Dear music critics: There's really only so often you can pull off the "this widely hated band is actually great" trick before people start to suspect that you might just have terrible taste in music.

Hell, I LOVE a good contrarian music essay. Carl Wilson's defense of Celine Dion is one of my favorite works of criticism. I'm always up for giving maligned artists another chance, and I'm totally open to the idea that Miley Cyrus or Toby Keith might just get lucky and release a great single next week -- and if they do, I'll be totally unembarrassed about buying it.

But Creed? You don't have to be a traditionalist or a snob to recognize that they represent everything vile and soulless in contemporary rock music.

Seriously, be careful with these. I respect your audacity, but I'm starting to wonder if maybe you shouldn't just be listening to some better music here.

Yeah, they tried this trick with Limp Bizkit awhile back! We're not fooled.

Full disclosure: I'm not a music snob and I don't know any. I know a few other rock fans.

I thought the first Creed album was really good. I thought everything else they did was insipid. On top of that, the megalomania that was fully unleashed in the subsequent albums made it impossible to ignore in its infancy in the first. Now, that I can turn on the radio without hearing their music, I can enjoy the songs off of the first album again (everything more recent still sucks).

The rock fans I knew at the time all this was happening liked the first album and hated everything else, while the rest of the world seemed to be buying those albums in bulk.

willerror:

Yeah, they tried this trick with Limp Bizkit awhile back! We're not fooled.

At least Bizkit was rock and roll enough to sing about fuckin', Creed wasn't even good mindless party music.

The problem with the article it's not that Creed sucks. It feels phony and contrived because the author doesn't really make any point about why the band has any musical value. This guy obviously doesn't' like Creed either. He just thought it would be cool to be so uncool as to defend them. And the whole thing just completely backfired