Creed cooks up recipe for rock drivel

By: Alex Segura, Jr. / Managing Editor
Music buyers are not a wily lot. They never will be. Yet you can’t help but wonder what Creed does that makes the girls swoon and the boys play air guitar. It can’t be their sound. I liked it better when it was called Pearl Jam and Soundgarden. It can’t be their brooding good looks. The Doors did that years ago. It can’t be their talent. Then again, talent doesn’t always equate to record sales. Look at Yanni.

For eight weeks Weathered sat atop the Billboard charts. Creed has succeeded where similar poetry spouting, guitar crunching and mood swinging bands have flopped. Creed are the anti-rock stars. They’re punk’s worst nightmare.

Like the Journeys, Chicagos and Bostons before them, Creed have given up whatever anti-establishment stance is still left in rock and basked in the generalities that have gotten them this far. I would safely say that only the most hard core Creedlodyte could describe in detail how My Own Prison, Human Clay and Weathered differ from each other musically. Or how they differ from a stack of Alice in Chains or Candlebox b-sides.

Like most bands lately, Creed has reversed rock rebellion. Classic punks like the Sex Pistols and the Clash fought the excesses of prog-rock by bringing music back to it’s simpler, harder roots. Creed is taking it to the next level. With their sellout mentality, brooding Catholic school-boy spiritualism and homogenous persona, they’ve built a machine that is the anti-rock band.

They’re not the first band to do this, nor are they the only one doing it now. Creed leads the pack of faceless bands like Tantric, Staind, Slipknot, Linkin Park and Papa Roach. Could anyone aside from hard core nü rock fanboys be able to point them out in a lineup of future hasbeens? Probably not.

The most irksome thing about Creed isn’t their glaring lack of talent or invisible sense of humor. It’s that they actually take themselves seriously. Poor suckers. They think their music actually matters.

If you’re going to produce unoriginal cock-rock, at least have fun with it. Take a page from the Whitesnake and Bon Jovi handbooks: If you’re making mad money off music that will only sell for a few years, you might as well have a little fun while you’re at it.

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