Anonymity is the nemesis of pop. History is filled with earnest, well-meaning bands who did whatever they could to keep the music up front and the personalities in the background, often to the point where they wouldn't even reveal their names (like early Pavement). But unless you intend to toil in obscurity for the rest of your days or advance anonymity itself as your main selling point (the Residents), you're destined to fail.
This is the dialectic behind the current underground movement known as post-rock, which is essentially progressive rock made respectable. During the heyday of prog rock, people like Peter Gabriel, Robert Fripp and whoever happened to be in charge of Pink Floyd at any given moment practiced a high-minded theatricality that many believe was directly responsible for the emergence of punk as an antidote to creeping pretentiousness.
But for every masturbatory show-off like Keith Emerson, there was a willfully weird art student like Holger Czukay, the genius behind the influential German prog-rock collective Can. Can's members were not anonymous, but the music stood forthrightly on its own, somehow detached from its creators.