I went to see the world’s most hated bands party like it’s 1999

Memories of the late 1990s and wafts of vape smoke were in the air at the Alpine Valley Music Theatre, site of the Summer of ’99 and Beyond Festival. The two-day offering was part of an ongoing reunion tour by Creed, the Christian-ish alt-rock band that topped the charts at the turn of the millennium. But what drew me and more than 20,000 other people to rural Wisconsin was the other name at the top of the bill: internet punching bag Nickelback.

Both bands are relics of rock’s last stand, signifiers of bad taste and targets of scorn and even hatred, so much so that they’ve also become memes unto themselves in the past few years. That a festival headlined by these bands is a viable commercial venture says a lot about how nostalgia can put butts in seats and overpower conventional wisdom.

Creed kicked off its reunion tour last year, alongside erstwhile contemporaries like 3 Doors Down and Finger Eleven, after more than a decade on hiatus. In addition to a Summer of ’99 cruise, it included a day-long festival in San Bernardino, California, billed as “a rock revival you can’t afford to miss.”

For the second edition of the festival, Creed moved the event to the friendly confines of the Alpine Valley amphitheater, doubled the length and upped the star power, reconvening many of the bands that dominated alt-rock radio in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Like Creed, bands such as Live, Our Lady Peace and Fuel were the ones in the trenches trying to keep rock alive during the rise of hip-hop’s global ascendancy, when labels like Cash Money Records took over in 1999 and 2000.

They’re also, to put it lightly, critically reviled. While they appeared in the wake of grunge, they shared only a vague aesthetic and dynamic range of that world-changing Pacific Northwest scene. Rather than reject the arena rock that grunge supplanted, they sought to re-create it in their own suburban image.

And they won. Post-grunge — from Bush and Stone Temple Pilots, to Creed and Nickelback, to the diminishing-returns bands that followed — lasted longer than grunge, and on a long enough timeline Nirvana will sit next to Nickelback. But nevertheless, this persists as the sound of rock for wide swaths of America: Marshall stack riffs, acoustic strumming, straight-ahead rhythm rumble, grumbly, growly male vocals about dissatisfaction with lives, wives and jobs. Kurt Cobain wrote “I Hate Myself and Want to Die.” Three Days Grace wrote “I Hate Everything About You.”

The solipsistic escapism of post-grunge lived on earlier this month too, when Alpine Valley became a respite from the real world — free from the Epstein files, ICE arrests, international wars, the rising tides of climate disasters. A few festivalgoers wore their politics on their sleeves in the form of T-shirts about “Making the Gulf America Again,” but there were more faux campaign tees emblazoned with Creed ’24 (“Take Me Higher”) than MAGA shirts, and still more for pro wrestlers, beer brands and the bands on the bill.

When artists gestured to signs o’ the times, they mostly kept it vague. Sevendust front man Lajon Witherspoon — the only Black performer onstage all weekend — spoke of the “crazy world” we live in, and he encouraged the crowd to navigate life’s obstacles with kindness. “This is my life, and I get to choose how I live it,” Daughtry namesake Chris Daughtry declared.

Bold-ish words, but Daughtry — a band the singer formed in 2006 after a run on “American Idol” — doesn’t deliver anything bold onstage, much like the other groups on the bill that began after the summer of 1999. Hinder is inspired by the sleazy hair metal that Nirvana supposedly put six feet under; Mammoth shows off Wolfgang Van Halen’s virtuosity but nothing else; and A Day to Remember fuses nasal pop-punk vocals with chugga-chugga metalcore and seems like it missed the exit to Warped Tour.

Those who lived through the MTV era can probably name a song or two, but not three, by alt-rock also-rans like Lit, Tonic and Vertical Horizon. Live, a band forgotten to time, or just search engine optimization, might have aged the best of any band on the lineup. Meanwhile, Our Lady Peace front man Raine Maida, who had one of the most distinct voices of the era, now seems to be getting by on stylized tics, while Fuel sounded even more aggro and adrenalized than before.

Fuel’s signature song, “Shimmer,” always reminds me of a friendship that blossomed in the summer of 1999, but on this Saturday, it sounded like any other song echoing through Alpine Valley. Lyrics about a failed relationship took on a poignant new meaning at a show where performers and participants were grasping at the straws of nostalgia.

“We’ll forget the past, but maybe I’m not able,” sang Fuel singer Aaron Scott. “All that shimmers in this world is sure to fade away again.”

Eventually, it was time for Creed to close out the festival on a Saturday night. Your results may vary, but the band sounded as good as it did on its records all those years ago. Lead guitarist Mark Tremonti nailed those arpeggios, solos and palm-muted riffs, and founding rhythm section Scott Phillips and Brian Marshall were locked in, too. But after a decade in the news for legal and personal troubles, all eyes were on front man Scott Stapp, who looks fit and focused, if missing the luscious locks of his peak years. And apart from a few chewed lyrics and faltering notes, he’s comfortable in a familiar baritone range, even if he still sounds like a hybrid of Eddie Vedder and Scott Weiland.

But no matter how earnest or obvious Stapp’s intra-song diatribes, a Creed reunion show was not my own prison. His overarching narration of the night’s set gave cohesion to what would otherwise be an empty play-the-hits exercise. And it was fascinating to watch him interrogate his own failings and turn them into inspiration for the audience, like the most effective televangelists, issuing Facebook status wisdom like, “The past is the past — it does not define today,” and, “It’s not about the setback, it’s about the comeback,” to cheers from thousands of people.

Things threatened to come off the rails when Stapp was at his most political. The meandering message touched on surveillance, taxes, bank runs, credit card interest rates and the true meaning of “power to the people.”

“If you want change, stop being gaslit by the media, the government and by everyone in charge,” he said conspiratorially, before course-correcting and calling for positive, constructive change — not disruptive anarchy. Then the band launched into “One,” an anti-affirmative-action missive that preaches unity and now sounds like the theme song to the All Lives Matter movement.

Creed’s set was one last breath of Wisconsin air. It was also a change of pace from Nickelback’s headline set the night before, which played like an irony-free take on Creed’s iconic halftime show, full of strobe lights, fog machines, pyrotechnic explosions, “Guitar Hero” graphics and even a T-shirt gun. But there was no nostalgic joy to be found during the Canadian act’s set, just charmless frat-boy banter, riffs ready-made for “Monday Night Football” and lyrics that make Motley Crue sound like Andrea Dworkin.

The low point of both the band’s set and the history of recorded music was “Figured You Out,” a song about a sex-drugs-and-rock-n-roll fling that goes sideways. Lyrics about pants around feet and white stains on dresses — “I love your lack of self-respect / While you’re passed out on the deck / I love my hands around your neck” — are as gross and stupid now as they were then.

Not that the crowd took offense; most people knew “Figured You Out” — thanks to its 13 weeks at the top of the mainstream rock charts back in the day — and were happy to sing along. But the crowd also started a “Let’s go, Brandon” chant when the band pulled a same-name fan onstage to sing “Rockstar” (a song that presaged Post Malone’s whole country rock shtick by a decade) and stayed until the encore closed with “Burn It to the Ground.” With the hook, “Take anything we want / Drink everything in sight / We’re going till the world stops turning / While we burn it to the ground tonight,” the latter sounds like a kleptocrat’s anthem.

I listened to Nickelback when “How You Remind Me” took over rock radio in 2001, eventually becoming the most played song on U.S. radio of the 2000s. I almost certainly had a burned CD of “Silver Side Up,” an album whose release was the second-worst thing to happen on Sept. 11, 2001. But for the fans who stayed on the bandwagon over the next seven albums, it’s time to admit the folly of youth instead of embracing it.

It’s time to acknowledge the truth, with arms, eyes and ears wide open. This month’s festival had plenty of “Summer of ’99” but was short on the “beyond.” I think the bands involved know that, too. As Nickleback’s oft-memed “Photograph” goes, “It’s hard to say it, time to say it, goodbye, goodbye.”