![]() ![]() Lange, who’s appeared in this column a bunch of times, had divorced his former collaborator Shania Twain a few years earlier, and he was living in semi-retirement in his Swiss castle. After they finished touring their 2007 sophomore album It Won’t Be Soon Before Long, Maroon 5 locked in with Mutt Lange, the arena-rock mastermind behind blockbusters from AC/DC and Def Leppard. Just before he found his semi-permanent place on the coaching panel at The Voice, Adam Levine and his buddies took their last stab at anything that was even remotely comparable to rock stardom. Apparently, though, Levine could claim to have moves like Jagger, and nobody got too mad about it. If Adam Levine tried to sing that Maroon 5 had moves like the Rolling Stones, it would’ve been torches and pitchforks for those guys. It’s not a song about a band, which is notable. Maroon 5 made this transition, ironically enough, with a song that’s basically about a rock star. The other Maroon 5 members are basically just the guys who stand behind Adam Levine when he’s doing solo-career stuff. Maroon 5 only pulled that trick off by making the fateful and lucrative decision to stop working as a band. But there aren’t really any bands who consistently dominate the Hot 100 the way Maroon 5 did for years. ![]() There’s no bands anymore, and I feel like they’re a dying breed.” I feel like there aren’t any bands anymore, you know? That’s the thing that makes me kind of sad, is that there were just bands. If it’s around, no one’s invited me to the party.” In 2021, Levine told Zane Lowe, “When the first Maroon 5 album came out there were still other bands. In 2018, he kicked up a bit of a backlash when he told Variety that his band had always been more drawn to rap and R&B: “Rock music is nowhere, really. If anything, Adam Levine has been outright dismissive of the idea of contemporary rock stardom. (Blake Shelton’s highest-charting single, the 2013 Pistol Annies collab “ Boys ‘Round Here,” peaked at #12.) Honestly, Blake Shelton is probably more of a rock star than that guy. Since then, Maroon 5 has essentially become Adam Levine’s solo project, as he’s worked with industry-approved song-doctor types to make forgettable pop smashes. By 2007, when Maroon 5’s “ Makes Me Wonder” became their first #1 hit, the group had mostly tapped into a post-Timberlake strain of sleekly chirpy white funk. ![]() Even in their earliest days, when they mostly functioned as a band, Levine’s group Maroon 5 didn’t really do anything that could’ve been mistaken for rocking. Adam Levine has never been a rock star, even if he’s (sort of) played one on TV. “Rock star” was Shelton’s way of praising Levine even as he belittled him.īlake Shelton was wrong. People tuned in more for the coaches than the contestants, and the gym-buddy rivalry between Shelton and Levine was usually the main dynamic at work, with various other big stars struggling to get their own shots in. They competed, supposedly, to get the best singers on their teams and then to push those singers to victories, but nobody ever particularly cared who won The Voice. On the NBC singing show The Voice, Shelton and Levine would constantly bicker in the most theatrically playful way. “Rock star.” That’s what Blake Shelton would call Adam Levine. Book Bonus Beat: The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.
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