This story was funded by our members. Join Longreads and help us to support more writers.
When Will Smith rose from his seat at the 94th Academy Awards ceremony, walked to the stage, and unleashed a right-hand slap on host Chris Rock, it shocked the watching world—but perhaps it shouldn’t have. The creative arts are no stranger to interpersonal drama. The internet is filled with reports of actors who despise each other. In 1971, authors Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal went at it hammer and tongs live on late-night TV in a showdown that allegedly spilled over into violence. More than 400 years ago, the Italian artist Caravaggio was accused of circulating disparaging poems about his rival, Giovanni Baglione. “Pardon me, painter, if I do not sing your praises,” he wrote after a series of surprisingly profane suggestions about what Baglione’s art could be used for, “because you are unworthy of that chain you wear, and worthy only of painting’s vituperation.”
Yet, none of these spats can match the sheer messiness of those found within the realm of popular music. Before hip-hop brought the concept of “beef” into the mainstream, rock and roll’s aggression and excess resulted in many an unfriendly rivalry; decades earlier, the hard life of the traveling jazz musician led to some heady and memorable fallouts. Whether it’s pop stars, country singers, dancehall artists, or Kendrick Lamar and Drake’s recent multi-song war, feuds hold an irresistible pull for listeners.
These days, of course, things play out not just on record or in mainstream media, but in the 24/7 pressure cooker of social media. In such an environment, where success or failure is stamped in the concrete numbers of record sales, streaming numbers, and concert tickets, it’s easy to see how competition can erupt into conflict. And such conflict can easily spill over into tribalism. (If our tastes define us, then it’s hard not to take an attack on said tastes personally.) In my day, it was Blur versus Oasis, a battle that utterly divided UK Gen Xers in the mid-’90s.
Of course, strife occurs not just between competing artists, but among bandmates as well. External pressure can either bring a group together or split it apart; when the latter occurs, it’s often a bitter divorce. Insecurity, arrogance, misunderstanding: no matter the cause, the stories collected below are more than a chronicle of artistic difference. They’re a mirror held up to human nature itself.
Beatles or Stones? (John McMillian, The Believer, June 2007)
The two biggest bands of the 1960s (and possibly of all time, depending on your criteria) share more than an era-defining rivalry. They also share a lineage. Before Andrew Loog Oldham became the Rolling Stones’ manager—and, depending on your point of view, he either shaped the Stones into a cultural juggernaut or alienated band members with his cutthroat tactics—he did publicity work for The Beatles. The fact that he was fired from that gig by Beatles manager Brian Epstein provides a nifty origin story for the rivalry: for Oldham, creating a band that could outdo the Fab Four was a personal mission of revenge.
That bad blood aside, though, were the two groups themselves really rivals? Individual Beatles and Stones have certainly traded words over the decades, but the issue is far from straightforward, as this in-depth piece makes clear. Journalist John McMillian does an admirable job of drawing the reader into the center of the action, painting a vivid account that explores the complex interrelations between fans, press, and the musicians themselves. Whatever side of the fence you fall on, these are two of the most influential and successful acts of the 20th century, and their combined stories remain absorbing.
Nowhere was the Beatles/Stones debate more fiercely fought than in American underground newspapers, which by 1968 could be found in every pocket of the country, and had a readership that stretched into the millions. “The history of the sixties was written as much in the Berkeley Barb as in the New York Times,” claimed literary critic Morris Dickstein. Freewheeling and accessible to all manner of left-wing writers, these papers generated some of the earliest rock criticism, and provided a nexus for a running conversation among rock enthusiasts nationwide. To recall how youths assayed the Beatles/Stones rivalry is to be reminded that when rock and roll was in its juvenescence, youths interrelated with their music heroes in a way that today seems scarcely fathomable. Amid the gauzy idealism and utopian strivings that characterized the late-1960s youthquake, they believed that the Beatles and the Rolling Stones—the biggest rock stars in the world!—should speak to them clearly and directly, about issues of contemporary significance, in a spirit of mutuality, and from a vantage of authenticity. Young fans believed that rock culture was inseparable from the youth culture that they created, shared, and enjoyed. In some fundamental way, they believed themselves to be part of the same community as John and Paul, and Mick and Keith. They believed they were all fighting for the same things.
The Icon and the Upstart: On Miles Davis’s Legendary Feud With Wynton Marsalis (James Kaplan, Lit Hub, March 2024)
Throughout his life, jazz icon Miles Davis earned a fearsome reputation for being taciturn at best, and impossible at worst. The same toughness that strained his personal relationships, however, unquestionably served his ambition. The jazz life was a hard one, full of hard touring and the temptations of alcohol, drugs, and general excess. Though Davis couldn’t match the frenetic, fiery playing of his idol, Charlie Parker, he was also too stubborn to quit. Instead, he forged his own path, and a whole new approach to jazz—cool, introspective, and quite beautiful. Yet, he would later abandon even his own oft-emulated sound in a relentless quest for new styles.
As Davis approached the end of his career, Wynton Marsalis was on an upward trajectory. Since the mid-’60s, jazz had been declining, unceremoniously pushed from its podium by rock and roll, then the folk revival, then hip-hop and rap. Marsalis was the savior burdened by critics with reigniting the genre’s flame. Marsalis was on a mission to de-corrupt his beloved artform, stripping away its acquired rock stylings and electronic edges to return to the pure wellspring. Or so the music press would have us believe. As is usual with such cases, nothing is ever so clear cut, and this piece does a first-class job of diving into the truths behind the headlines—particularly an onstage encounter at a jazz festival in 1986.
A startlingly gifted trumpeter from a brilliant New Orleans jazz family, he first came on the scene in the late 1970s and immediately began making a splash, both with his playing—not only of jazz but also the classical trumpet repertoire—and his outspoken critiques of the contemporary jazz scene, most pointedly of his former idol, Miles Davis.
The young trumpeter was highly opinionated and highly quotable, and from the beginning the music press, sniffing a possible feud, gave Marsalis’s venting about Miles—he even critiqued the outlandish outfits Miles had taken to wearing onstage, calling them “dresses”—plenty of column inches. The first time the two met, Miles said, “So here’s the police.”
How Creedence Clearwater Revival Fell to Pieces (Hugh Fielder, Classic Rock, October 2023)
For three blazing years straddling the 1960s and ’70s, Creedence Clearwater Revival was one of the most commercially successful acts in rock. Formed in California, CCR consisted of brothers Tom and John Fogerty (on guitar and vocals/guitar respectively), bassist Stu Cook, and Doug Clifford on drums. They were still in their mid-teens when they began playing as a unit, fired up by British Invasion bands such as The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. Today, they’re best remembered for their enduring hit single, “Bad Moon Rising,” and for numbering among those who appeared onstage at the legendary Woodstock concert. In their short career the band released an asstonishing 14 consecutive US Top 10 singles and five Top 10 charting albums. Then, in 1972, it ended, with a split so acrimonious that even revisiting it can be painful.
So rancorous was the group’s dissolution that, in 1993, when CCR were justly inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, John Fogerty refused to perform with the band’s two surviving members. Fogerty continued to play CCR songs live, while Cook and Clifford themselves later toured as Creedence Clearwater Revisited. With such tangled tales, it’s often hard to appreciate the viewpoints of all parties, but Hugh Fielder’s balanced retrospective comes as close as possible to unraveling the causes behind CCR’s swift demise. Sibling rivalry, paranoia, swelling egos, and grasping music executives all play a role—but in the end, it comes down to the fact that you can’t escape the unrelenting pressures of the entertainment industry.
Fearing they would be sued, Warners told Fogerty to remove the tracks. Fogerty refused, and indemnified Warners instead. He then found himself facing a $140 million defamation lawsuit from Saul Zaentz. Scarcely had he wriggled out of that by changing the song title to“Vanz Kan’t Dance”than Fantasy sued him, claiming that the album’s first single,“The Old Man Down The Road”(not published by Fantasy), plagiarised an earlier Creedence song,“Run Through The Jungle”(published by Fantasy). Fogerty was being sued for plagiarising himself.
Why Noel Gallagher Hates Liam: The Story Behind Rock’s Fiercest Feud (Mark Beaumont, The Telegraph, August 2019)*
I was in my early 20s in 1994 when Oasis’ debut album, Definitely Maybe, shot to the top of the UK albums chart. This was a time that would come to be viewed as the heyday of Britpop, a sensibility somewhere between pop and rock, with catchy melodies, often whimsical sonic palettes, and sophisticated, yet earthly lyrics. Acts like Super Furry Animals, Kula Shaker, The Lightning Seeds, and Pulp all occupied the scene, but two bands inarguably stood out, with their singles regularly racing each other up the charts: Blur and Oasis.
Fronted by Damon Albarn, London-based Blur displayed a metropolitan sheen and veered toward the poppier side of things, producing hit after earworm hit, with tracks such as “Girls & Boys” and “Country House” burying themselves in the public consciousness. Oasis was Blur’s perfect polar opposite; fronted by brothers Liam and Noel Gallagher and hailing from the industrial city of Manchester, the band employed a grittier sound that matched its provenance. A rivalry between the two bands was nearly inevitable, but was stoked by the media, with large bodies of fans forming into two entrenched groups. In fact, the competition was more about hype, with little to no true enmity between the outfits. Unbeknownst to many, however, a bona fide feud was growing inside Oasis, and would spill out into a fractious and very public affair. Here, Mark Beaumont does a fine job of breaking down the long and complicated history of the fallout between Noel and Liam, breaking things down by era to offer a balancing, nuanced perspective of one of the ugliest feuds in popular music.
Liam’s drunken comments about his ongoing divorce from Kensit turned into a free-for-all of abuse that overstepped the mark. When Liam questioned the legitimacy of Noel’s daughter Anais, Noel jumped on him, raining punches and splitting his brother’s lip. Again, Noel quit the tour; again the band eventually reconciled. But this was one barb that stuck deep – as late as 2005 Noel would tellQmagazine, “I’ve never forgiven him because he’s never apologised…He’s my brother, but he’s at arm’s length until he apologises for what he’s done.
*This article may require a Telegraph subscription to read.
A Brief History of John Lydon’s 22-Year Beef with Green Day (Andy Malt, CMU, October 2018)
There was a time when John Lydon’s credentials as a counterculture anarchist icon seemed unshakeable. A swaggering, unconventional singer with an intense, magnetic presence, Lydon joined punk legends The Sex Pistols while still a teenager, having been spotted in a crowd sporting a handmade “I Hate Pink Floyd” T-shirt. Attitude was everything with punk, and Lydon had plenty. Yet the singer’s credibility has slipped over the decades; it may have begun with his appearance in this surprising ad for Country Life butter, but more seriously, his comments against same-sex marriage, support for Donald Trump, and anti-Muslim sentiment have led many to wonder if Lydon was ever the antiestablishment hero that his early persona suggested.
Of course, that’s putting it simply. Lydon is clearly a complicated character, and Andy Malt’s detailed history of the singer’s war of words with the American band Green Day offers a fascinating insight into the mind of a man who, for better or worse, played a large part in changing the course of music history. It also asks the question: what happens when an old punk finds himself displaced by a new one?
Soon after those happy remarks, however, something snapped. Possibly because Lydon tired of being repeatedly asked what he thought of Green Day, the biggest punk band of the time, while promoting his reunion tour.
In a particularly antagonistic interview with MTV the same year, Lydon was asked what he felt he could “offer a sixteen-year-old Green Day fan that Green Day can’t?” The answer? “A big willie,” said Lydon, who at this point had already called interviewer Toby Amies “queer.”
Chris Wheatleyis a writer and journalist based in Oxford, UK. He has too many guitars, too many records, and not enough cats.
Editor:Peter Rubin
Copyeditor:Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Get the Longreads Top 5 Email
Kickstart your weekend by getting the week’s very best reads, hand-picked and introduced by Longreads editors, delivered to your inbox every Friday morning—and keep up with all our picks by subscribing to our daily update.
