What? Thom Yorke? The mopey dude from Radiohead? What in the hell is he doing here? Well, like I said in the intro, there are several different facets to the rock and roll cliché and while Yorke is pretty much the exact opposite of the party animal degenerate that most of the dudes on this list are, he represents that sort of self-loathing tortured artist cliché that is just a big a part of rock and roll as anything else. You can pretty much predict everything that Yorke is going to do before he even does it. He has a sort of love-hate relationship with his fans, best summed up by the anecdote that he used to hate it whenever they would sing along with him during concerts, he seems to hate all of his past songs, never wants to play them, and he’s constantly blurring the lines between music and discordant noise, almost as if he is daring people not to like him. It’s admittedly a blurring that often results in brilliance but you can’t deny the fact that Thom Yorke embraces the idea of being an anti-rock star, which these days is just about the most clichéd rock-star thing you can do.

Photo credit: YouTube/Radiohead

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Just like with the Sex Pistols, Mötley Crüe as a whole could be on this list. No band in history had a bigger reputation for utter degeneracy than the Crüe. But out of all of them, Tommy Lee is the most infamous. He was the one who banged Pamela Anderson on camera, he is the one who remained in the headlines even after the band stopped ruling the charts, and he, more than anyone else, is the dude people think of when they think of Mötley Crüe. Say you were judging the people on this list like they were figure skaters or something on a ten point scale (stay with me here) – in the sex category of the sex, drugs and rock and roll cliché, Tommy would get an easy ten. In the drugs category? Hell, he’d get an eleven. In the rock and roll category? Well, that all depends I guess on whether or not you like Mötley Crüe. But there can be no denying that Tommy Lee lived that cliché to the fullest, and hey, he’s still get some time left so who knows? Maybe one day he’ll be sitting at number one on this list.

Photo credit: YouTube/Mötley Crüe

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Whoa, whoa, whoa… what in the hell is Kurt Cobain doing on a list of the most cliched rock stars? After all, wasn’t Cobain’s whole thing not being a rock star? Well yeah, and that’s why he’s on this list. Because, like Thom Yorke, at some point trying so hard to not be a rock star is just as clichéd as actually being one. But beyond that image, if you really think about it, how was Cobain really that different than anyone else on this list? He carefully cultivated an image that became larger than life, an image that was the personification of an entire rock movement, an entire decade. And then there was the lifestyle. Really, how was Cobain all that different from, say, Sid Vicious? He had a famous and tumultuous relationship with Courtney Love, who herself almost worshipped Sid Vicious and his girlfriend Nancy Spungen. It almost seemed like Kurt and Courtney were creepily trying to emulate the story of Sid and Nancy. And the whole time, Kurt was swimming in the deep end of that most clichéd of rock-star clichés – the heroin addiction. And then when it all became too much for him, he did the most rock star thing of all and blew his own head off. Say what you will about Kurt Cobain, but you simply cannot argue with the facts and the facts are that Kurt Cobain was, ironically, one of the most clichéd rock stars of all.

Photo credit: YouTube/Nirvana

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Jim Morrison pretty much created the whole rock god image. He was the first to really embrace the cliché, the out of control degenerate with the tortured soul who just wanted to get drunk and whip his dick out on stage in between rambling poetry screeds. Pretty much every clichéd rock and roll dude who has come after has been basically trying to emulate – either consciously or subconsciously – what Jim Morrison did. He turned his back on the audience – literally – while he played, he drank himself into oblivion, he turned his body into a goddamn drug farm and he banged every groupie he could find. Jim Morrison was such a rock and roll cliché that it killed him. It consumed him completely, became who he was, and with all of that said, how could anyone else possibly be number one on this list?

Photo credit: YouTube/The Doors

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