Make America Grunge Again

Twenty-five years ago, in an act of apathetic surrender to mediocrity, rock and roll announced its precipitous decline into irrelevance. The event that marked rock’s demise was Billboard’s 1998 decision to name Creed—known for such immediately overplayed, insufferable singles as "My Own Prison," “Higher,” and “With Arms Wide Open”—as their “Rock Artist of the Year.” It was as if the musical powers that be were implicitly acknowledging rock and roll no longer had anything novel or important to say.