Creed is having a moment. Actually, if we’re being precise, it’s having innumerable moments, over and over again, all across the internet.
On Instagram, the band has been repurposed as a comedic device for dunking on President Joe Biden; on TikTok, shitposters imagined what it would be like to explain the butt rock legends to an alien race; and on X, Creed is an easy punchline for commenting on political theater. All the while, those memes are collectively accumulating millions of likes, views, and shares.
It’s safe to say that if Charli XCX hadn’t already made 2024 a “brat summer,” then this—as far as memes are concerned—would be Scott Stapp season. And Stapp, for his part, seems to be fully aware of it. “I’ve seen so many [memes],” the Creed frontman says. “Some are hilarious and I find myself just laughing, and some are really heartwarming in terms of how much time and energy the fan has put into creating the video.”
The wildest part of all isn’t that Creed is being memed to death—it’s that the band is seemingly being memed back to life. In 2024, Creed quietly clawed its way back from internet punchline to real, honest-to-god, record-selling rock band. By June, the band found itself back in the charts—the top 40 no less. Last month, the band’s Greatest Hits was climbing in sales.
As a result of its unexpected resurgence, Creed is even back touring, playing sold-out shows with fellow postgrunge staples like 3 Doors Down. On top of that, they’re selling tickets for arena gigs for upwards of $100. For the super Creed-core, there’s the band’s second-annual Miami-to-Nassau “Creed cruise” in 2025, which lists top-tier tickets for an eye-watering $4,300. Those tickets, by the way, are sold out.
Sure, old music finds new audiences all the time, often with a bump from the internet—but Creed isn’t other bands. Creed is a band that hasn’t released a new studio album in 15 years and has spent most of that decade and a half as the butt of internet jokes. By industry standards, Creed was, at least until recently, six feet under.
“Back in 2020, Creed hadn't toured since 2012, so we were kind of intrigued, I think would be the word, to see the interest and to see the songs having new life and resurgence and renaissance,” says Creed’s agent, Ken Fermaglich, who has been with the band for decades.
All of that begs a couple obvious questions: Why here and why now?
According to YouTuber Pat Finnerty, whose channel “What Makes This Song Stink” ritually roasts bands of Creed’s ilk, the equation for Creed’s comeback is a simple one: time + cringe = popularity.
Creed, Finnerty says, are now past the 20-year mark after which most old bands can feel new again. “But then there’s the meme thing—you see all these memes of like ‘this band sucks,’ but now, to use the parlance of our time, ‘this band fucks,’” he adds. “They’re switching it from ‘this band sucks’ to ‘this band fucks’ and it’s actually funnier for them to get into it.”
Finnerty, like a good portion of Creed-posters, sees the irony. Tasked with putting his finger on what makes Creed so memeable in the first place, he says simply, “Have you seen the act?”
“Anyone could do the voice, it’s just he’s doing it. It’s just like, [inaudible guttural singing],” Finnerty continues, mimicking Stapp’s signature sound.
Removed from the context of late-’90s, early-2000s rock that birthed so many universally loathed Nirvana ripoffs, liking Creed’s music feels less fraught. Even more so for younger audiences who may not have the same hangups about what constitutes “real grunge.”
But time isn’t in and of itself an answer; just ask bands like Buckcherry who have decidedly not enjoyed the same resurgence. Irony, as powerful a force as it may be online, doesn’t tend to sell tickets, especially ones that cost as much as four new iPhones.
Maybe, as one Redditor speculated last year, the band is the unlikely beneficiary of remorse: “Creed’s rise in popularity and earnest support is due to a cultural phenomenon where you have a snowball effect of ‘we’ve been too hard on that.’”
Probably the best point in favor of that theory comes from the singer-songwriter SZA. “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,” she told Variety in 2023. “Because even if it’s cliche, he’s so fucking dead ass! I will be a Creed fan forever.”
Or maybe, one could argue, the band fits more easily into today’s political zeitgeist. Creed’s music famously has a religious bent that may appeal to more conservative listeners. Stapp stepped further into the realm of political commentary this month with an onstage speech about democracy and religion.
“We [will] start reminding them of what our Constitution says. We start reminding them what our Bill of Rights says. We remind them that we are a constitutional republic built upon the Bible and the word of God and not a democracy,” Stapp said between songs.
Stapp, who’s been open about his struggles with mental health and addiction, has had a turbulent life in the limelight. There’s the time he fell from a balcony in Miami only to be found by the rapper T.I.; there was the public feud with Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst. The list goes on.
While much of that is firmly in the rearview, those moments have all created fertile soil from which shitposting can sprout. Years later, that shitposting worked like an accelerant, helping Creed fully catch fire last year when the band’s music became a fixture at Texas Rangers games. As legend has it, the Major League Baseball team started ritually blasting “Higher” in the locker room around the same time they started winning, and eventually went on to take the World Series.
“The Texas Rangers thing came out of nowhere and we became the theme song for an underdog that made the playoffs as a wild card,” Stapp says. “There was a point in time that I was like, ‘Oh my god, I hope they win,’ because this could go the opposite direction. It could be the Creed curse. And instead, it was the Creed touch.” (The Rangers’ hopes of a second World Series this year were dashed over the weekend when they were eliminated from the playoffs.)
Whatever the genesis of Creed’s resurgence was or is, it’s clear the band is back—back in stadiums, back in people’s brains, and back as a punchline for anyone who can’t get over the way Stapp inexplicably pronounces the word “open” as “oh-pawn.” As polarizing or enlightening as that might be, Creed seems to be along for the meme ride.
“I think we just embraced it and counted ourselves blessed and fortunate that our music was still connecting to people in whatever manner,” says Stapp. “It’s like we’re breaking as a new band all over again and we have the internet and social media to thank for it.”
If you’re a fan of Creed, congratulations. You got just what you wanted. And if you’re not? Well, be careful what you meme next, because sometimes a stupid joke is all it takes to turn our guiltiest of pleasures into butt rock’s second-coming.
