply offensive. Fires would be set onstage while they played, and the members would get increasingly violent during performances. This was a band that was genuinely shocking. Eventually they did succumb to a calmer, more mainstream sound. Tracks like Pepper and Who Was In My Room Last Night? fused their trademark oddness with a pop sensibility and made them unlikely darlings of 1990s MTV (temporarily). While their final album, Weird Revolution, undoubtedly leaned too far towards pop sounds (it's predictable fare), everything else they created was marked by some form of weirdness and a pitch black sense of humour. They may have eventually lost their unpredictable edge, but there is no denying the insanity of Butthole Surfers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYlcxBE5dh0