Jackson Free Press

I am generally pretty understanding of bands who decide to dust off their instruments and go back on tour, but there are a certain few groups who should not be permitted to reunite under any circumstances. Two of these offending groups, The Backstreet Boys and Creed, have recently released new records and are in the midst of world tours. The detrimental impact they inflicted on their genres make them the musical equivalents of the school kid who does something so terrible that he is sent straight to the office without warning or timeout.

The Backstreet Boys were a fun, albeit disposable little group when they came onto the scene in 1993. Everyone acknowledged that they were talentless, but we indulged them and their besotted teenage fans because we all knew that this was a fad. Surely, the Backstreet Boys and their boy band spawn would soon quietly withdraw into oblivion.

Except the Backstreet Boys' sound turned out not to be just be a passing trend. Sure, they faded away into obscurity and rehab after their four-year run at the top, but the malign influence they brought to pop music has grown only stronger in the 10 years since. Listen to any top-40 radio station and tell me that the combination of overdone synthesizer effects, digitized voices and bland, soulless lyrics aren't direct byproducts of the Backstreet Boys.

Creed's influence on modern rock is no less cancerous than the Backstreet Boys' is on pop. If you are looking to pinpoint a band that bridged grunge to the generic, overproduced drivel that is currently padding the wallets of bands like Nickelback and Daughtry, then Creed is your culprit.

This is a band that took all the wrong lessons from Pearl Jam, deriving their grandiosity and cheeseball sentimentality, while eschewing their attitude and cocksureness. Nearly all of the successive chart-topping rock bands have relied on a similar formula, essentially castrating a large bloc of radio rock 'n' roll for the past several years.

This is the point where one may start addressing these reunion tours and accuse these bands of selling out. However, selling out implies that you had some artistic integrity to begin with.

If anything, I am a sucker for a reunion tour. I loved seeing Stone Temple Pilots run through their hits last year. If The Replacements were to get back together, I would shell out an exorbitant amount of money to see them, despite the fact I'm not going to get the type of rowdy, lawless show the band was famous for.

But these are more than typical reunion tours. They are potential referendums on popular music. Few acts played bigger roles in degenerating their respective genres over the past ten years than these two. We need to ask ourselves: Are we going to welcome them back because of some dubious sense of nostalgia? Or are we going to condemn them for the execrable influence they have had over music? I am not optimistic.