Old Shame/Music

• The Goo Goo Dolls used to be a punk band. John Rzeznik said in the band's Behind The Music episode that the band's third album, Hold Me Up, was their first "real" album, effectively disowning their self-titled debut and its follow-up, Jed. Taking this further, the band rarely (or never) plays anything that came before their fifth album, A Boy Named Goo (which brought the band its first taste of commercial success), in concert anymore.
• Katy Perry started out making Christian gospel-rock music under her real name Katy Hudson, releasing a self-titled debut album in 2001. All mentions of this album have been excised from her official website and promotional materials as it doesn't quite fit with her current musical output that includes the singles: "Ur So Gay" and "I Kissed A Girl".
• Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley had a band before Kiss called Wicked Lester. They recorded a self-titled debut album, but before it could be released internal strife in the company and Wicked Lester dissolving blocked it. Once KISS began to take off, Gene and Paul purchased the rights to the Wicked Lester recordings to prevent the album from being released as a cash-in. According to them, it was out of embarrassment about how bad they were. In one interview Stanley shows a picture of them in bad glam make up and says "This is when Lily Tomlin was in the group!"
  • The 1981 Kiss Rock Opera From The Elder is often dismissed as an embarrassment and a misstep by Simmons and Stanley, as well as guitarist Ace Frehley, who departed the band after the album's release and commercial failure, and producer Bob Ezrin. In spite of this, the Simmons ballad "A World Without Heroes" was performed at the band's MTV Unplugged appearance.
  • There is also the case of Carnival of Souls, released with no serious promotion in the middle of the band's successful reunion tour with original members Frehley and Criss in 1997. The album is hardly ever spoken of by band members and holds the distinction of being the only full-length release in the KISS catalog to have never had any of its songs played live.
• Steve Harris of Iron Maiden is apparently not too fond of the first two albums, Killers and Iron Maiden, the latter moreso due to shitty production.
• Also, Amy Lee of Evanescence will break down and cry if you bring up their debut album, Origin, which is embarrassingly bad Christian pop rock. In fact, the only song they play live off of it nowadays is "Lies".
• The 2000 single "Most Girls" seems to be this for P!nk, perhaps due to its more cookie-cutter, pop/R&B crossover sound. It seems to be entirely omitted from Greatest Hits collections despite being a top five hit.
• Oasis retrospectively disown large chunks of their output. In the commentary for the playthrough of all of their hit music videos on the Greatest Hits DVD, Noel Gallagher spends much of his time mocking singles from the late 1990s, despite at the time defending them heavily in the press, going as far to ask why somebody didn't take him to one and side and tell him to "just stop". Could also be seen as a slight Dork Age.
• Depeche Mode's 1981 debut album "Speak and Spell" is full of frothy, lightweight synthesizer-pop tunes, mostly the handiwork of Vince Clarke (who left the band after the first album to form Yazoo and later Erasure). By the late 1980s, the band - whose sound had by then long since matured into the dark shadings they would become known for - was rarely performing anything from that first album live, to the point that when they played "Speak and Spell"'s best-known song, "Just Can't Get Enough," at the concert filmed for their live concert movie "101", it was a VERY big deal.
  • Songwriter Martin Gore would also later distance himself from "People Are People" - which was the band's first hit single in North America - saying it was too simplistic. By the '90s, it too was largely gone from the band's concert set list. Ironically "People Are People" and "Just Can't Get Enough" still receive a fair amount of radio airplay, even in the U.S.
  • Speaking of Martin Gore, there was also that period circa 1984-1985 when he enjoyed dressing up in women's clothing (including black lace slips). He still finds that difficult to live down to this day.
• David Bowie's not too proud of any of his pre-Space Oddity work, but by far the most infamous example of that bunch is the So Bad It's Good 1967 novelty single "The Laughing Gnome", which was successfully re-released by his old label after he hit it big in The Seventies. When he was prepping his Sound+Vision tour, New Musical Express spoofed it by encouraging those participating in the decide-the-setlist phone polling to get "The Laughing Gnome" in. Bowie canceled the phone polling. In his "canon" career, the song "Too Dizzy" has been left off of all reissues of 1987's Never Let Me Down (which is generally regarded as his worst album anyway).
• Lena Meyer-Landrut appeared topless in the German docusoap Bitte Helfen Sie Mir before winning the Eurovision Song Contest.
• American songwriter Irving Berlin, known for classics such as "God Bless America," wrote an antiwar song called "Stay Down Here Where You Belong." However, a few years later, the United States entered what was then known as "The Great War" and Berlin wrote his more well-known, patriotic songs. As a result, Berlin was so openly ashamed of his earlier song that Groucho Marx repeatedly antagonized Berlin by performing "Stay Down Here Where You Belong" in his presence. Tiny Tim also recorded it on his 1968 debut album.
• Pink Floyd aren't particularly fond of their albums from the period after Syd Barrett left and before their classic era. Roger Waters in particular said that the album Atom Heart Mother was a good case "for being thrown into the dustbin and never listened to by anyone ever again!" A 1992 Box Set, called Shine On, had every album between A Saucerful of Secrets and Meddle (and also The Final Cut) left out (The Piper at the Gates of Dawn was missing too - not because the band doesn't like it, but because was given a re-release earlier in the year that the label didn't want the box set to compete with). Fortunately for fans that still like these albums, the 2007 set, Oh, by the Way, retains all of these and even gives The Final Cut a bonus track.
• There are The Beatles' repeated efforts to keep "The Star Club Tapes" off the market. Now, those tapes were homemade, low-quality, and possibly violating EMI's copyright. This is noted here because it wasn't EMI trying to stop the Star Club Tapes...
• In 1970, before launching his solo career as a singer-songwriter, Billy Joel formed an acid rock keyboard-and-drums duo, Attila, with former Hassles bandmate John Small. They released only one self-titled album before breaking up. All Music Guide critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine has described it as "the worst album released in the history of rock & roll -- hell, the history of recorded music itself." Joel himself later called it "psychedelic bullshit." Joel fans who have heard the album (who aren't many; it's quite a rarity) tend to consider it So Bad It's Good.
  • Joel is similarly embarassed by the two albums the Hassles recorded in the late 1960s, and has blocked attempts to re-release them.
• Pantera's first four albums, recorded during their eighties "hair metal" phase, have been kept out of print since their initial vinyl release. The band's website does not even acknowledge them, starting the discography with 1990's Cowboys From Hell. This policy is also followed by most of the fanbase. They did license a song from this era, "Proud To Be Loud", for use in Donnie Darko. However, to avoid having their name attached to it, it was credited to The Dead Green Mummies.
• In a rare case of a musician actually disowning his entire musical career, acclaimed actor Mark Wahlberg has no interest whatsoever revisiting his career as white rapper Marky Mark. In an interview, he described coming across a VH-1 retro-'90s special in which he appeared, and apparently he didn't find it as funny as the VH-1 commentators did.

Mark Wahlberg: Oh my God, how am I going to explain this to my kids?

• • Though he did some self-lampooning in Rock Star: during the credits, his character says he'll leave rock and attempt to do rap. While "Good Vibrations", by Marky Mark, is playing in the background.
• Piano-rock chanteuse Tori Amos fronted a synth-pop band called Y Kant Tori Read that released a single self-titled record in 1988. The record label stopped promoting it after two months, Tori had fired the entire band except one member by the time the first video was shot, and Tori had, for a long time, acted like it never existed, with good reason. She seems to have reconciled herself with the album, to the extent that she occasionally plays songs from the album live (particularly "Etienne" and "Cool on Your Island"). This may be an example of an artist reconciling with Old Shame.
  • There's also the 1987 TV commercial for Kellogg's Just Right cereal that she did because She Was Young And Needed The Money, and the cheesy but catchy "Baltimore", a song that she wrote and recorded (as Ellen Amos) at age 16 for a Baltimore Orioles theme song contest (she won).
• Polish singer Ewa Sonnet first got famous for her nude modeling, a fact she tried to downplay when her singing career took off.
• Michael Longcor's "Privateer" is the only thing that survived from a bad space opera novel he wrote in college. The song itself is rather good. He'd prefer not to talk about the rest of the novel...
• In 1967, rock/soul icon Van Morrison's debut album with Bang Records was a Mood Whiplash mixture of uptempo rave-ups and brooding, lyrically adventurous songs. Morrison and producer/label owner Bert Berns had major artistic disagreements. Berns wanted Morrison to be some sort of cross between Mick Jagger and Neil Diamond. Morrison was moving into a more poetic, jazz-influenced direction. To make matters worse, without Morrison's permission they tried to jump on the 1967 psychedelic bandwagon by calling the album Blowin' Your Mind and releasing it with an ugly, would be-"trippy" cover. When Berns, who had chronic cardiac issues, died suddenly, Morrison wanted out of his contract. The label said he owed them about three dozen songs, so he recorded a bunch of of deliberately, unreleaseably awful songs ("The Big Royalty Check," "Ringworm," "Want a Danish," "Here Comes Dumb George"). This ended up backfiring on him in the early '90s, when the cash-strapped rightsholders began licensing them out...on "Greatest Hits" compilations, no less.
• Alanis Morissette once was a bubblegum-pop idol singer of sorts, releasing two albums named Alanis and Now it's the time. Later, when she became famous with Jagged Little Pill, she wasn't amused to see her other works were still around.
  • She has somewhat reclaimed one of her old pop songs, "Too Hot", playing it in a reworked version that sounds more like her normal sound. She has said of it (before playing), "This song deserves no introduction."
• Dr. Dre of N.W.A. fame helped to found the gangsta rap genre. But that didn't erase his earlier work with the "World Class Wrekin' Cru," where he was pictured on the album insert in mascara and lipstick. Eazy-E was kind enough to remind everyone about it on a diss track.
• Peter Furler of the Newsboys has said that when he first listened to the finished Boyz Will Be Boyz album, he actually cried because it was, in his words, "crap". These days, any mention of the band's songs before the (appropriately titled) Not Ashamed era will generally be met with embarrassment.
• Japanese pop star Momoe Yamaguchi debuted on the scene in 1973 with a series of hits with suggestive lyrics like "You can do whatever you want with me; it's okay if rumors start that I'm a bad girl." In later years, her early hits embarrassed her so much that she stopped performing them live.
• Most members of dc Talk choose to ignore their first two albums, which were mostly rap-driven and quite a contrast to their later pop/rock work (especially the first album, which is not so much "cheesy" or "dated" as it is... bewildering.)
• Shock rocker Alice Cooper's early psychedelic period of 1969-70 and his bizarre experimental years of 1977-83, as well as his "hair metal" years of 1986-91 (except for "Poison", his biggest post-seventies hit) are largely ignored by the man himself as well as most fans.
• My Bloody Valentine do not think much of their non-shoegazing period (everything they released before the Strawberry Wine EP).
• Most of Weird Al's early stuff is not considered particularly shameful by him, so much as "not fit for release as it was recorded in [his] dorm's bathroom". Still, he has expressed displeasure with his parodies "It's Still Billy Joel to Me" and "Girls Just Want To Have Lunch", keeping the former off his Dare to Be Stupid album, and deciding against including the latter on his Food album. "It's Still Billy Joel to Me" was never released on any album, and "Girls Just Want to Have Lunch" is a result of Executive Meddling and not something Al wanted to record in the first place. Cyndi Lauper was huge at the time, and his record company at the time thought that he should do a parody of that song. Not hard to believe just by listening to the quality of the song in which, compared to other parodies (of female artists), Al seems to be mocking it as he sings it.
• Juan Luis Guerra and his group 4:40 released their first album around 1984, which was very experimental and quite different from the poetic merengue and bachata songs they would be known for later. Said album didn't sell well, and they also didn't like to mention it, beginning their official discography with the one where they first get their characteristic sound, released in '86.
• Genesis's first album, From Genesis to Revelation, was an attempt to appeal to their producer, Jonathan King, by mimicking the Bee Gees. As the next three albums were released (Trespass, Nursery Cryme and Foxtrot) a line was rapidly drawn under that part of their career. The songs from it were rarely, if ever, performed. Most of the fans agree with this policy and many disregard the album altogether. It's one of the easier Old Shames to find, though, because King, not Genesis, owned the rights to it, and kept publishing it over and over as the band actually produced records that sold. The bandmembers have also been uniformly negative about And Then There Were Three, which was written in the wake of Steve Hackett's departure and Phil Collins' first divorce.
• Mike Oldfield's 1975 recording of Don Alfonso, an early 20th century comedy novelty song, falls into this trope. The single was pulled worldwide before many copies were sold, and the accompanying video was rarely seen until it appeared on a 2004 DVD. Apart from that, and the early Virgin Records compilation V, the track has never appeared on any other compilation. This is especially notable considering some of the musical skeletons-in-closets that were dusted off and presented in Boxed (e.g. Mike Oldfield and David Bedford's attempt at a duet in Speak Tho' You Only Say Farewell).
• Alice in Chains began as a hair metal act. After Facelift was released, they began to deny this and avoided answering questions about it in interviews. While they were never officially published during that period, there are a few demos floating around the internet.
• After releasing their first EP and breaking into the early '80s hardcore scene, Bad Religion then went on to make Into the Unknown... a prog-rock album. Everyone in the band widely regards it as one of the worst mistakes they've ever made. It has never had a second printing, two of the members walked out during the recording of the first song, and they followed it up with an EP titled Back To The Known. Curiously, Allmusic gives it four and a half stars.
• Cee-Lo, the singing half of Gnarls Barkley, was originally in a group called Goodie Mob, who were in league with Outkast and had a similar style. However, he hated the group's overly-pop third album, World Party. He left the group as a result, to record two solo albums before forming Gnarls Barkley with Danger Mouse.
• From 1984 to 1990, Star Search winners Sawyer Brown recorded for Capitol Records. Their albums for the label were largely composed of bubblegum country-pop, and their band image included dance moves and bright pink shoes. When the band switched to Curb Records in 1992, it went for a much more substantial sound that included quite a few winning ballads and some above-average country-rockers. With a couple exceptions, most of the Capitol-era material is long since forgotten and out of print. It should also be noted that the earliest albums don't even credit the producer, musicians or songwriters (perhaps because no one wanted to own up to such brilliant lyrics as "Betty's bein' bad, bad, bad, bad").
• Bob Seger refuses to allow his early albums to be reissued on CD. This is actually a subversion in that many fans regard titles like Mongrel, Back in '72 or Seven to be as good as, if not better than, Seger's more commonly-available later stuff.
  • However, Seger's Live Bullet album has been kept in print, and it includes versions of some of those early songs - such as "Turn the Page" and "Katmandu" - which went on to become staples of classic rock radio.
• Similarly to Bob Seger above, Neil Diamond won't allow most of his Bang Records recordings from the 1960s to be reissued, even though many people believe that's the best stuff he ever did.
• Before the band Hurt released their first album "Vol. 1," they released two other albums prior to that: their self-titled album and "The Consummation". The latter was eventually released in 2008 under the name "The Re-Consummation", while the former will most likely never see the light of day again because as J. Loren (the band's singer) put it, it was "poorly done and actually diminishes from the intentions behind the songs." Some of the songs from said album were released between Vol. 1 and Vol. II, however, they've confirmed that the songs from both albums are drastically different from the early songs (an interview with the singer states that the self titled album's Summers Lost and Abuse of SID is different from Vol. II versions).
• Celtic Frost - Cold Lake. Considered one of the worst metal albums of all time (along with St. Anger), the band refused to re-issue it.
• Perhaps some of the most infamous examples are the "racist" freestyles that a teenaged Eminem recorded, after being dumped by a black girlfriend. To this day, he hates the fact that those tapes ever saw the light of day, and even made a song to officially apologize for ever creating them. Eminem himself has confirmed Infinite as his personal Old Shame, citing that he had not found his style yet (and it shows, notably, his Slim Shady persona is nowhere to be found on the album) and that he sounded too much like Nas. Em also seems to be disappointed with his "comeback" CD, Relapse. On "Not Afraid", he actually apologizes for it.
• Sergei Rachmaninoff's "Prelude in C-sharp minor", written early in his career, became his most famous piece. He detested it, and often would refuse to play it when he performed.
• Industrial artist Al Jourgensen -- frontman of Ministry, and member of Revolting Cocks (aka RevCo) and Lard -- has been known to physically destroy any copies of Ministry's With Sympathy and Twitch albums that he encounters at clubs or signings. Both albums are considered by fans and critics to be decent, if not exceptional, synthpop/darkwave albums (much closer to Kraftwerk and Front242 than to his later work); and Twitch in particular has a strong following. However, he's developed a substantial hatred for them; particularly With Sympathy, which he refers to as "an abortion", and claims it was the result of the record label forcing him to go for a more commercial synth-pop sound.
• Older Than Radio example: Richard Wagner insisted that the first three operas he wrote didn't count as his work. The third, Rienzi, is still played today, but the first two are generally considered to be pretty bad.
• Megadeth and their 1999 release, Risk. It emerged after the commercial success of Cryptic Writings, when Dave Mustaine decided that they would go further in the direction of radio-friendly metal and away from the thrash-heavy sound of Rust In Peace. Mustaine admits that it didn't do that well and wasn't particularly good. Part of the problem with Risk is that Dave had little control on how it was handled.
  • Amusingly, the title of the album came from a comment Lars Ulrich made in an interview where he said that Mustaine didn't take enough risks with his music.
• This might apply to country music singer Joe Nichols' 1996 debut album. While 2005's III was his third album for Universal South Records (now known as Show Dog-Universal), it was his fourth overall, and by naming it III he effectively disowned the 1996 album, which he recorded at age 20 — either out of shame or out of the fact that it was on a small indie label and produced no chart singles whatsoever.
  • It should be noted, the album has been re-released at least twice since Joe became famous. The only reason the first album is forgotten is because the label it was originally released on never actually promoted it, and they closed down shortly after.
  • And it strikes again: for some reason, "If Nobody Believed in You" is missing from his Greatest Hits Album, even though it was a bigger hit than the two songs released before it (which are on the album).
• Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus seem to regard most of their early songwriting efforts this way. Mostly the Hep Stars and Hootenanny Singers efforts, as well as the ABBA songs written before they knew what kind of band they were going to be. Benny seems especially embarrassed, though, going so far as joking about making a "Worst of" album for ABBA.
• The French composer Maurice Duruflé was such a perfectionist that he only managed to publish 14 works in a career spanning 60 years, and still felt enough Old Shame about the first one that he withdrew it from publication.
  • Duruflé's mentor, Paul Dukas (most well-known for the tone poem "The Sorcerer's Apprentice"), was similar in this respect. His surviving work only constitutes around half of his total output; he abandoned and/or destroyed the other half for not meeting his personal standards.
• Composer Hector Berlioz had taken to "burning" compositions of his that he disliked, though often the manuscripts were not actually destroyed but filed away. One of these works, the Messe Solennelle, was not rediscovered until 1991.
• Comedic singer Tony Goldmark, as a young teen, put together an album of kids' songs, You Bug Me!: Songs Guaranteed to Annoy Your Parents. Fast forward a decade-plus, and with two more albums and numerous hits on The Dr. Demento Show, he does not recommend You Bug Me as part of his body of work, even having an audience member reference it near the end of his "second" full-length comedy music album - just so he can shoot the guy for bringing it up!
• Sandie Shaw was like that for the longest time with her Eurovision song, Puppet on a String. Similarly, there's Lulu with her Eurovision entries (Boom Bang A Bang and I'm a Tiger).
• Musician in a Comedian's Body Stephen Lynch shows endless remorse over an early song called "The Bowling Song", so the audience inevitably asks for it whenever he plays.
• Before he was in Ace of Base, Ulf Ekberg was in an 80s punk band called Commit Suiside, who wrote extremely-racist lyrics and got him in trouble when Ace of Base started to achieve fame in the 90s. Yeah, he doesn't like talking about that band anymore.
• Fall Out Boy's first EP releases (their split EP with Project Rocket and Evening Out With Your Girlfriend) are disowned by the band, having been released prior to Andy Hurley taking the reins as the drummer, Patrick Stump taking up rhythm guitar from the other guys that quit, and Pete Wentz becoming the primary lyricist. They've shown more favor to the song "Growing Up" (only due to it being the first song they ever did as a band), which showed up on their greatest hits album.
  • For a Take This To Your Grave example, due to Pete and Chris "Hey Chris" Gutierrez's falling out around the time the band went mainstream, the song "Grenade Jumper" is rarely performed during their live shows, even though their relationship has improved since then.
• Jason Martin of Starflyer 59 has said that he can't stand to listen to his first album, Silver, any more. On the other hand, he's not too ashamed to allow the album to be reissued (twice!).
• The Beastie Boys don't seem too fond of their debut, Licensed To Ill, in retrospect. (Much in contrast to the rest of the world; it's still probably their most well-known album.) They've mentioned in interviews that they're embarrassed about some of the misogynistic lyrics (joking or otherwise), and it's the only older album in their catalog that they chose not to remaster in 2009. In fact, they've explicitly refused to ever play "(You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (To Party)" again.
• Cage hates his debut album, Movies for the Blind, and considers it too random and fragmented, and says that it glorified drugs. Despite his distaste for the album, it was appraised by critics and is considered a Cult Classic.
• Ralf Hutter has dismissed his work on the first three Kraftwerk albums (ditto Tone Float by Organisation, the band he and Florian Schneider were in prior to Kraftwerk) and refuses to licence them for any official reissues. Thus, any CDs of these albums to date have been "gray market" releases.
  • Hutter was also so embarrassed by the band's "hippie" appearance on the cover of Autobahn that the "rearview mirror" was airbrushed out of reissues of the album, and the band image on the back replaced by a later band photo (from the band's "robotic" phase; incidentally, a different lineup of the band that is featured on said album!). It seems he's no longer embarrassed by the image anymore as the 2009 remastering of Autobahn restores the original picture.
    • He's also may have warmed up to the original albums, stating that he's dug up additional artwork for each of those albums and is probably readying a box set for them.
• Wu-Tang Clan members RZA and GZA had solo careers prior to the groups formation as Prince Rakeem and The Genius respectively. Both have expressed disdain over the image they were given and honestly, you can't blame them.
• Judging by interviews it seems that former Panic! at the Disco guitarist/main songwriter Ryan Ross is pretty embarrassed over Panic!'s 2005 emo-heavy debut A Fever You Can't Sweat Out, which he wrote when he was still a teenager. Probably due to Ross completely rejecting emo in favor of classic rock.
• Charlie Simpson of emo band Fightstar is well known for having been in the pop-punk boyband Busted. Whilst he doesn't regret it, many of Fightstar's fans do.
• Japan's first album Adolescent Sex is an old shame for David Sylvian, who has long past moved from its camp synth glam rock to sophisticated ambient music. He wishes the album hadn't been released, mainly because they didn't have much control over the way it was handled.
• Muse's early demo tapes especially This Is A Muse Demo, which they've had people outbid the fans for on two occasions so no one can hear it.
• Jay-Z has admitted that the lyrics in "Big Pimpin" strike a nerve with him nowadays, considering that his views on relationships have changed drastically since then.
• Randy Travis recorded an album called Wind in the Wire for a TV series of the same name. The label didn't promote the album well, and its singles both tanked miserably at radio (although one went to #10 in Canada). This album is widely considered one of Travis's worst. Even Warner Bros. Nashville's then-senior VP of marketing agreed, saying that it was an "angst" period for the label.
• Buffalo hardcore band Every Time I Die hate their debut EP Burial Plot Bidding War so much when asked to give his favorite song, lead singer Keith Buckley said "Having a favorite song means you like something on it...and i dont."
• Long before she joined the Black Eyed Peas, Stacy "Fergie" Ferguson was part of an Christian all-female group called Wild Orchid, which formed in 1990 and had some modest success with the hit single "Talk To Me" in 1997. Due to a change in the group's sound, faltering sales and a bad breakup, Ferguson went into a spiral of drug use and depression that eventually ended when her bandmates staged an intervention, and then ended with her leaving the group. She has only come out to talk about this once, in a 2006 Entertainment Weekly interview, explaining that it was a very bad time for her, professionally and personally.
• Mandy Moore's old records, especially So Real are manufactured studio pop made simply to capitalize on the popularity of Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera in the 90's and early 2000's, from the same "Me Too" mold as Jessica Simpson and 100 other Pop Princesses that ruled the Top 40 back in the day along with just as many boy bands. Moore has denounced them as such in the past couple years, releasing albums that are actually written by her such as Wild Hope and Amanda Leigh, that demonstrate what she actually wants to be as an artist.
  • She stated on a radio show that she would personally give a refund to anyone who bought So Real. And then she actually did.
• Jeremy Dawson and Chad Petree, the producers of Shiny Toy Guns, seem to have disowned their old trance productions as Cloud 2 Ground, Slyder, RRDS, etc., some of which appeared in Grand Theft Auto III on the Rise FM station.
• Door, Door, the lone album by The Boys Next Door is apparently this to Nick Cave and the rest of the band (who would later become The Birthday Party). This is most likely because it's more commercial-sounding and New Wave-esque than The Birthday Party were, with Nick Cave employing smoother vocals. In one interview, Cave himself called it "one of the worst records ever recorded", and also said "I think my singing style at that particular period was totally repulsive. It was really disgusting".
• Although the album cover is one of the most iconic logos in the history of rock music, the Grateful Dead album Steal Your Face is considered the worst live album by the band. The two main criticisms were its poor sound quality, which required studio overdubs, and its emphasis on songs rather than the band's signature improvisational jamming. It's frequently referred to as Steal Your Money by fans, critics, and the band themselves. When Rhino Records released two box-sets containing their main studio and live albums, they opted to exclude this album and instead release the separate five-disk Grateful Dead Movie Soundtrack to represent that time in the band's history.
• Don't ask George Jones about the rockabilly records he did in the 1950s as "Thumper" Jones.
• The KLF deleted their entire back catalogue upon their disbanding in 1992.
• Originally, country music duo Bomshel consisted of Kristy Osmunson and Buffy Lawson. This lineup released a three-song EP and a cut from the Evan Almighty soundtrack, with all four songs charting. After Lawson left over Creative Differences, Kelley Shepard took her place and the Shepard/Osmunson lineup went on to release a full album. The duo has since disowned three of the four Lawson singles, keeping only "Bomshel Stomp".
• The pilot for Stargate SG-1 blended Joel Goldsmith's original score with tracked-in David Arnold cues from the original movie. When this mixture was replicated for the soundtrack album, both composers had their names taken off the disc.
• Long before he launched himself to stardom on British television, Ricky Gervais was a 22-year old performing in an 80's New Wave/electropop duo called Seona Dancing. The group had a pair of (extremely) minor hits, and featured Gervais dressing like David Bowie while sporting massive hair. The duo's music video for the second track, "Bitter Heart", was filmed for 300 quid in a scummy parking garage near the BBC offices. Predictably, TV interviewers mentioned it in every interview he did soon after the video was discovered. Gervais is reportedly still embarassed by it, and many note that for a guy who seemed oddly resistant to being famous when he first debuted in The Office, he sure tried his best to become a superstar as a young man.
• The first album by The Divine Comedy, Fanfare for the Comic Muse. Neil Hannon had the album removed from the label's catalog and says the title of their 2006 album Victory for the Comic Muse is a coincidence.
• Martina McBride and producer Paul Worley both criticize her 1993 single "Life #9" in the liner notes to her Greatest Hits Album. Worley referred to it as a "country disco phase", and Martina thought that it didn't fit her style.
• Michael Bolton would prefer it if people forgot he was ever a hard rock singer, but 1985's Everybody's Crazy is still regarded as a classic of its type.
• Britney Spears subverts this trope in that she's not all that upset by her bubble gum past (but plays the trope straight with the red outfit she wore in Oops, I Did It Again).
• For Guster, they're a bit ashamed of their first single, "Happy Frappy," from their first album, finding it extremely trite. While plenty of other material from their early albums still get play, they all but refuse to acknowledge "Happy Frappy" at all; There are only two known times they've played the song live since 1998.
• Rodney Atkins' first single, the 1997 flop "In a Heartbeat", had him singing in a Roy Orbison-esque voice while wearing a cowboy hat and mustache. Dissatisfied with his material at the time, Atkins asked the head of his label for a change in producers. Atkins did one album (2003's Honesty) as basically a hatless, mustache-less Tim McGraw clone before finding his niche in 2006 as a baseball cap-wearing purveyor of positive, life-affirming uptempos (e.g. "If You're Going Through Hell") and easily relatable songs about fatherhood and family (e.g. "Watching You", "Cleaning This Gun"). Atkins has disowned everything from before "If You're Going Through Hell".
• Coldplay have straight-up called their first album, Parachutes, "terrible music". A case where most people (fans, critics, even nonfans) disagree.
• Boards of Canada have refused to acknowledge any of their releases prior to Twoism. They consist of a mix of good-quality tracks and some that...probably justify the band's attitude towards them. They're still highly sought-after by fans, though.
• Jethro Tull's Ian Anderson seems to feel this way about the band's 1973 Concept Album, A Passion Play (feeling it was over-arranged and lacked humor), and to 1975's Minstrel In The Gallery (considering it well-recorded and produced, but too dark lyrically). His use of soprano and sopranino saxophones in general on the 1972-74 material come under fire, too, as he decided he didn't really like the sound or feel comfortable playing the instrument, and only tried them to see if he could develop a love for it or find a way to make it a pleasant experience for himself.
• While they don't seem to disown their debut-era musical output, most members of BTS are not happy with some of the styling and promotional choices they did at the time. They also seem to be regretful of several early-career remarks they did on interviews and lyrics about race issues that were born from ignorance. Doubly so in both accounts for group leader RM, which at the time used the stage name "Rap Monster" and looked and acted like he could illustrate the page for Pretty Fly for a White Guy.