The 10 Worst Post-Grunge Songs of All Time

Newly revised and expanded edition!

If nu-metal was an earnest attempt to further the creative gains made by grunge then post-grunge was an attempt to erase them. Not all post-grunge was bad, I’ve made an honest go at defending as much of it as I can, but for a sub-genre of music that was as popular as this a truly mind blowing amount of it was awful. There was simply no attempt at driving grunge further by these bands, just strip mine the most parodic elements of their forebears and repackage the most digestible scraps for top 40 radio. When it worked there was a poppy thrill to it, when it didn’t work it dragged all of popular guitar rock down with it. Certainly it tanked the reputation of my beloved nu-metal, which was yoked to it for reasons mostly fair, and has created a sort of co-agenda where I must be both serious about how bad post-grunge was and also make the occasional gesture at well maybe it wasn’t that bad efforts as well. But dammit, I’m the ceo of nu-metal and I didn’t get here by lying to you and since I’m taking this week to work on a bigger piece I’m digging this article out from under my 10 Greatest list and republishing it on its own. So here you are, have at it, let’s be real now, it’s The 10 Worst Post Grunge Songs of All Time:

A perfectly catchy song that happens to be the worst example of an obnoxious post-grunge cliche; the non-apology. “What I really meant to say is I’m sorry for the way I am,” is not an apology. You’re not apologizing for what you did, you're just finding another way to say “I’m sorry you’re mad.” You can circumlocate about “all of the lies” and look back at yourself as much as you want at some point you just gotta fess up that you did flip the Tahoe while driving back from Alex “Brickster” Lewis’ lakehouse last weekend. Crossfade’s “Cold” is an anthem for those Tapout shirt wearing, lifted truck, divorce court journeymen singing their hearts out at a picnic table because that’s somehow easier to do than just fess up.

The further from the post-grunge glory days you got the more shameless you had to be to notch any kind of a hit. So for the hyper-Canadian My Darkest Days to touch even 90 on the Billboard Hot 100 they had to load their afternoon shift strip club banger with guest appearances from Ludacris and Chad Kroeger bring Zakk Wylde to write weedlie guitar solos for challenging Guitar Hero charts and dump a whole chum bucket of cheap electronic effects scraped out of Lil Wayne’s “Lollipop.” “Brandy just got way too much baggage / And that shit just gets old” goes the wretched second verse. “Porn Star Dancing” is something like the bottom of the entire grunge barrel. If Mudhoney had known all the way back in 1990 that the genre “Touch Me I’m Sick” was about to launch would wind up at “Porn Star Dancing” two decades later you have to wonder if they would have scrapped the whole operation right then and there.

Tantric lead singer Hugo Ferreira sounds like someone doing a parody of Will Sasso’s parody of Scott Stapp. His baritone twisting and maiming every vowel, every consonant until you start to wonder if Pearl Jam classics like “Alive” and “Even Flow” were worth it if they led to this. Not content with simply stealing from Pearl Jam though, Ferreira and guitarist/vocalist Todd Whitener also rip off Layne Staley and Jerry Cantrell’s singing styles with zero percent originality and 100% reliance on “HEAY-AY-AYYYYY”s and “YEEAUH”s for filler. So why “Astounded” over their hit “Breakdown”? “Astounded” happens to contain one of pop music’s most bizarre refrains: “All you stupid fuckers walk around astounded.” What?? I thought choruses were supposed to be relatable, what the hell did I do? Nothing because “Astounded” was made for an audience of one; Travis Meeks the ego tripping Days of the New singer who accidentally created Tantric when he fired his band and they formed this one. It’s an awfully bitter way to write music, to get back at one guy. Only thing that ever astounds me about Tantric is how a band whose legacy is a minor rock hit and a gold record could have twenty-two former members.

The world’s most famous Kurt Cobain impressionist lecturing us on selling out. “Who's to know if your soul will fade at all? / The one you sold to fool the world” chides lead singer Shaun Morgan before launching into a series of bridges, choruses and refrains strung together without any higher aspirations than creating a hit single, which it was. It’s awfully rich for someone who wrote “Driven Under,” the most galling Nirvana rip-off in a genre full of ‘em, to “feel so raped” but I guess that’s why he can “fake with the best of anyone.”

Puddle of Mudd has always been more interesting as thought experiment than as music; imagine Kurt Cobain surviving the 90s, watching nu-metal happen, then coming back in 2001 to make hit singles at all costs, integrity be damned. In this universe “She Hates Me” would be his label bosses at Flawless informing Cobain the feminism has gotta go and Cobain dutifully agreeing. And really lyrics like “She was queen for about an hour / After that, shit got sour” aren’t so much offensive as they are inert. There’s no passion in them or the delivery, which ranges from a fake-Aberdeen sneer to a digitally enhanced yell, and a song that’s supposed to sound like trashy fun ends up boring, its tossed off good times outro sounding like a suggestion by a record exec. Only once have I done this song at karaoke, you’d think it'd be a blast but it wasn’t. No raised glasses singalong, just some gentle applause at conclusion. That’s when it really struck me what a bitter, boring, caustic song “She Hates Me” is, I couldn’t even get a dive bar in Florida into it. Then the next guy did “What’s Up?” by 4 Non Blondes and everyone lost their shit. Lesson learned.

This is just what we were looking for from Creed; a song asking, hey, who are real racists today? “Society, blind by color / Why hold down one to raise another? / Discrimination, now on both sides / Seeds of hate blossom further.” Amazing. I had never considered Donald Trump was quoting Scott Stapp when condemning “both sides” at Charlottesville but now must. Like “All Lives Matter,” just glance at the lyrics to “One” and they may seem innocuous (“The goal is to be unified”? What’s so bad about that?) but with even a tiny consideration are revealed to be an ignorant heap of cliches. Calls for unity, to stop the hatred, are at most a call to maintain the status-quo and, at worst, a neat way to check yourself out of the whole situation. Why try to fix anything if it only provokes more hatred? Take my hand, be my brother! Then the song reveals its true intent during the chorus: “I feel angry, I feel helpless / Want to change the world, yeah / I feel violent, I feel alone / Don't try and change my mind.” Now that is honest. A four line manifesto predictive of the rampaging hatred we now have to live with everywhere, everyday, all the time.

When Donald Trump put together his 2016 inauguration, an event that has four “Investigations” subheadings on Wikipedia, he managed to snag the likes of Lee Greenwood (who, presumably, was not booked to perform selections from 1984’s You've Got a Good Love Comin'), Toby Keith, DJ Ravidrums, “The Piano Guys” and 3 Doors Down. While I cannot speak for DJ Ravidrums or “The Piano Guys,” it’s easy to assume the fanbases of Lee Greenwood, Toby Keith and 3 Doors Down survived that debacle intact. Greenwood speaks for himself, as does burp aficionado Toby Keith, though 3 Doors Down’s slide from drive time radio staples to bootlick-grunge extraordinaires takes a second. Their first album, 2000’s The Better Life, got by on big hooks and better timing with the politely rockin’ hits “Kryptonite” and “Loser” sopping up airplay on pop and rock radio but when follow up Away from the Sun timed two smash ballads with the beginning of the Iraq War, becoming anthems for troops abroad missing home, 3 Doors Down set about endlessly touring military bases and yee-haw states in an attempt to keep their bread buttered. This marketing strategy hits bottom with 2008’s “Citizen/Soldier,” literally an advertisement for the National Guard. And without speaking to the quality of the National Guard themselves, collaborating with the military industrial complex for a recruitment campaign has gotta be one of the most humiliating things a rock band can do. It is also one of the more crazy ass moments in grunge history; a genre founded on inclusivity and integrity reduced to a music video shot on a National Guard Base and screened in movie theaters that includes depictions of soldiers fighting in the middle east (I thought the National Guard was national?) and the… uh… revolutionary war. Effective propaganda casts a broad net I suppose. Somehow, after all that we’ve barely even touched on the song itself. It sucks.

Layne Staley of Alice in Chains was one of music’s most distinctive vocalists. The chilling minor key harmonies he and Jerry Cantrell perfected together are often imitated, never bettered. Speaking of imitated; Staind’s “Layne” is, in theory, a tribute to the late Layne Staley singer but in practice a parody. Launching straight into a strangled cat attempt at harmony so off-key you can practically hear the Autotune plugin seizing up and crashing trying to fix each note, “Layne” wastes no time communicating how good Staley and and Cantrell were at this by how bad Aaron Lewis is by comparison. Finally we make it to some lyrics, it’s not an improvement: “I heard today that you were gone / I had to stop and sing along” groans Lewis. Sing along? Sing along with what? Was Layne Staley’s death announced to you via town crier? Did you off-key harmonize with him as he went about his grim duty? The bridge, in excellently Aaron Lewis fashion, recasts the late singer’s music as a neat gift all for Lewis: The words you said / You made me feel like they were all for me” the “all for me” part sounding less like reverence and more like a kid sweeping his halloween candy into a big pile to make sure his little brother doesn’t swipe any. It’s post-grunge in the most ghoulish sense of the word, a reminder of both who and what we lost on the journey from Layne to “Layne.”

Nothing cures Nickelback sympathies like the band’s “strip club anthems.” If any one thing puts Creed above their partners in crimes-against-humanity Nickelback, it’s that Creed knew to stay in their lane. Meanwhile here’s Nickelback, brace yourself: “I love the way you dance with anybody and tease them all by sucking on your thumb” Oh… “ You're so much cooler when you never pull it out” Oh no… “Cause you look so much cuter” Oh god… “with” No no no no… “something in your mouth!” Yep. In some ways, unlike ISIL, you do kinda gotta hand it to them; you didn’t think a song could exist that makes “Crazy Bitch” sound subtle, “Porn Star Dancing” classy, “Get Stoned” romantic yet here it is. Punctuating verses with “COME AWN!” or breaking into a rough parody of rapping during the pre chorus and serving the whole thing on a platter of limp dick riffage and stainless steel production that sounds like all the guitars were run directly into ProTools patches called “Pure Rawk.” “Something In Your Mouth” is a destruction derby with no crashes, awful but airless, the soundtrack to Buffalo Wild Wings happy hours that get rowdy after your aunt maces a guy for spilling his Bud Light all over her new white Valentino bag. COME AWN!!

Every single second of Theory of a Deadman’s “Hate My Life” is like someone smashing your big toe with a ball pein hammer over and over while he looks you dead in the eyes and saying “It’s just a joke dude can’t you take a joke I’m just joking.” So, “Hate My Life” is a joke. But it’s the kind of “edgy” joke that we’ve been suffering with from ”comedians” whining about how mean everyone is being to them on Netflix specials called “CANCEL THIS!” or when a President of the United States of America encourages the populace to inject bleach and plays it off with a retroactive I was just kidding. The problem with the “kidding” defense is that once you end up in that indigent pose it’s probably not because the joke was too “edgy,” it’s because it wasn’t funny. I don’t need someone to explain the set-up/punchline behind “I hate that I can't tell when a girl's underage / And how when I tell her she's a nice piece of ass then her daddy punches me in the face.” There’s no context where that’s funny, just imagine delivering it at an open mic night or at dinner on a first date. All of “Hate My Life” is like this, a series of actual truths delivered through a smirk and a shitty goatee. Singer Tyler Connolly opens the song straight away with “So sick of the hobos, always beggin’ for change. I don't like how I gotta work and they just sit around and get paid.” It totally flops as any kind of “joke” because Connolly means it. He absolutely hates “the hobos” and believes they’re just lazy, beliefs that power actual public policy. He definitely means it too when he complains “[his] wife is always up [his] ass,” an ex-wife (divorced in 2011) that was, mind you, literally in the music video while he sang this. It just goes on and on. A grim slog through every one of Connolly’s petty grievances, like a series of bitter tweets that get sideways laugh-cry emoji replies from the driver’s seat wraparound sunglasses selfie people. Somehow this shit came out all the way in 2008 on Roadrunner Records, the whole nu-metal/post-grunge apparatus crashing and burning as Connolly tries to spin the song into a sing-along anthem: So if you're pissed like me / Bitches (??) here's what you've gotta do / Put your middle fingers up in the air / Go on and say ‘fuck you.’” I’m not offended by “Hate My Life.” I’m not triggered or outraged or incensed at Connolly’s whining at how hard his incredibly easy life is. I’m bored. I’m not laughing either.