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As a millennial white dude, I’m uniquely qualified to speak on the strange place that Creed occupies within our culture, as their rise, fall, subsequent meme-ifying and now legitimate reverence has unfolded essentially in tandem with my life.
Hell, I saw Creed in concert with my Dad back at the old Continental Airlines Arena back in their heyday when they were touring Weathered and crushed Natty Lights to “Higher” at college pregames — I was there I lived it.
Creed and Nickleback are essentially two sides of the same coin. They both emerged in the post-grunge era of the late ’90s and early 2000s and achieved significant critical and commercial success — producing multiple radio hits and selling out concerts around the world — before eventually reaching a level of ubiquitousness that paradoxically made them uncool to the point of turning into their own genre of memes.
But the difference between those two bands, at least from my point of view, is that while they may be mocked, one of them is widely beloved on a larger scale as evidenced by the fact that seemingly *everyone* knows the lyrics to one of their songs: and that’s Creed’s “Higher.” They’ve also recently returned to the Billboard charts after launching their tour earlier this year.
Creed has now come so full circle on their meme-ification that they’re now acknowledging their most subversively iconic moment, their performance of “Higher” during the halftime show of the 2001 Thanksgiving day game between the Dallas Cowboys and Denver Broncos, that they’re now selling the jersey that lead singer Scott Stapp wore on that infamous day.
Following an 11-year hiatus between 2012 and 2023, Creed reunited in 2023 and is now on a headlining tour, The Summer of ’99 tour, across the United States.
Creed has released four studio albums since being founded in Tallahassee, Florida in 1994: My Own Prison in 1997, Human Clay in 1999 (which featured “Higher”), Weathered in 2001, and Full Circle in 2009.