Rock bands/artists who went pop

For sure.

 

Free, morphing to Bad Company.

 

Hmm...how about Blue Öyster Cult?

 

Styx

 

Although not rock the Brand New Heavies went from Death Threat to Dream On Dreamer, as big a slide from 'heavy' to 'pop' as humanly possible.



The Brand New Heavies - Dream On Dreamer (HQsound)

 

As shocked as I was when I learned the person in your avatar played on “Instant Replay?!”

 

J Geils Band

 

I don't think he quite qualifies. His 2014 album is far from Pop. He may have had his Pop period but of late I don't think so.

 

I was referring to an earlier comment about Talk Talk - who did the reverse. Sylvian's career is somewhat similar. He's about as far from pop now as he could possibly get.

 

I can see that. They went from Godzilla to gecko.

 

You may have actually never heard Bowie's 90's records.

 

You should've seen my face the first time I saw that video!

 

I agree on both points.

Well done pop music can be really good.

As for Queen, while some of the drum beats got more "poppy" in the 80s, they were still almost always a rock band, the travesty that was Hot Space notwithstanding.

 

Status Quo

 

Rainbow (Dio) -------- Rainbow (Joe Lynn Turner)=pop metal

 

I can just hear Cliff screaming "NOOOOOOOO!!"

 

Can't say for sure, but he may have meant "MOR" pop (middle-of-the-road).

 

Heavy Rhyme Experience is a very underrated and outstanding album. I think, though, this was a one-off project (perhaps future volumes were intended) to showcase a live band on a hip-hop record when most others were sampling. Their earlier S/T album from 1990 is along the same lines as what came after with "Dream On Dreamer." HRE is probably the exception in their catalog rather than the norm.

 

Their debut album is pretty mellow. If anything, their sound got a little more "rock" afterward, but overall they probably stayed pretty true to their sound and style IMO.

 

All of them, meaningless and confused question that needs its assumptions unpacked and left at the side of the road.

 

Grateful Dead. Remember the album cover with in white suits.

 

Def Leppard

 

This.

The idea that there's a clear distinction re how the words are actually employed is pretty bogus.

We could use "rock" in some more limited way, but if we do, a ton of the stuff that's currently, conventionally considered rock isn't going to fit.

The idea that something like Aerosmith's "Pink" is pop, while "Adam's Apple" isn't, would be just about impossible to make work if we're attempting to correlate it with any concrete criteria. Same with "I Don't Want to Miss a Thing" versus "Home Tonight" and so on. Same with "Let's Dance" and "Changes".

Is Hendrix ' "Up from the Skies" a rock tune?

Judas Priest's "Last Rose of Summer"?

Led Zeppelin's "Thank You"?

Alice Cooper's "Desperado"?

I'm not trying to suggest that any of that stuff is it isn't rock. But those are artists that people would often give as examples of rock artists, especially at those points in their careers, while those songs would make any attempted narrower definition of rock, correlated to concrete characteristics, difficult, especially if the idea is to exclude the stuff we want to call pop. You wind up just having to say "I know it when I hear it"--simply because there's no way to make sense of it beside it just being stuff you think of feel about in some ineffable or vague way rather than another.

 

The CURE

VAN HALEN