Bands That Don't Sound Anything Like They Used To

David Bowie is almost as famous for his endless transformations as his music. The man came up with more personas in his career than a Russian hacker or a YouTube troll goes through in a week. But really, get a load of his early, British Invasion-style work, before he changed his name to no longer be confused with one of The Monkees.

With his later pioneering work in glam and electronic music, it's hard to believe anyone would have ever confused him with a 1960s boy band like The Monkees. Listening to his very early work, however, that concern becomes a lot more clear. The whole band is a few mop-top haircuts and frilly shirts away from looking like they were formed in a cloning lab a few blocks down from the 1910 Fruitgum Company.

Michael Bolton has definitely carved a niche for himself in music history, and that niche is basically "everyone's mom's favorite singer." He practically turned "gravelly-sounding frizzy-haired white man singing soul music" into an industry. Hard to believe that, at one point, he fronted a Thin Lizzy-ish late-70s rock band that opened for Ozzy Osbourne. He even auditioned for Black Sabbath, which is like ... what?

You could point to the video for "Love Me Tonight" just for the hilarious intro of the camera floating through a pair of literal Blackjack-themed saloon doors, but that song is actually surprisingly prescient of his later crooner work. Even Bolton's first breakout single "Fools Game" actually still clung to the hard rocker image but, by 1983, he made Journey seem like speedy thrash Satanic death-doom metal in comparison.

The Go-Gos had a poppy, upbeat sensibility, and at least one radio hit you've probably seen a high school cheerleading team do a routine to at some point in your life. It's a bizarre career arc for the group, when you look back at their beginnings.

Flipping through Beauty and the Beat, their debut album, you realize pretty quickly that, underneath the slick production, the guitar-work and drumming has a distinctly punk rock sound. That's because they actually started out as a snotty LA punk band that used to play rowdy clubs like Whiskey-A-Go-Go, with decidedly unpoppy, downbeat bands like Fear. Belinda "Heaven On Earth" Carlisle even started out as a drummer for The Germs, of all bands.

Flipping through the discography, you can hear this vibrancy slowly strangled out of the band until they disbanded in 1984. However, considering they were throwing out founding members of the band, like, the moment they got signed so they could more easily embrace a more fun, less abrasive style, maybe this shift wasn't so involuntary.

When the Beastie Boys' License to Ill was released, hardly anyone knew what to do with them. Combining gratuitously borrowed Led Zepplin guitar and drum samples with their peculiar blend of ironic party rap and absurdist stabs at gangster posturing, that album might as well have fallen out of the sky. Their second album, Paul's Boutique, was declared by Rolling Stone as "the Pet Sounds/Dark Side Of The Moon of hip hop," and each successive album brought on new levels of occasionally brilliant, and occasionally pretentious, experimentation.

With that in mind, it's kinda refreshing to dig back to the band's roots as a snotty hardcore punk band, making Jerky Boys-style prank calls and sludging through Bad Brains-inspired guitar riffs. They're a bunch of nerdy kids that definitely got their heads swirled in the toilet by bullies more than once, but clearly know they want to rock. It also shows a distinct irreverence that dominated their early work, but had to go by the time they discovered Buddhism and started wanting to save Tibet.

Sheesh. From loud punk to frat-punk-rap to weird-art-rap to Buddhist-Dalai-Lame-loving-rap, the Beasties' career has more plot twists than Game of Thrones.

Tori Amos is a fairly difficult-to-pinpoint artist, to a point where it seems baffling. She's a piano singer ... except ... well. She has a song about literally meeting the Devil in person while taking ayahuasca. She has a song about developing a connection with a young boy with bat wings across the world from her, who wanted her to start fires. She wrote the most abstract song about touching yourself probably ever recorded. Her song lyrics dance around meaning and associations the way her hands dance around the piano, combining chords and metaphors in ways her fans try to decode like they're crime scene investigators trying to deduce what social expectation she will murder next.

However, it's all the more baffling to go back to what should have been her more straightforward early days, with her project Y Can't Tori Read. Who in the seven heavens approved that name? Why is she dressed like a pirate, and what's with all the swords? Did Tori leave any hairspray for the rest of humanity? What exactly is going on in this video? Let's get back to songs about talking to Satan — it makes way more sense.

It's almost like she resented having to chain herself to some schlocky synth-pop band to get in the door, and couldn't wait to dump this whole thing and get on with her career. That's literally what she did, actually — she refused to play songs from that era for two decades plus, during her infinitely more successful solo career. It's almost like she was playing some sort of 4th-dimensional chess gambit with this cheesy pirate-themed band. Never change, Tori ... unless you want to, because you clearly know what you're doing more than we do. Ya unrepentant weirdo.

To many folks, Sugar Ray was yet another blonde-frosted late-'90s nothing of a band whose songs showed up in sitcoms and romcoms. They wrote some catchy songs about flying away or what happens every morning and/or when it's over, but nothing you're exactly jumping to outside of a nostalgia party or karaoke session. This brings us to their first album a messy funk-punk effort called Lemonade and Brownies. Dan Brown couldn't possibly decode what the meaning of that album title is, or why Nicole Eggert from Baywatch is naked on the cover.

Oh wait, Lemonade and Brownies is a bathroom joke isn't it? That just ... creates more questions than answers.

The songs are a completely bonkers mess of Mike-Tyson-in-jail apologism ("Iron Mic"), punk-metal in-jokes like "Danzig Needs A Hug," and other songs with super tryhard titles like "Big Black Woman" (we just aren't going to touch that one). Then there's "10 Seconds Down," that timeless ode to not lasting long in bed and preferring TV to your partner anyway.

Mister Guitar Guy hanging from the ceiling at the beginning of the video isn't only playing Korn-like atonal guitar — he even has the hair, which is like a seven-layer burrito of why. Why is Sugar Ray (what'd his mom name him, Mark? Nuts to that, he's Sugar Ray) singing into an Elvis microphone? Why does he not sound one iota like the Fly guy, even though it's definitely the Fly guy? Why do none of these guys look like they're in the same band? They're playing in a meat locker and riding in cars to nowhere, and literally nothing about this era of the band makes sense.