Note: The audio attached to this Webworm compliments today’s newsletter. I collected it as I met people attending a Creed concert. Their opinions may differ to mine.
Hi,
When I was 14 I was obsessed with a band called Creed.
I’d come home from school, and the first thing I’d do is go to my room, shut my door, get out my discman, and put on Creed’s 1997 album My Own Prison.
I was deep in Christianity at the time, and my musical tastes reflected that. Apart from some Britpop sneaking in, I lived on a musical diet of DC Talk, Jars and Clay and Newsboys (to this day I maintain that the songs “Supernatural”, “Crazy Times” and “Entertaining Angels” are absolute bangers).
Then Creed came along, fronted by Scott Stapp.
Creed did something very interesting, because they never marketed themselves as a Christian band — they snuck in under the radar, appealing to people who did not give a shit about God or faith. They also happened to sing an awful lot about God and faith.
An absence of a Christian label also gave them room to be slightly more edgy. They seemed more aggressive and angry, and didn’t mind throwing in the odd “goddamn” in their lyrics, which to me at the time seemed exceedingly blasphemous and naughty (and therefore cool). As I was going through the emotions of a relatively fresh teenager, Creed hit an angsty (but God-approved) sweet spot.
As this 2000 story from Spin magazine explains, I wasn’t the only kid listening to Creed. Creed got big.
Scott Stapp leads the most popular hard-rock band in America. Creed’s second album, Human Clay, recently went quadruple-platinum and is holding strong in the Top 10 almost a year after its release.
Their tormented, fire-and-brimstone music, which crosses the thick guitars of Metallica with the thundering dynamics of Alice in Chains, would be more at home in the grunge era. Stapp eschews baseball caps for tight leather pants and long hair, looking like an early-’90 throwback (and his baritone sounds eerily like Eddie Vedder’s).
But whether it’s the Doors or U2 or Soundgarden or Live, the world always needs at least one rock band with an overwrought sense of musical drama, and Creed hold that mantle today. Stapp’s lyrics, which draw heavily on biblical imagery, are usually news bulletins from the land of anguish. For instance, “Forked tongues in bitter mouths / Can drive a man to bleed from inside out.”
It’s sort of hard to explain unless you’re from that world, but I grew up in a form of Christianity that made it very clear everything in the world was sinful, and if you weren’t careful Satan would get his hooks in and take you directly to hell.
Like all teenagers I gravitated towards music, but I had this extra step in the process where I had to check the lyrics aligned with Biblical values. While other kids were listening to Nine Inch Nails’s The Downward Spiral, I had to carefully skip songs like “Heresy” and “Closer”.
But with a band like Creed — I could listen and not sin.
It was heaven.
