6 Musicians Who Hate You For Listening To Their Music

6. Blues Traveler

For years, Blues Traveler was a little-known jam band making their way across college radio stations. Their big commercial breakthrough came in 1994 with the release of "Run-around," a song that was infinitely more pop-oriented than anything else they'd released to that point. Much to the chagrin of the band, it became their calling card, earning a Grammy and spending a record-setting amount of time on the Billboard charts. When they released yet another simple, pop-rock song as their follow-up single, "Hook," it seemed the former jam band had finally caved and sold their souls to Top 40 radio. But further exploration of "Hook" reveals just the opposite: they hated being known as hitmakers, and they hated you for making them that way. The song begins "It doesn't matter what I say, as long as I sing with inflection." From there, singer John Popper explains, in detail, why people will listen to any garbage that's on the radio, whether or not it has any meaning whatsoever, as long as it sounds catchy. The chord structure used in "Hook" is the same as Pachabel's "Canon in D," which is the most commonly used chord structure in all of pop music. Popper's theory was that as long as you use those chords, you could get away with literally telling listeners that they are morons for liking the song, but they would bob their head and sing along anyways. And it worked.