Nickelback vs. Creed: Worst Band
DAVE TOMAR: Say what you want about the past six years in human history. George W. Bush, Hurricane Katrina, North Korean brinksmanship. At least Creed didn’t exist. But just like that herpes flare up that you thought was totally, finally gone, it has once again reared its ugly, blistered, puss-spurting head. Evidently, lead singer Scott Stapp got tired of Googling his name and finding outdated punchlines. So he called up the boys and made a record, tentatively entitled Full Circle. The title is a reference to the fact that Creed can’t come up with a good title for its record.
Now since it has been six years, you can be forgiven and applauded for forgetting about Creed. As a reminder, Creed is the worst band that ever was. Creed is the pale bloated stinking corpse of rock and roll, fished from a sea of formulaic opportunism, crass consumerism and easy money. It is the stillborn bastard son of parts much greater than itself, mashed together in a fleshy lump of organic rot. It’s not like there aren’t other offenders. Creed is not the first band to reduce rock music to a cynical collection of arbitron approved sounds, nor is it the first to use these sounds to promote a messianic agenda. Night Ranger, I’m looking in your direction.
But Creed earns a distinction for genuinely combining the elements of rock’s last golden age—bookended by the release of Nevermind in 1991 and Cobain’s suicide in 1994—and yielding something utterly irredeemable from it. Powered by loud, buzzy grunge guitar and produced with all the knobs pushed to the high-end, Creed is the sound of rock music sucking its own dick for a paying audience. I think you can get that in Thailand but here it violates obscenity law.
All that said, it is really the unparalleled Scott Stapp who distinguishes Creed. As a vocalist, he rivals the likes of Michael Bolton and Celine Dion in terms of putrescence and as a celebrity, he is guilty of insufferable douchebagerie. Take for example his comments in a 2001 interview with People Magazine, where Stapp told a reporter that “I see a lot of breasts when I’m singing . . . But that’s not what I’m into.” If you’ll pardon me for being old fashioned, this guy should have been black-balled right then. I see a lot of breasts . . . but that’s not what I’m into?? Wow. Wrap your brain around this. That means Stapp is in it for the art.
Of course, these comments predated the 2006 sex tape in which he and unlikely friend Kid Rock engage in sexually explicit activities with several large breasted women on a tour bus. Apparently, he’s only into it if Kid Rock can be there to watch. Oh, and as a tangent, check out the preview some time. Is that chick giving it to Kid from behind? Hmmmm.
To be fair, Stapp has overcome terrible odds as a human being. Born with an ass for a head, he has achieved remarkable success by shitting out of his mouth and into a microphone. But does it really justify a reunion? I guess you could argue that the time is right. Rock radio is officially deceased, with most formats dominated by what I have always called ‘Creed Bands.’
This is where Ted’s argument comes in. Nickelback, Puddle of Mudd, Days of the New, Grin, Papa Roach, Our Lady Peace etc. The 35 million records that Creed sold paved the way for their success. This is what makes Creed’s offense one of the highest order. Its enormity and self-importance helped to open the door to the sound that would castrate and replace rock and roll. To me, suggesting that Nickelback is worse than Creed is like saying Adolph Eichmann was worse than Hitler. We all know who the head cheese was.
With respect to Creed’s new album, Stapp calls this phase in his career a ‘rebirth.’ I wonder what happens when a Born Again Christian is reborn again. How much more Christian is he now? I guess you would have to listen to the album to know. Good luck with that.
In fairness to the world, Creed should have receded back to the Pentecostal swamp from which it slithered, never to return to the surface again. We have already suffered enough.
TED BERG: Make no mistake: Creed sucks. They make terrible music with lame lyrics, and they suck so hard that their fans once actually sued them to recoup money they had spent on tickets to disappointing performances. That’s a nearly unprecedented level of suck.
But Creed is a Christian band, and Scott Stapp’s ridiculous and impious fall from grace made his band subject to a bevy of punchlines. At this point, their recent reunion notwithstanding, Creed is a joke. Because of that, and no matter how thoroughly they suck, Creed can only be considered the second worst band of all time.
The worst is Nickelback. And it’s not even close.
I remember the first time I heard of Nickelback, in early September of 2001. I used Yahoo! as my homepage, because that was something people did in 2001, and a headline on the Yahoo! Music stack read, “Nickelback’s New Album Changes Everything.” It became a joke among me and my roommates, and we’d talk about how everything was dramatically different now that Nickelback’s Silver Side Up had dropped.
Little did we know, events would soon unfold that actually would change everything. I’m referring, of course, not to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, but to the advancing ubiquity of “How You Remind Me,” Nickelback’s first single. All of a sudden, where there used to be a radio, there was only a speaker that frequently tortured me with one of the lamest, most derivative rock anthems of all time. I couldn’t work out at the gym for more than 20 minutes without being subjected to Nickelback’s fist-pumping awfulness. When it came on, I had to leave, and so I got fat.
Nickelback’s fault, not mine.
FOR HANDIN’ YOU A HEART WORTH BREAKIN’!
Sorry.
Anyway, the bright side in 2001 was that Nickelback seemed destined to be a one-album wonder, a horrifying tragedy that swept through our lives, shook our worlds, pummeled our heads with predictable music and disappeared into the ether.
Didn’t happen. Nickelback, unbelievably, continued to inexorably storm forward with album after album and hit after hit. Canada doesn’t have much of a military, I’m told, but they don’t really need one. Nickelback is indestructable. If Canada needs to annex some territory, they should just send Chad Kroeger in with his guitar. Give him six weeks, and everyone in the area will be crazed with rage or, improbably, brainwashed by Nickelback’s agenda.
What’s on that docket? Terrible music. Need evidence? Listen to a Nickelback song. Still want proof? Check this out.
By now you’re probably thinking: “Who’s this guy to judge? Millions of people buy Nickelback albums.”
Guess what? Millions of people are stupid. I believe taste is subjective, just not in this case. Nickelback sucks that much. Nickelback is the type of sterile, uninteresting bullshit that record companies can force upon people when the labels’ parent corporations own all the radio stations.
I share an office building with a record company, and you can pick out the executives as soon as they get into an elevator. They wear pinstripe blazers and designer t-shirts with expensive-looking jeans and shiny leather shoes. You see them and you think, “man, look at how these guys dress — they must be cool. They must have much better taste than me, standing here in the elevator in my seven-year-old Doc Martens and my Old Navy khakis.”
Wrong. I overheard a conversation between a few of them just a few days ago. They were discussing some new band they had heard, and one of them said, “They actually remind me a little bit of Nickelback.” I assumed, naturally, that this was a derogatory statement, so I said something like, “Whoa, nelly, better stay away from them then!”
I got no response. They rolled their eyes and continued talking. Record executives don’t care that Nickelback sucks; Nickelback is something they can sell to innocent people who somehow haven’t been exposed to more compelling music, and so they see a comparison to Nickelback as a good thing.
That’s a bad thing. That means that Nickelback’s suck tentacles reach far beyond the radio stations they’ve ruined and the headaches they’ve provided. They’ve crept into the heads of people who find and promote new music, and so now we’re all inevitably going to be exposed to more bands like Nickelback.
No one’s going out to search for the next Creed. Our exposure to Creed, beyond what we seek out for our own snarky entertainment, is mostly finished. Nickelback’s reign of terror has only just begun. That’s why they decidedly suck more than Creed.