The hoopla over that Boise Weekly preview of a Nickelback concert – and the hate and love that followed its printing and Internet success – got me thinking about another dumb band with a dumb name that has become a musical punchline due to their unwarranted success. Here’s a hint: “*Sings a bunch of nonsense about sacrifice, while sounding like a growling Eddie Vedder with a dildo from Kid Rock’s collection stuck in his throat.”
I’m, of course, referring to Creed, whose second album, Human Clay, has gone 11 times platinum, good enough to be one of the top-selling records…in U.S. history. (It’s tied with Nevermind and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, among others.) As you can see above, they were also once popular enough to grace the cover of Spin, when that still meant something. (It should be noted that this isn’t relegated to just Spin; being on a magazine cover has lost much of its shine over the past decade – I’d like to think it’s because Shel Silverstein wrote “The Cover of The Rolling Stone,” but really, it’s because LOL printed word.) Ask any Spin editor now about whether they regret their decision to take a photo of a shirtless Scott Stapp and put it into newsstands and mailboxes worldwide and they’d take a shot of whiskey and proceed to repeat “WHY WHY WHY” for hours and hours, until they finally collapsed out of exhaustion. Yeah, Creed will do that to you.
Here are 15 (mostly crappy) bands and artists on magazine covers that must have made sense at the time.
It’s sexist AND dumb. Like Jessica! (Via)
A part of me was hoping that I had just imagined Gay Dad after eating a bad slice of eel pie. Nope. (Via)
Is “no one’s” an option? Also: could use more Dashboard Confessional. (Via)
I love “Torn” as much as the next guy, but Natalie Imbruglia as the “perfect pop star”? Does that mean fellow one-hit-wonders Deep Blue Something are the perfect rock stars? The answer: yes. (Via)
This magazine cover would make for amazing rolling paper. (Via)
I’ll let Danger Guerrero explain this cover in the comments. (Via)
And Burnsy for this one. (Via)
I think they confused the “Jewish Lesbian Folk Singer” with Charlie Sexton. (Via)
It’s the backwards pink hat that sells this cover. Not the “sex, golf, & rock and roll” or the yellow shirt or the affirmative action headline or the Jesus Lizard having to share space with Hootie and the Blowfish, but the backwards pink hat. (Via)
That guitar was one day away from retirement. (Via)
If you read the text from top-to-bottom, it says, “Poo.” Heh. (Via)
Let’s add another ellipsis:
“…and came out on top
…and then lost it all and went on to host Pussycat Dolls Present: Girlicious.” (Via)
I had felt bad cutting Stapp off at the torso. Well, not so much bad as, were it only true. (Via)
Survey says: two pieces of wood that grow when doing something naughty. (Via)
![[avatar]](http://p.uproxxcdn.com/photo/679/thumb)
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LOOK AT THAT SWEATY CHEST HAIR!
You bad mouthing Sugar Ray, Hootie AND Spin Doctors?! All in one post? You’re going to offend like 10 people…and I’m one of em.
It also makes me sad to see Miley Cyrus on the cover of LIFE. It’s like topping off a nice layer cake with shit.
We do not bash Natalie Imbruglia or Deep Blue Something.
And their big hit in Croatia, “Breakfast Naked On the Floor.”
To be honest, I’d take Natalie Imbruglia over about 99.9% of current pop stars.
is UPROXX seriously throwing shade at Everclear? Who do I work for?
Seriously. A line was crossed.
I didn’t hate my parents enough to like them, I guess.
Yea what’s up with that Uproxx?? So they’re not Zep or PJ, but they weren’t one hit wonders either. Maybe they didn’t break any new ground, but they were never a joke band.
FOR SHAME!
/piling on
I started out as a hater and grew to like them, whereas everyone else I know says they kind of liked them and grew to hate them.
Have any of you heard the re-recorded Everclear tracks? Art Alexakis went back and redid a bunch of their “hits” and released them as an album. It’s the most god awful shit you have ever heard. The original “Santa Monica” is a great slice of bubble-grunge but the new version is unlistenable. If you want an album that will definitely destroy any goodness that is in your life, now you know where to find it.
Yeah, calling bullshit on hating Everclear. It’s a ridiculous cover, but those guys — at least the original three — never took themselves too seriously for a band who covered so much dark material. They made two great albums and one phenomenal one, and everything up through at least Slow Motion Daydream is listenable at the absolute worst. Even Welcome to the Drama Club is solid, and that’s just Art and four punks he picked up at the local rock show.
set ‘em straight b, put ‘em in a serious injury bag
Everclear is, was and always will be a complete frat douche joke of a band.
Are you really going to tell me you weren’t at some point during their popularity, signing along with half the songs from some of these performers?
Oh, I did; for some acts, this post has more to do with the ridiculous headlines than anything else. Again, “Torn” is great, but that BS about Natalie becoming the next something of pop? Hindsight is hilarious.
All these bands were way too mainstream for Josh.
Dave Matthews Band was my favorite group for a two-year span. They’re about as mainstream as it gets, through their magazine covers aren’t particularly amusing.
Christina’s “Dirrty” phase was pretty damn gross. Like Ke$ha, but with less glitter and white lady pseudo-rapping.
and it actually inspired boners. Particularly mine.
Verified
I have a soft spot for Hammer… at age 6, “Please Hammer Don’t Hurt ‘Em” was my first tape purchase. I played it at my grandma’s. She ripped it out of the cassette deck, threw it across the room and proclaimed that it was “devil music.”
…So I took it back home and in an elaborate ceremony involving a burnt offering, I was able to put it back together.
Poor Hammer, first my mom yelled at me for having my walkman to loud and stormed off to the bathroom whilst saying “I’m sick of listening to MC Hammer” as she was unknowingly 4feet away from him at O’Hare, now this.
ahahaha I had forgotten how completely shit the NME is until I saw that ‘War On Emo’ headline. lol
There are actually a lot of bands in here that make perfect sense to me. As much as I despise Creed, Miley, and some others, they make a certain pop-culture sense. Miley sucks as a musician, but as a pop-culture phenomenon she merits a cover (hopefully one with targeting circles printed onto it in advance). Hammer was HUGE.
The ones that don’t make sense to me… I looked at the one with “Gay Dad” for a solid minute going, “Who?” And the emo bands were total flash-in-the-pans and you KNEW it at the time. They only made sense for a cover if you’re doing an article on emo in general and needed them as poster-children.
A great many of my favorite acts will never be on the cover of anything. Sadly, that paints me as a hipster, a label that anyone who knows me could laugh at.
For real. As sorry a rapper as Hammer was, he was arguably the most popular rap star in the world for about a year or so. He may even have been the first real mainstream solo rap artist. That alone is deserving of a magazine cover.
We can all laugh at Hammer now, but before “U Can’t Touch This” he was respected enough to get a shout out in the liner notes of NWA’s “Straight Outta Compton.” So there’s that.
Big Boi of Outkast once said on an Mtv special on hip hop about ten years ago that people talk about how much of joke and a sellout Hammer was but he will kick any of yall’s asses today. I think that is still pretty much accurate.
I’m not an eminence at music, but seriously, I didn’t know at least half of the artists in those covers. Should I feel bad or blessed?
The only cover Miley deserves is Playboy. And it’s getting old for that.
Miley is the youngest woman to have a saggy rack that I’ve ever seen. Man, that’s some hard living or bad genetics.
To answer your question, yeh, you’re probably pretty blessed. The only band out of all of those I’d say I as “in to” was Everclear, but I’d heard of every one of them except for “gay dad”.
Lol @ Christina caption….that guitar’s seen some things and some stuff.
I can’t believe no one has mentioned how fucking hot Jessica Simpson used to be.
So affirmative action is to blame for Hootie and the Blowfish? Poor Darius.
Charlie Sexton’s hair definitely warrants a magazine cover. Also producing for Jimmie Vaughn and Lucinda Williams earns him points. But mostly that hair.
Since when are MCR and Panic at the Disco emo? lol
Ask somebody at NME [twitter.com]