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 — and hit on his teenage daughter in the process. Subliminal lyric disses sparked a nuclear response from Em, resulting in a war of words in songs and interviews that has continued sporadically ever since.

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It’s the second part of our series about the power struggles inside the greatest rock band ever! Within the Beatles, the unquestioned power couple was John Lennon and Paul McCartney. But in the band’s later years, George Harrison emerged as a major creative force, writing hit songs like “Something” and “Here Comes The Sun.” And yet he struggled to gain respect from his two big brothers in the Fab Four, even after the band broke up.

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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. After they bonded as boys in Liverpool over shared childhood tragedy and common artistic ambitions, their friendship slowly frayed as the Beatles grew more and more popular. John was the adventurous wit and Paul was the canny romantic — or at least that’s what the archetypes are. But in reality, their difficult dynamic is far more complicated.

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The almost oppressive ubiquity of Imagine Dragons’ songs like “Radioactive” and “Thunder” made the band an easy target for criticism, even from fellow musicians. In 2017, The 1975 lead singer Matty Healy accused Dan Reynolds and Co. of singing songs about “nothingness” and not taking advantage of their global platform to enact positive change. Reynolds, a tireless advocate for the LGBTQ community, took offense and slammed Healy for adding to the negativity prevalent in the music industry. This episode of Rivals examines their feud and explores 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.

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In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, country superstar Toby Keith released “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American).” Some embraced the song as the perfect rallying cry for an angry and traumatized nation. Others felt it was a crude, hateful, jingoistic anthem about putting your boot in someone’s ass. Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks fell squarely in the latter camp, and denounced the hit tune in interviews. Months later, when the Dixie Chicks were blacklisted from the country music community following their onstage criticism of President Bush and the invasion of Iraq, Keith was quick to peg the band as unpatriotic traitors. 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. 

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Before they started their own successful bands, Jeff Tweedy and Jay Farrar were boyhood friends who formed a group called Uncle Tupelo in the 1980s. Uncle Tupelo wasn't all that famous or successful in their time, but historically they would prove hugely influential on a generation of alt-country acts. Farrar was the creatively dominant force in that band, but Tweedy quickly came into his own, which created tension that eventually boiled over. 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.

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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. For most of the 1960s, their partnership worked as the Beach Boys scored dozens of hits. But a conflict over the magnum opus "Pet Sounds" revealed that Brian was out to pursue high art at all costs, while Mike prefered to stick with "the formula." For the next 50 years, this battle has raged over what truly constitutes the "real" Beach Boys.

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At the height of Nirvana’s success in the early ‘90s, Kurt Cobain slammed fellow Seattle grunge gods Pearl Jam in the press, labeling them bandwagon-jumping “corporate puppets” who aped his band’s style in the vapid pursuit of fame. Eddie Vedder, a great admirer of Kurt’s, never retaliated publicly, but their relationship grew strained as Pearl Jam’s popularity eclipsed Nirvana’s. Before the two could settle their differences, Cobain took his own life — leaving Eddie to simultaneously mourn the loss of his hero and make sense of their complex, adversarial bond.

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When The Band first emerged in the late 1960s, they epitomized the era's hippie, back-to-the-land ethos. Every member was considered equal, and they played with an uncommon power and sensitivity as a leader-less ensemble on classics like "The Weight" and "Up On Cripple Creek." But as time wore on, and The Band got more successful, cracks in this foundation were caused by inequitable money distribution and petty arguments over attention. The central conflict was between Robbie Robertson, the guitarist and songwriter, and Levon Helm, the lead singer and soul of the group. After they broke up in 1976 with "The Last Waltz" concert, their spat became public, turning one of rock's greatest fairy tales into a sad cautionary tale about how commerce can really screw up art.

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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. As far as MJ was concerned, the musical landscape was big enough for only one eccentric, androgynous, Midwest-raised genre-bending star with killer dance moves and a propensity for Xanadu-like private compounds. He even crafted “Bad” as a duet to serve as their on-mic showdown, but the Purple One turned him down. Over the years they duked it out in the charts, onstage, and even on the Ping-Pong table. The rivalry pushed them towards artistic greatness, but despite a begrudging mutual respect, the pair would never be simpatico.

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