A bit more on the pop side of things, but Blur and Pulp are entirely different bands to their early stuff. Jason Pierce's migration from Spacemen 3 to Spiritualised makes sense, but I doubt anyone watching Spacemen in the late-80s would guess that J Spaceman would go on to be radio 2-friendly 'AOR' (if that's not too much of an insult).

i like spacemen 3 better than spirtualized, i like spritiualized a lot too but i dont think its significantly different than the spacemen.

heres one i know some will disagree vehemently with, but the hip hop enthused will know im spo on, LIL WAYNE!

when this kid debuted, he was a 12 year old novelty kid for some reason one of the hot boyz singing "drop it like its hot", and here he is now, dropping mixtape after mixtape of freeform lyrical brilliance, and has the most anticipated hip hop record of the year, hes improved from being a shitty annoying little kid rapper, to be one of the best alive.

I'm not really a Lil Wayne fan, but I admire his ethic and ability.

That's a good way to put it. I've always had difficulty describing their sound.

i don't see why so many people didn't like 23, it's good but not very exciting, then again, you could say that about every blonde redhead album.

I don't think they've ever made a bad album and they're awesome live. Their 1st two or 3 releases had that "exciting" feel to them, the rest have been more an exercise in sound.

yeah, but even, say, la mia vita is like cool to listen to but i don't really go apeshit listening to it, even if the music is more lively than their later stuff.

as i said, it's all good but not terribly exciting.

Royal Trux - Junkie noise rock, to indie-rock (i guess you could call it that), to a Rolling Stones boogie-rock band. THEN you've got RTX, who I think are amazing but noone else seems to get.

Rolling Stones - From the begining to Exile...

yeah i was gona stay stones to exile, but they got worse and worse afte that.

and i think royal trux was way fucking better as a trash noise rock band than an indie band, hand of glory and twin infinitives are two of the best american noise rock records ever. combining the exile like stones blues rock with pure atonal noise, fucking awesomeness. i never liked any of their records after those nearly as much, but thank you is fucking amazing too.

Strange...I just realized everyone is forgetting the Velvet Underground! From avant-garde proto-noise rock to .....pop rock.

Current 93 - From industrial loops and chanting/yelling to gently-played acoustic-based musicery and long, involved poems/stories.

thats because theyre first two records were infinitley better than their last two records, not to mention the absence of john cale. so i dont think anyone is forgetting them, just correctly omitting them.

Bad

Joni Mitchell - she got all Jazz, and started just "singing" "sco be do bop bop" on top of everything, not great.

Todd Rundgren - have you heard Liars, enough said.

...

On that list of child stars who were annoying and went onto be good we could add Beenie Man - early stuff is abysmal, even if you like the later stuff. Also, Bjork. I haven't heard her kids stuff, but Kukl are a different thing to Sugercubes which in turn is a different thing to early Bjork which in turn is different to her mature stuff. She's like Madonna for people who don't like dancing.

Snoop Dog

Dr Dre

Eric B and Rakim

Myass

Most of her jazzy albums are great in my opinion, just a few are boring like Mingus.

I disagree, I love the S/T and I think Loaded is not bad at all.

I can't stand any of it, even Shadow's And Light from The Hissing Of Summer Lawns.

although, is that Jazz?

Oh, on the subject of bad - I think anyone who remembers Catatonia for their piss-awful 'Britpop' era stuff would be astonished to learn that they are roughly four million times better in Welsh. Her problem, bless her, is that her voice is simply not suited to the English language.