Wait, is Creed unironically cool again?
No one ever really thought Creed was THAT cool.
Even when they hit it big in 1997 with My Own Prison, no one had a musical revelation. They always were one of these post-grunge units who did the Nirvana thing competently, except cleaner and more commercial. Whenever an unexpected band makes it big, every record label scrambles to find its next iteration. The band that’s just like them, but not quite. Creed was one of these bands. They were inspired and well-meaning, but also a little derivative.
It’s the same thing wherever there’s a paying market to engage. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel for as long as you’re profitable. Just do what the guy who reinvented the wheel did to the best of your ability and you’ll never go broke.
So, it felt like it was in the order of things when Creed’s grandiloquent sincerity became the butt of every unfunny internet joke sometime around 2010. It’s what happens to bands you don’t have an emotional relationship with. Frontman Scott Stapp didn’t do his band any favors when he started wearing his arena rock adrenaline withdrawal on his sleeve and started acting like a 1983 Sunset Strip burnout in the internet age. People made fun of his antics. They turned him into a meme. Creed’s clean cut, earnest muscular rock became synonymous with unsophisticated, unself-aware pricks who loved themselves a little too dearly.
But something changed after Creed hit rock bottom. The memes came back in 2023, but they felt nicer? They were still ironic, but that irony was aimed at a closeted undying love for Creed rather than at Creed themselves. They promoted self-deprecating humor and slammed cutting-edge art for being snob and disconnected. It looked like this.
This unexpected wave of love culminated with the announcement of a reunion tour for the 25th anniversary of their most popular record Human Clay. What the fuck happened exactly? Is it kind of cool to listen to Creed now? Let’s examine the genesis of this unlikely, organic resurrection.
First: is this an industry plant?
All these listening-to-Creed-at-Applebees might be the creation of a record label looking to engineer a giant nostalgia driven cash grab. After all, Creed is going on tour with 3 Doors Down, Finger Eleven and that Wolfgang Van Halen band that’s just not that great. If you attend this concert, you will technically be in 1999 for a couple hours.
I’ve seen corporations launch meme pages before. They let the zoomer intern go crazy with it on social media for as long as it cannot be explicitly traced back to the brand. It’s never overly difficult to figure out (it’s kind of an open secret), but it never fails to make the aforementioned corporation more relatable even if the meme page is often the work of one person. These Creed memes are so cohesive with one another that I wouldn’t put it past LiveNation or Sony (who bought out their previous distributor BMG) to pull off something like this.
But I doubt it. It’s a lot of work and money investment for a return that feels qualitative at best. It doesn’t matter how many shares your Creed meme gets, it doesn’t guarantee anyone that did is ready to shed 200$ for floor tickets. Given Scott Stapp’s history of emotional instability, mental health problems and addiction, organizing a four months-long tour is a huge risk to take in a financially distressed industry. The memes might’ve been part of a larger strategy in order to rake the largest demographic possible, but I doubt it.
Record labels aren’t that smart. They’re reactive, not proactive. The tour announcement most likely happened in reaction to this reaction to this newfound wave of love for Creed, so….
How Nostalgia Works
Some artists, let’s say Slayer, never become uncool. That’s because they never tried to be cool and ride-whatever-was-popular at the moment in the first place and stuck to their guns for the entire career. Diabolus in Musica was an accident and their bounce back effort God Hates Us All was so fucking strong that we immediately forgave them. It was Kerry King’s fault anyway.
AC/DC is another, more mainstream example. AC/DC’s always been AC/DC, whatever was popular at the moment. They didn’t suffer from the disco era or the grunge apocalypse. Their identity was already settled. Their fan base already convinced.
But these are exceptions to the rule. When a band gets a big breakout like Creed did, they become indebted to a cultural movement and the cultural movement they were indebted to never really had legs of its own. Post-grunge had a what? Five years lifespan of relevancy before getting swallowed by nu metal and emo? It was mostly a corporate takeover of a grassroots movement following the death of Kurt Cobain in an attempt to offer a more palatable brand of alternative rock. It was destined to fail. Creed was destined to become uncool.
Whatever becomes uncool can become cool again, though. That’s the thing.
If you get swept into a trend, you’re going to automatically rebel against it. Trends die off for a handful of reasons, but usually because they become too commercial. You can’t possibly feel good for connecting with a genre of music if everyone around you is. It’s a fatality that is being largely accepted as part of an industry because making money and becoming rock stars are more important factors to both musicians and execs than a self-sustaining musical legacy.
What happened to Creed (and Limp Bizkit for all that matters) is that the rebellion became the norm. It became uncool to make cruel Creed jokes on the internet because it’s what everybody started doing. You didn’t need to be clever or foreseeing to make them. You just had to say that Scott Stapp smokes crack and sings weird. But the self-aware culture we’ve collectively built on social media would never admit defeat and accept the Creed-is-actually-good argument. It would only settle for the I-do-like-Creed-but-it’s-my-lonely-friday-night-at-Applebees-secret.
They’re becoming an almost Springsteenian symbol of failed idealism for millennials who, in their late thirties, early forties, are starting to figure out they’ll never be the special human being their parents once promised they’ll one day be. Secretly liking Creed is embracing your ordinariness, with a wink-wink kind of way. You accept your fate while rocking to Christian working class anthems. You are not cool and it’s OK.
You have the potential to be cool again once the song is over. It’s a temporary contract.
But are Creed ACTUALLY good?
Creed was never secretly great.
They are and always were a competent, derivative arena rock band that banked on power chords and subconscious association between Scott Stapp and Eddie Vedder vocals in order to thrive. To use the parlance of video games, Creed was an expansion pack to Pearl Jam. They never would’ve existed without them and they don’t make sense if you don’t subconsciously associate them with something you already love.
What we love about Creed in 2024 is the simplicity of being a teenager/young adult in a pre-9/11 world. It was a time of uncomplicated pleasures where you tried to enjoy the music you were dealt with by radio and television without overthinking it. The overcustomization of the end user experience brought by the internet has made the process of discovering new music and enjoying it more complicated and anxiety inducing than ever. Now that you have access to all the music in the world, whatever you choose to pay attention to is more important than ever.
Hence the love-hate relationship everyone has with the yearly Spotify Wrapped.
By willingly listening to Creed in 2024, you refuse to take responsibility for your own taste and find solace in what-is-offered. People respond to that more than they respond to the music itself. But the music itself is fine. Power chords always help to blow off some steam and the over-the-top emotionality of Creed isn’t corny when you do feel emotional in the same In the End by Linkin Park is always hit the fucking spot when you’re going through some shit.
I think everyone will agree when I claim that you don’t really like Creed, but you do like the memories their music invokes and the forgiveness towards yourself you’re feeling when you hear Higher now. They’re not great, but they’ve become culturally good for the mental health of aging millennials. It’s music you can enjoy without feeling the pressure of being a professional and emotional success. By listening to Creed in 2024, you’re embracing the wasteland and the possibility that something will grow from it again. If this isn’t peak New Sincerity with a side of self-deprecating humor, I don’t know what is.
That’s why I believe they will fill up the arenas and have a successful tour. Creed is (kind of) unironically cool again. They could become the biggest feel good story of the 2020s and I’d be fine with it.
