In midtown Manhattan one fall night, a mélange of bros descended upon Herald Square to see Creed. They walked around clutching Budweiser beers and hot dogs in their fists — some of them even lit their Marlboro reds in unison during “Higher.” The crowd was peppered with 3 Doors Down shirts (they were the opening act), Dallas Cowboys jerseys with “Stapp” on the back, and the types of dirty-joke tees you buy on the Jersey Shore boardwalk (one read “Do MILFs Not Drugs”).
This was all happening not in 2002 — but last November, when the band sold out Madison Square Garden.
The last time Creed 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’s 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.
But for every joke at Creed’s 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, 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, 3 Doors Down, Staind, Hinder, Buckcherry and the rest of the Top 40 hard rock of that era.
At the time, these über-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 ‘n Roses or Mötley Crüe. Not exactly grunge but not exactly metal, they fell under the umbrella term “butt-rock,” a name the bands loathed but the fans have adopted more earnestly over the years.
“In the early 2000s, rock is back,” recalls critic and 60 Songs That Explain the ‘90s host Rob Harvilla. Around the time butt-rock reigned, Harvilla had just begun working at an alt-weekly in Columbus, Ohio. “The Strokes and the White Stripes were considered very cool, magazine-cover-worthy bands. Meanwhile, Nickelback 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.”
In 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 “One Last Breath” on the Top 40 stations or watching Nickelback’s “Photograph” video on MTV. Those memories were good, remarkable even.
Over the past three years, content shared about these bands shifted from sneering jokes to loving or humorous memories. Fans started to call the genre “divorced-dad rock,” a natural evolution of classic rock’s “dad rock” 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 “How You Remind Me” when it came on shuffle. “We need to pull up the instrumental,” she said, right before imitating the way Chad Kroeger sings the word “yeah.” SZA defended both Creed and Nickelback during an interview with Variety.
“Do white people hate Nickelback?” she asked after the interviewer facepalmed in response to her saying she loved those bands. “I like Creed so much — ‘Higher’? Why are you hating on it? Have you ever felt more inspired and uplifted in your life? I’m in the car and I’m blasting ‘Higher,’ I feel like it’s a gospel song, the vocals are going crazy and it’s also somehow slightly romantic, it just feels so fun. Because even if it’s cliche, he’s so fucking dead-ass! I will be a Creed fan forever.”
Nostalgia 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’s 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.
But 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+, where Drew Barrymore, Patrick Stewart, and Arnold of Hey Arnold! sang “Higher.”
But it’s 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?
ON HALLOWEEN IN 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 couples’ costume, and, unlike most parties, a high volume of Fred Dursts. Behind the decks, the Deadbangers Ball’s host and DJ, Alanna Raben, played Korn and Creed as the backward red caps drank Mezcallica and Black Hole Rum cocktails.
Raben’s first Deadbangers Ball was five Halloweens prior, in 2019. She had been DJ’ing 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 “sounds and feels like a lower-back tattoo,” she says. “I 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’m here for it.”
Before she started hosting her own hard-rock parties, she’d throw on Nickelback and Creed in between Drake or the Chainsmokers to test out the crowd.
“I felt like 2 a.m. was this magic hour where I could finally play what I liked, and it resonated with people,” she recalls. “Those people making faces pretending to despise this music are now too drunk to hide it. They’re lip-synching to ‘How You Remind Me.’”
A year earlier, she started “Grunch,” 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.
“When I first started these events, it wasn’t exactly cool or accepted,” Raben admits. “Venues would hear me pitch an event centered around butt-rock and turn their heads.” During the pandemic, she turned her Grunch Instagram 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.
“We’re 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,” 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’s show at Long Island’s Jones Beach amphitheater this July. “People recognized that our love for the music is genuine. There’s a real fan base out there. The memes have definitely proven that,” she says.
Meanwhile, down south, songwriter Bryan Frazier grew up idolizing Nickelback and Creed.
“I always loved these bands,” the 35-year-old Virginia native says proudly. He moved to Nashville in his twenties to pursue his music career. “People hated them and tried to make fun of you for liking this music. It’s been a funny cycle of it coming back around where it’s cool again to like it. I guess people are admitting it.”
At BMI’s Key West Songwriters Festival, he realized he wasn’t 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’t avoid on the radio as kids. “We were trading memes and being like, ‘Oh, man, we miss that music,’” Frazier says.
One 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’s songwriter community could sing some of their favorites from this era, creating “a professional cover band with really good singers.”
“It brought everyone back to being young,” he says of the first Butt-Rock Night, which happened at Live Oak in March 2021. Nearly 250 people attended. “No one was in competition with each other. We were all just kids again singing the songs we loved.”
Frazier 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’s Live in Nashville album, “a big milestone moment for this ridiculous night,” Frazier says.
“Creed 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’t making fun of them,” he continues. “We are 100 percent superfans of these guys, and the term is not derogatory. We want to make them bigger. We’re trying to make it a positive term.”
It’s 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 “Lips of an Angel,” have found themselves back on the road and in the studio, having released the astutely named album Back to Life in May.
“The 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,” says drummer Cody Hanson.
And the fans are definitely searching for Hinder: A representative for TouchTunes shared data trends with Rolling Stone, 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 “Lips of an Angel” off the jukebox because it was being played too much.
Grunch 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 “Higher” poured out of the speakers. Last fall, SiriusXM Octane host and content creator Jesea Lee co-hosted his first butt-rock-themed party in Cleveland with emo party promoters Jukebox Breakdown.
Lee’s 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.
“There was a noticeable huge tide turn on Nickelback,” he explains. This was between the release of the Canadian band’s 2022 album. Get Rollin’, and the premiere of its documentary, Hate to Love, which is now streaming on Netflix. “Every time I post content about them and it does get crapped on, those commenters get crapped on back. People will say ‘It’s not cool to pretend to not like Nickelback.’”
All 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’s and Nickelback’s comebacks by a few years; there were multiple Woodstock ‘99 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.
Harvilla began to notice the blurred lines of late-Nineties genres as he produced his podcast 60 Songs That Explain the ‘90s and while writing its corresponding book.
“The late Nineties were a weird, transitional wasteland,” 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 “Nineties music.” The same can be said for Y2K as well, as many of those bands only became more successful in the new millennium.
Nostalgia 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’ cars. The genre lines mean nothing; this was nothing more than the Top 40 hard rock that defined their childhoods.
But the Gen X’ers who weren’t making fun of butt-rock are still very much active fans. They’re not the ones attending the trendy dance parties; they’re the ones selling out cabins on Creed’s cruise and filling the lawns at the sold-out amphitheater runs each summer. In the comments of viral videos, they’ve become protective and even territorial, Lee says.
“You see a lot of angry older people in the comments,” he says, mostly on “butt-rock rankings” of artists and albums that younger fans have shared. “‘You don’t even know about that,’ or, ‘How could you rank this? You weren’t there.’”
“These bands sold millions and millions of records and their fans loved them unironically,” Harvilla adds. “They loved them despite the fact that they were uncool, or maybe because they were uncool. And that’s a more interesting relationship to have with a band than to just be told to like something. That’s something more strident, more honest, more personal.”
CREED’S 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 “USA!” chants occurred during the set of opening act 3 Doors Down (who played Trump’s first inauguration in 2017). At least four more happened after Creed took the stage.
“There’s no way any Kamala (Harris) voters would go to this,” commented the millennial men behind me, pronouncing Kamala’s name incorrectly.
Flightless Bird 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, “deeply Trump-y.” The concert reminded him of the Baptist megachurches of his youth; Stapp even stopped the show to pray after a fan was injured in the pit.
“Nothing Scott Stapp is doing is ironic,” he says. It’s part of the problem Creed’s haters had with them to begin with: He’s an incredibly earnest frontman who toys with the theatrics of Eighties rock machismo — 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.
“There’s this very hypermasculine vibe,” Farrier continues. “Looking at the crowd that was at the Creed concert I went to, it did feel like the attitude of men who were there was, ‘We can be men. It’s not shameful to be into this hypermasculine, very right-leaning Christian world.”
Online, people have joked about the parallels Trump’s second administration has had to George W. Bush’s 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’ Thanksgiving game in 2001, which doubled as a 9/11 tribute. Video of the almost outlandishly patriotic show featured a choir, flag 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 “the greatest halftime show ever.”
Whether or not they were explicitly religious or even political, these bands represented simple ideas of good and evils, songs about sin and salvation. “I think politically, the world that these bands came up in and grew up in and were popular in is being mirrored now,” Farrier adds. “It’s less about the old-school Christian values I grew up with, but more the idea that it’s OK to be white and proud and a man, and it’s cool you can rock really hard still.”
As apolitical as the Instagram memes and viral videos have been, that hasn’t stopped alt-right influencers from adopting butt-rock’s resurgence as a positive sign for their movements. Political commentator Rogan O’Handley posted on X: “Gen Z kids are listening to Creed & Nickelback. They’re going to church in record numbers. They’re intolerant of LGBT extremism. They’re supporting Trump in record numbers. They’re barely drinking alcohol and avoiding hookup culture. This generation didn’t grow up watching MTV, Hollywood movies, and legacy media. They grew up on the internet and self selected the content they wanted. And it turns out when the human mind isn’t brainwashed, it drifts towards the Bible and traditional values. And 90s rock.”
Outside of 3 Doors Down’s inauguration performance and Staind’s Aaron Lewis declaring “God bless Donald Trump and J.D. Vance” in concert, most of these bands’ politics have been opaque. Canadian act Nickelback are confusingly co-headlining a “Rock the Country” tour with Trump superfan Kid Rock. Stapp endorsed God during a concert prior to the 2024 election.
“They want us divided. They want us separate. They want us compartmentalized in our little niches, in our own little groups … to keep us distracted from holding them accountable,” he said at a Texas show last September. “We remind them that we are a constitutional republic built upon the Bible and the word of God, and not a ‘democracy.’” He went on to say that “civil rights are being violated every day” and that “everything we accuse almost every other country of doing, we’re doing right here.”
“I would say I am a Creed fan,” Farrier says now, “and yet I don’t stand by any of the values they preach on, or certainly the values I imagine a lot of the people I found myself in the crowd with have. But I fit right in at a Creed concert: I’m a white male in his forties wandering around.”
UNLIKE FARRIER, I did not fit in at the Creed concert. As a Black millennial woman, I was an anomaly in Madison Square Garden that Friday night. But I grew up in the Midwest loving Creed, Nickelback, Staind, Hinder, and the collection of nu-metal bands that get lumped in with them on all of these meme pages and parties.
During a classmate’s 10th birthday party, I watched her receive a copy of Creed’s Weathered from her sister and cry tears of joy. Throughout my twenties, I’ve belted out “How You Remind Me” and “With Arms Wide Open” in countless karaoke rooms. At age 30, I took a stretch limo with six Canadians to go see Nickelback perform at New Jersey’s Starland Ballroom. Last summer, I wore a backward red hat and black cargo pants on a party bus to see Limp Bizkit. During the three years since, I’ve attended countless butt-rock-themed parties, blurring the lines between reporting for this story and simply going for my own enjoyment. I like listening to this music, so much so that a number of songs from this era have snuck their way into my Spotify Wrapped and Apple Music Replay over the past few years.
I’ve come to understand that the appeal of these bands to me, someone who is not part of their ideal demographic, is the same appeal I get from the girly pop music I love and typically cover: the heightened sense of gender performance. The overly taut, veiny muscles, the bad facial hair, the low-hanging oversize jeans, the tribal tattoos, the beer swigging. It’s a type of masculinity that feels both dramatic and sexless.
“I’ve never had the pleasure of seeing Creed live, but I always pictured them as very long-flowing-hair-in-the-wind-machine, foot up on the monitor, messianic pose, with arms wide open,” Harvilla says. “This very resonant idea of the rock star frontman on the cross.”
For millennials like Raben, it felt like both the butt-rock bands and their nu-metal peers were just as in on the joke — sometimes.
“I feel like Fred Durst created that personality,” she says. “When he puts the red hat on, he’s Fred Durst. I accept the role for what it is: fun to watch, fun to listen to.”
Nostalgia cycles have a tendency to make people wonder if the criticism against what was once deemed uncool was actually underrated. But this particular musical resurgence is so tied into the songs themselves and what they evoke it’s hard to ignore a certain level of musical mastery these bands had over creating pretty-timeless anthems.
“I think the music is good,” Farrier says. “I think ‘Higher’ is an incredible song. They make amazing pop songs.”
“I like Nickelback just fine, but I don’t think we need to go all the way now to claim that they were truly great or that they were the best rock band of their time,” Harvilla argues. “They never needed the critical acclaim, and I think that’s the thing that frustrates critics more, the idea that we don’t have any control and we can’t tell the world at large what to like.”
In some ways, the critical reappraisal has barely started, though the country community has already led the charge. In 2024, Nickelback were invited to be special guests at Stagecoach, Coachella’s sister festival in Indio, California, that highlights country music. They were joined onstage by Hardy and Jelly Roll. When Creed filled the same slot this year, they were joined by Tori Kelly.
The bands are finding ways to keep the goodwill coming. Creed leaned into nostalgia by naming their cruise “Summer of ‘99.” This summer, they’ll take it to land for a festival of the same name in East Troy, Wisconsin. Nickelback will co-headline. Even if they’re still not considered cool, it’s clear butt-rock bands have become truly beloved.
“I do think they enjoyed being huge more than they would’ve enjoyed being cool,” Harvilla says. ““They certainly make more money that way. They’re able to play arenas forever. You have to choose to an extent.” These bands probably chose wisely.
