\n<\/p>\n
\n\tIn midtown Manhattan one fall night, a m\u00e9lange of bros descended upon Herald Square to see Creed<\/a>. They walked around clutching Budweiser beers and hot dogs in their fists \u2014 some of them even lit their Marlboro reds in unison during \u201cHigher.\u201d The crowd was peppered with 3 Doors Down shirts (they were the opening act), Dallas Cowboys jerseys with \u201cStapp\u201d on the back, and the types of dirty-joke tees you buy on the Jersey Shore boardwalk (one read \u201cDo MILFs Not Drugs\u201d).<\/p>\n \n\tThis was all happening not in 2002 \u2014 but last November, when the band sold out Madison Square Garden.<\/p>\n \n\tThe last time Creed<\/a> played the Garden, it was the year 2000. They were both the biggest and most hated band in the world. The Christian tinges of their lyrics, baritone dramatics of Scott Stapp\u2019s voice, shoulder-length wind-blown hair, greased up chests and perpetually unbuttoned shirts made the band and others like them symbols of all that was uncool about modern rock music at the time.<\/p>\n \n\tBut for every joke at Creed\u2019s expense in their heyday, the band would sell another thousand CDs, tallying up nearly 30 million albums sold in America, with 53 million worldwide. When it comes to the bestselling acts of the millennium, the band was up there with Eminem, Britney Spears<\/a>, Toby Keith, and Jay-Z. And while all those acts were prodded in their own ways by the public and the critics, the only other bands that were as maligned as Creed were the bands that sounded like them: Nickelback<\/a>, 3 Doors Down, Staind, Hinder, Buckcherry and the rest of the Top 40 hard rock of that era.<\/p>\n \n\tAt the time, these \u00fcber-masc hard-rockers were seen as the regrettable product of a generation of musicians who idolized the sound of grunge icons like Nirvana and Pearl Jam but wanted to live the more debauched and ideally less depressed life of the Sunset Strip rockers like Guns \u2018n Roses or M\u00f6tley Cr\u00fce. Not exactly grunge but not exactly metal, they fell under the umbrella term \u201cbutt-rock<\/a>,\u201d a name the bands loathed but the fans have adopted more earnestly over the years.<\/p>\n \t\tEditor\u2019s picks<\/p>\n<\/h2>\n<\/section>\n \n\t\u201cIn the early 2000s, rock is back,\u201d recalls critic and 60 Songs That Explain the \u201890s<\/a> <\/em>host Rob Harvilla. Around the time butt-rock reigned, Harvilla had just begun working at an alt-weekly in Columbus, Ohio. \u201cThe Strokes and the White Stripes were considered very cool, magazine-cover-worthy bands. Meanwhile, Nickelback<\/a> are selling 10 million records. The entire point of declaring some rock cool is to cast further aspersions on the actual popular rock bands at the time. You always need the cool band and the uncool band for it to be defined against.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tIn the decades following, Creed and others either waned in popularity or imploded the way popular rock bands often do: lineup changes, substance abuse, legal issues, deaths. The acts that kept it going became focused on touring, failing to see their new songs or albums climb the charts the way they used to. But before Creed reunited in 2023, however, a tide was already shifting. Millennials who came of age when Creed and other bands like them ruled the charts, have fonder memories than the seemingly more discerning adults of the time recall. Their childhoods are peppered with memories of hearing \u201cOne Last Breath\u201d on the Top 40 stations or watching Nickelback\u2019s \u201cPhotograph\u201d video on MTV. Those memories were good,<\/em> remarkable even.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tOver the past three years, content shared about these bands shifted from sneering jokes to loving or humorous memories. Fans started to call the genre \u201cdivorced-dad rock<\/a>,\u201d a natural evolution of classic rock\u2019s \u201cdad rock\u201d moniker. There are Gen Z content creators sharing their songs and attending butt-rock dance parties. Even big pop stars are singing their praises. On Instagram Live in 2023, Megan Thee Stallion turned up the volume and stopped what she was doing to dance to \u201cHow You Remind Me\u201d when it came on shuffle. \u201cWe need to pull up the instrumental,\u201d she said, right before imitating the way Chad Kroeger sings the word \u201cyeah.\u201d SZA defended both Creed and Nickelback during an interview with Variety<\/a>.<\/em>\u00a0<\/p>\n \t\tRelated Content<\/p>\n<\/h2>\n<\/section>\n \n\t\u201cDo white people hate Nickelback?\u201d she asked after the interviewer facepalmed in response to her saying she loved those bands. \u201cI like Creed so much \u2014 \u2018Higher\u2019? Why are you hating on it? Have you ever felt more inspired and uplifted in your life? I\u2019m in the car and I\u2019m blasting \u2018Higher,\u2019 I feel like it\u2019s a gospel song, the vocals are going crazy and it\u2019s also somehow slightly romantic, it just feels so fun. Because even if it\u2019s cliche, he\u2019s so fucking dead-ass! I will be a Creed fan forever.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tNostalgia cycles are natural; every 20 to 25 years, some trend or genre or subculture comes back into the mainstream, revived and reinvented by kids who were too young to experience it the first time. The past five years have been flush with aughts microtrends: baggy low-rise pants, baby T-shirts, the bright pastels of Club Libby Lu, Fueled by Ramen pop punk. The streets of Manhattan\u2019s SoHo area are as indecipherable from 2002 as the Creed concert had been. The cycle can become so accidentally ubiquitous that the former kids who blissfully existed outside of whatever discourses these trends or bands started in their heyday wonder now, as adults, what was so bad about them in the first place.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tBut massive tours and some Instagram memes are just the tip of the butt-rock iceberg: There are sold-out cruises, a festival on land, bootleg merch, streaming hikes, and dance parties in every major American city. The bands themselves are back to reap the benefits: Creed starred in a Super Bowl commercial last year for Paramount+<\/a>, where Drew Barrymore, Patrick Stewart, and Arnold of Hey Arnold! <\/em>sang \u201cHigher.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tBut it\u2019s not just the meme makers who are reclaiming the music of their youth. So have the Trump-loving, manosphere-running conservative bros, a more fitting reflection of the post-9\/11 Bush era during which these bands found their audiences, adding a more complicated layer to the butt-rock revival. The audience for these bands is more confusing than ever, split between the extremely online humorists and the more earnest ticket buyers, who probably never stopped loving these bands in the first place. Between them is where the irony starts to blur: Were Creed and Nickelback unfairly rated? And if so, who are they even for anyway?<\/p>\n \n\tON HALLOWEEN IN <\/strong>New York City, the usual crowd of costumed revelers packed out Fig. 19, a speakeasy cocktail bar on the Lower East Side. There were cats, zombies, a topical Challengers<\/em> couples\u2019 costume, and, unlike most parties, a high volume of Fred Dursts. Behind the decks, the Deadbangers Ball\u2019s host and DJ, Alanna Raben, played Korn and Creed as the backward red caps drank Mezcallica and Black Hole Rum cocktails.<\/p>\n \n\tRaben\u2019s first Deadbangers Ball was five Halloweens prior, in 2019. She had been DJ\u2019ing around New York for a while, and was starting to grow frustrated with playing the same Top 40 every night. Raben, a millennial, is a fan of music that \u201csounds and feels like a lower-back tattoo,\u201d she says. \u201cI have a strong love for tribal tramp stamps and wallet chains and Ed Hardy. I will definitely date a dude with a soul patch or a landing strip. So I champion it. I\u2019m here for it.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tBefore she started hosting her own hard-rock parties, she\u2019d throw on Nickelback and Creed in between Drake or the Chainsmokers to test out the crowd.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cI felt like 2 a.m. was this magic hour where I could finally play what I liked, and it resonated with people,\u201d she recalls. \u201cThose people making faces pretending to despise this music are now too drunk to hide it. They\u2019re lip-synching to \u2018How You Remind Me.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tA year earlier, she started \u201cGrunch,\u201d a grunge brunch where she would play a mix of grunge, post-grunge, and a host of other semi-related rock from those eras. Bushwick restaurant El Cortez served up Nickelback Shots, Red Hot Chili Nachos, and Korn on the Cob to a packed-out crowd.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cWhen I first started these events, it wasn\u2019t exactly cool or accepted,\u201d Raben admits. \u201cVenues would hear me pitch an event centered around butt-rock and turn their heads.\u201d During the pandemic, she turned her Grunch Instagram<\/a> into a meme page. It has since accrued 178,000 followers with her Fred Durst Fridays and Scott Stapp Sundays stealing the show. When pandemic bans lifted, she saw her parties grow, too.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cWe\u2019re selling out events across various cities. We do an event called Nothing Butt-Rock and venues are now requesting us to host afterparties for bands and shows,\u201d Raben says. Grunch has hosted official afterparties for Crazytown and Limp Bizkit concerts, as well as a club party for VIP-ticket buyers at Creed\u2019s show at Long Island\u2019s Jones Beach amphitheater this July. \u201cPeople recognized that our love for the music is genuine. There\u2019s a real fan base out there. The memes have definitely proven that,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n \n\tMeanwhile, down south, songwriter Bryan Frazier grew up idolizing Nickelback and Creed.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cI always loved these bands,\u201d the 35-year-old Virginia native says proudly. He moved to Nashville in his twenties to pursue his music career. \u201cPeople hated them and tried to make fun of you for liking this music. It\u2019s been a funny cycle of it coming back around where it\u2019s cool again to like it. I guess people are admitting it.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tAt BMI\u2019s Key West Songwriters Festival, he realized he wasn\u2019t alone in unabashedly loving this era of music. He was in the Atlanta airport with a few other musicians who attended the conference, and they got to talking about those rock songs they couldn\u2019t avoid on the radio as kids. \u201cWe were trading memes and being like, \u2018Oh, man, we miss that music,\u2019\u201d Frazier says.<\/p>\n \n\tOne of the new friends was from the Raised Rowdy brand, a podcast network and live-event promoter in Nashville. They decided to create a house band and put on a show where the city\u2019s songwriter community could sing some of their favorites from this era, creating \u201ca professional cover band with really good singers.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cIt brought everyone back to being young,\u201d he says of the first Butt-Rock Night<\/a>, which happened at Live Oak in March 2021. Nearly 250 people attended. \u201cNo one was in competition with each other. We were all just kids again singing the songs we loved.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tFrazier has since started his own Instagram page, where he produces memes and reels about loving the same bands they cover at the show. The page has accrued 165,000 followers and even supportive comments from Scott Stapp. In November, Butt-Rock Night hosted the official afterparty for Nickelback\u2019s Live in Nashville<\/em> album, \u201ca big milestone moment for this ridiculous night,\u201d Frazier says.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cCreed and a lot of those guys have been made fun of for so long, it took them a while to get on board to like and comment and understand we weren\u2019t making fun of them,\u201d he continues. \u201cWe are 100 percent superfans of these guys, and the term is not derogatory. We want to make them bigger. We\u2019re trying to make it a positive term.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tIt\u2019s clear the bands are feeling the positivity and even rethinking their relationship with a genre name that held such negative connotations for so long. Hinder, who have seen a remarkable jump in popularity for their song \u201cLips of an Angel,\u201d have found themselves back on the road and in the studio, having released the astutely named album Back to Life<\/em> in May.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cThe renaissance was happening, and we just thought it was a perfect time to get out there and put new music out and kind of piggyback off of it, since we have the eyes on us and on the songs,\u201d says drummer Cody Hanson.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tAnd the fans are definitely searching for Hinder: A representative for TouchTunes shared data trends with Rolling Stone, <\/em>and Hinder saw a 22 percent increase in plays from 2022 to 2024. At the bar across the street from where Frazier hosts Butt-Rock Night, they had to take \u201cLips of an Angel\u201d off the jukebox because it was being played too much.<\/p>\n \n\tGrunch and Butt-Rock Night are just two in a wave of butt-rock themed pages and parties. In L.A. this past May, DJ and nu-metal enthusiast Holiday Kirk put on Creed Night at a downtown venue where amateur wrestlers broke drywall over their heads as \u201cHigher\u201d poured out of the speakers. Last fall, SiriusXM Octane host and content creator Jesea Lee<\/a> co-hosted his first butt-rock-themed party in Cleveland with emo party promoters Jukebox Breakdown.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tLee\u2019s popular TikTok page is dedicated to hard-rock and metal news, so he began noticing a shift in positive accolades toward butt-rock bands in his own comments section back in 2023.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cThere was a noticeable huge tide turn on Nickelback,\u201d he explains. This was between the release of the Canadian band\u2019s 2022 album. Get Rollin\u2019,<\/em> and the premiere of its documentary, Hate to Love,<\/em> which is now streaming on Netflix. \u201cEvery time I post content about them and it does get crapped on, those commenters get crapped on back. People will say \u2018It\u2019s not cool to pretend to not like Nickelback.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tAll of these parties and meme pages have found success in a fusion of post-grunge, hard rock, and nu metal, combining the distinct genres under the same umbrella term of butt-ock, even though Korn, Deftones, and Limp Bizkit were not only markedly different in their approach, but also hated the butt-rock sound as much as everyone else claimed they did at the time. The nu-metal revival predated Creed\u2019s and Nickelback\u2019s comebacks by a few years; there were multiple Woodstock \u201899 docs, the repopularization of the JNCO brand, and a big Deftones collaboration with Heaven by Marc Jacobs that starred It-girl model Gabbriette in its campaign. As more bands that were played on the same rock and Top 40 stations during that time get reborn, the concept of Nineties-music nostalgia gets further flattened.<\/p>\n \n\tHarvilla began to notice the blurred lines of late-Nineties genres as he produced his podcast 60 Songs That Explain the \u201890s<\/em> and while writing its corresponding book.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cThe late Nineties were a weird, transitional wasteland,\u201d he says. All of these genres that had such stark lines in the Nineties have now become a more nebulous concept, blending into one supergenre of just \u201cNineties music.\u201d The same can be said for Y2K as well, as many of those bands only became more successful in the new millennium.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tNostalgia and memory can be tricky. Most of the posts Lee has noticed on his TikTok feed have been millennials and Gen Z listeners recalling their experiences hearing Staind or 3 Doors Down or Puddle of Mudd or System of a Down in their parents\u2019 cars. The genre lines mean nothing; this was nothing more than the Top 40 hard rock that defined their childhoods.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tBut the Gen X\u2019ers who weren\u2019t making fun of butt-rock are still very much active fans. They\u2019re not the ones attending the trendy dance parties; they\u2019re the ones selling out cabins on Creed\u2019s cruise and filling the lawns at the sold-out amphitheater runs each summer. In the comments of viral videos, they\u2019ve become protective and even territorial, Lee says.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cYou see a lot of angry older people in the comments,\u201d he says, mostly on \u201cbutt-rock rankings\u201d of artists and albums that younger fans have shared. \u201c\u2018You don\u2019t even know about that,\u2019 or, \u2018How could you rank this? You weren\u2019t there.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cThese bands sold millions and millions of records and their fans loved them unironically,\u201d Harvilla adds. \u201cThey loved them despite the fact that they were uncool, or maybe because they were uncool. And that\u2019s a more interesting relationship to have with a band than to just be told to like something. That\u2019s something more strident, more honest, more personal.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tCREED\u2019S MADISON SQUARE Garden show took place just a few weeks after Donald Trump was elected president again. There were no red hats visible in the audience, but there was a sense of victory among the attendees. At least two \u201cUSA!\u201d chants occurred during the set of opening act 3 Doors Down (who played Trump\u2019s first inauguration in 2017). At least four more happened after Creed took the stage.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cThere\u2019s no way any Kamala [Harris] voters would go to this,\u201d commented the millennial men behind me, pronouncing Kamala\u2019s name incorrectly.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tFlightless Bird<\/a><\/em> host Dave Farrier encountered a similar scene when he saw Creed in San Bernardino, California. Farrier grew up in New Zealand and attended a conservative Christian school. Creed and Nickelback were huge in his home country, but Creed were able to get the stamp of approval from his school and family because of the Christian-sounding themes from a band that never explicitly identified as being religious. The crowd was, as Farrier recalls, \u201cdeeply Trump-y.\u201d The concert reminded him of the Baptist megachurches of his youth; Stapp even stopped the show to pra<\/a>y after a fan was injured in the pit.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cNothing Scott Stapp is doing is ironic,\u201d he says. It\u2019s part of the problem Creed\u2019s haters had with them to begin with: He\u2019s an incredibly earnest frontman who toys with the theatrics of Eighties rock machismo \u2014 crotch gyrating, legs splayed out in a Warrior 2 pose while belting so hard that his tanned skin is always covered in beads of sweat within the first few songs.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cThere\u2019s this very hypermasculine vibe,\u201d Farrier continues. \u201cLooking at the crowd that was at the Creed concert I went to, it did feel like the attitude of men who were there was, \u2018We can be men. It\u2019s not shameful to be into this hypermasculine, very right-leaning Christian world.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tOnline, people have joked about the parallels Trump\u2019s second administration has had to George W. Bush\u2019s presidency: the blind nationalism, the Islamophobia, the fearmongering around who does and does not legally reside here. It was no accident that these hard-rock bands thrived even more in the wake of a deeply patriotic era in modern American history; Creed were notably called upon to headline the halftime show at the Dallas Cowboys\u2019 Thanksgiving game in 2001, which doubled as a 9\/11 tribute. Video of the almost outlandishly patriotic show featured a choir, \u00a0flag spinners, aerial silk performers, and live doves. It has recently begun going viral every year during the Super Bowl, despite not being affiliated with the Super Bowl, and spawned a popular shirt that calls it \u201cthe greatest halftime show ever.\u201d<\/p>\n\n
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