Fame has a cruel sense of humor. It takes the thing you made almost without thinking — the track you finished in an afternoon, the song you considered a throwaway, the one you liked least on the album — and turns it into the thing everyone wants. And then it makes you play it, night after night, for the rest of your career, while the songs you actually loved sit in the setlist like neglected children wondering what they did wrong. These five artists made the song the world loved most. They spent decades wishing they hadn’t.
1. Radiohead — Creep (1992) Thom Yorke has described Creep as embarrassing. He has said it represents a version of self-loathing he no longer identifies with. Radiohead famously refused to play it live for years in the mid-to-late 1990s, when they were making the experimental records — OK Computer, Kid A, Amnesiac — that represented who they actually were. Audiences at every concert would chant for it. Yorke would decline. The song that made Radiohead famous was, to the band making OK Computer, an obstacle. They have since reintroduced it to setlists sporadically, always with the air of men doing something they have decided to accept rather than something they enjoy.
2. The Beatles — Twist and Shout (1963) Lennon hated performing this song within a few years of recording it, and his reasons were specific and physical — he recorded the vocal with a severe cold, screaming the final take so hard that he shredded his voice and could barely speak afterward. The performance is extraordinary precisely because of the physical cost. But by 1965, when Beatlemania had reduced concerts to fifteen-minute sets of screaming that neither the band nor the audience could fully hear, playing Twist and Shout felt like a parody of what they had become. Lennon said the Beatles stopped touring partly because he was sick of screaming over noise while playing songs he had already moved beyond.
3. James Brown — I Feel Good (I Got You) (1965) James Brown performed I Feel Good approximately 98,000 times over his career, which is not an actual count but feels accurate. By the later decades of his life, he had said in multiple interviews that the song had become a kind of prison — the thing audiences required before they would accept anything else. Brown was one of the most restlessly innovative performers in American music history. He spent the 1970s making funk that was as sophisticated as anything in popular music. And he would close every show with I Feel Good because if he didn’t, people felt cheated. He performed it at age 73. He never stopped performing it. He reportedly hated it with affection, which is the specific feeling of someone who resents something they cannot escape.
4. Nirvana — Smells Like Teen Spirit (1991) Kurt Cobain’s relationship with Smells Like Teen Spirit was complex from the beginning. He was aware, shortly after writing it, that it resembled a Pixies song — the quiet-loud dynamic was something he had borrowed consciously from the Pixies and felt self-conscious about. When it became the defining song of a generation, he found the scrutiny attached to it suffocating. He deliberately played it sloppily at some concerts. He talked about it dismissively in interviews. He genuinely could not understand why this song, out of everything he had written, was the one that had connected so completely — and the inability to understand it seemed to bother him more than the fame itself.
5. Elton John — Crocodile Rock (1972) Elton John has been diplomatically unkind about Crocodile Rock for decades. He has called it his attempt at nostalgia for a 1950s rock and roll era he barely experienced, noted that it is deliberately simple, and expressed puzzlement that it remains one of the songs most requested at his concerts. He would clearly prefer audiences to request Funeral for a Friend, or Someone Saved My Life Tonight, or any number of songs from his 1970s catalogue that he considers artistically serious. Crocodile Rock is artistically unserious in a way that audiences find joyful and Elton finds faintly mortifying. He plays it anyway. Every night.