Rivals: Music's Greatest Feuds

Elvis Presley was the man to beat when Jerry Lee Lewis made the drive from small-town Louisiana to Memphis in 1956.

Our series on The Eagles concludes with a look at the business dealings and lawsuits that took place behind the scenes and the man who helped to shape their early career, David Geffen.

Our special series on The Eagles continues with their post-"Hotel California" years, in which the band was more popular than ever, selling one million albums per month while also falling apart.

Welcome to our epic three-part series on all of the beefs, feuds, and simmering resentments that occurred inside one of the most successful bands in history, The Eagles.

Back in the late 1980s, Dr. Dre and Eazy-E were members of N.W.A., one of the most important and iconic hip-hop groups ever.

This is an especially personal one for Steve — back when he was a Britpop-loving teen in the nineties, this was one of the first rock rivalries that he cared about.

Before there was Megadeth, Dave Mustaine was the guitarist in a promising San Francisco thrash metal band called Metallica.

Two burgeoning musical geniuses came together in the mid-60s to form the Velvet Underground, a group that expanded the definition of what a rock band could be.

In the 1980s, the biggest rock band in the world was The Police. While all three members were blonde and good-looking, they were hardly a conventional success story.

In the mid-'90s, no two rock stars struck more fear into the hearts of parents than Trent Reznor and Marilyn Manson.

For ‘80s babies, Britney and Christina represent the ultimate fan face-off. Originally friends and co-stars on The Mickey Mouse Club reboot in the early ‘90s, by the decade’s end they were pitted against one another in the press and in the charts.

If you were an alienated teenager in the 1980s — or an alienated teenager during any era who loves the music of the 1980s — then you have probably spent a lot of time listening to The Smiths and The Cure.

Our special two-part series on the battles between Van Halen and their two most famous singers concludes with this exploration of the Van Hagar years.

In tribute to the late Eddie Van Halen, we’re devoting a pair of episodes to the two distinct eras of his namesake band.

In the early '90s, no couple in rock was more notorious than Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love.

Marvin Gaye's 1971 masterpiece What's Going On was recently voted by Rolling Stone magazine the greatest album of all time.

Joy Division and New Order are two of the greatest and most important post-punk bands of all time, and at the center of those groups are two men: Bernard Sumner and Peter Hook.

Eric Clapton had earned a reputation as “God” in the mid-‘60s for his virtousic guitar work in R&B-inspired British bands like the Yardbirds and John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers.

Whitney Houston ruled the pop world in the late '80s with a string of infectious hits that included seven consecutive number ones.

The final part of our epic trilogy exploring the rivalries within CSNY examines the arrival of Neil Young, whose introduction to the highly-combustible supergroup made the band all the more explosive.

In the second part of our special series on the rivalries within the greatest supergroup in rock history, CSNY, we look at the group's original musical leader, Stephen Stills.

There are so many rivalries within Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young that we're devoting a three-episode arc to parsing them all.

Before the Gallaghers were even born, the Davies brothers were the quintessential Brit-Pop sibling rivalry, brawling backstage, onstage, and in the studio.

At a time when most punk and new wave bands cranked their guitars and jacked up their song tempos, Talking Heads came out of NYC with a completely original and utterly funky sound.

In the late '90s, The White Stripes came on the scene as a true anomaly: A post-modern blues-rock duo from the Midwest.

In the late '90s, a time of peace and prosperity for America, two of this country's biggest bands were Creed and Limp Bizkit. In retrospect, they seem like perfect signifiers for a decadent, bored nation on the verge of a major fall.

Joan Baez was the undisputed queen of folk in the early ‘60s when she began sharing the stage with her new boyfriend, a Woody Guthrie-worshipping up-and-comer from Duluth who went by Bob Dylan.

For much of the 2010s, Nicki Minaj was the most successful female rapper on the planet, selling more albums than any woman in hip-hop ever.

In the early '70s, Neil Young wrote two classic songs about the south — "Southern Man" and "Alabama" — that annoyed one of his biggest fans, Ronnie Van Zant of Lynyrd Skynyrd.

“Imma let you finish but…” When Kanye West crashed Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, he ignited one of the most compelling and complex music rivalries ever.

There's a long history of sibling rivalry infecting some of the biggest acts in pop and rock.

As co-founders of blink-182, Mark Hoppus and Tom DeLonge produced some of the most joyous and gleefully immature pop-punk of the ‘90s.

Pink Floyd is one of the greatest and most successful bands of all time, and that is due mostly to the lyrics and ideas of Roger Waters and the guitar-playing and musical acumen of David Gilmour.

In the late 1990s, there were no bigger boy bands than the Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC.

Together, Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel formed one of the most popular and critically acclaimed duos in rock history, producing classic songs like "Mrs. Robinson" and "Bridge Over Troubled Water."

Guns N' Roses were the biggest rock band in the world by 1991 — but that didn’t mean they were impervious to criticism.

Slim Shady enjoys a well-deserved reputation as one of the all time greatest rappers, but in 2015 Machine Gun Kelly made a play for his “Blonde MC from the Midwest” crown.

It’s the second part of our series about the power struggles inside the greatest rock band ever!

It’s our two-episode arc on the intra-band beefs that occurred inside the greatest rock band of all time! In this episode, we look at the partnership at the heart of the Beatles between John Lennon and Paul McCartney.

This episode of Rivals examines why one band became an object of ridicule and the other a critical favorite — despite the fact that they’re more similar than they are different.

Though they eventually buried the hatchet with Keith, the Dixie Chicks remain exiled from the country scene and their once-thriving career has never recovered. Their feud gets to the complicated truth of what happens when an artist publicly takes a political stance.

Even after the success of Tweedy's band Wilco and Farrar's band Son Volt, fans continue to debate over who was in the right.

At the heart of the Beach Boys, one of America's biggest bands ever, are two men: Brian Wilson and Mike Love. Brian is the songwriter and resident genius, and Mike is the cocksure frontman.

At the height of Nirvana’s success in the early ‘90s, Kurt Cobain slammed fellow Seattle grunge gods Pearl Jam in the press.

When The Band first emerged in the late 1960s, they epitomized the era's hippie, back-to-the-land ethos.

Though he’d achieved complete commercial domination with Thriller, the King of Pop spent much of the ‘80s looking over his shoulder at the Prince of Paisley Park.

Elton and Billy’s parallel careers intersected with a long-running duets tour, but things went south after Billy abruptly backed out in 2010.

The two pop queens started off as friends, sharing sweet birthday tweets and cat photos. Things got a little weird when they shared a man — John Mayer — but a case of pilfered backing dancers in 2014 made them, in Taylor’s words, “straight-up enemies.”

Stevie and Lindsey started as bandmates and bedmates before their love curdled into the toxic-yet-kinky antipathy that inspired Fleetwood Mac’s 1977 classic Rumors.

Starting February 26th, join Steven Hyden and Jordan Runtagh as they explore the most notorious feuds in the music business.