The artists everyone thought would last forever (but didn’t)
The music industry is extraordinarily good at manufacturing certainty. A debut album goes platinum, a Grammy follows, the covers of every magazine arrive in sequence, and the consensus forms almost overnight. This one is going to be around forever. The consensus is wrong more often than anyone admits.
These are the artists who had it all and then didn’t.
Milli Vanilli
In 1989, Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus were global pop stars. Their debut album topped the charts and they won the Grammy for Best New Artist, still the only ever revoked. When it emerged that neither had sung a single note on their recordings, the collapse was total. They went from global stars to a punchline overnight. Pilatus died in 1998.
Vanilla Ice
“Ice Ice Baby” in 1990 made Robert Van Winkle one of the most famous people on Earth for approximately fourteen months. The backlash was immediate, total and permanent. Critics dismantled the persona, the music and the sampling without mercy. According to BuzzFeed, Van Winkle never recovered his commercial momentum in music. He pivoted to real estate and home renovation television.
MC Hammer
Please Hammer, Don’t Hurt ‘Em sold ten million copies in 1990 and Hammer spent the proceeds on 200 employees, a mansion and a stable of horses. According to BuzzFeed, bankruptcy followed in 1996. The parachute pants became cultural shorthand for excess the decade eventually stopped tolerating.
Hootie and the Blowfish
They beat Alanis Morissette for Best New Artist in 1996, per Billboard. Cracked Rear View was one of the fastest-selling debuts in American history. Follow-up albums performed progressively worse. Darius Rucker eventually rebuilt his career in country music.
Arrested Development
They won Best New Artist in 1993, per The Wrap, beating Billy Ray Cyrus and Kris Kross. Their second album performed so poorly the group disbanded before the decade ended. The Grammy marked the high point, not the beginning.
Kris Kross
“Jump” went to number one in 1992 and stayed there for eight weeks, making Kris Kross one of the youngest acts to top the Hot 100. According to Rolling Stone, the backwards-clothes gimmick had a natural shelf life of one album cycle, and the follow-up material could not replicate the novelty. Both members largely stepped away from music by the mid-1990s. Chris Kelly died in 2013 at age 34.
Billy Ray Cyrus
According to Billboard, “Achy Breaky Heart” in 1992 launched a line dancing craze that colonized every wedding reception in America for three years. The critical reception was savage. Country radio eventually moved on and Cyrus spent much of the decade trying to recapture an audience defined by a single song. His 2019 resurgence through “Old Town Road” confirmed that sometimes the story is not over when everyone assumes it is.
The bottom line
Each of these artists sold millions of records, appeared on every major magazine cover and generated the kind of consensus certainty the industry treats as a guarantee. None of it was. The music business is excellent at spotting the moment of maximum commercial heat. It is considerably less reliable at predicting what happens after it.
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This article was syndicated by MediaFeed.co.
