The worst band “in the history of the world”, according to Anthony Bourdain
He might have been best known as a chef and television presenter, but music was always very close to the heart of Anthony Bourdain. It was all part of the culture he adored.
In contrast to the ever-saturated landscape of celebrity chefs, Bourdain always revelled in non-conformity and an entirely different way of doing things. This likely goes back to his days in New York City during the height of the punk movement during the 1970s in the bowels of the CBGB. Throughout his long and celebrated career, the chef was always keen to voice his own musical tastes.
Inevitably, given his age and birthplace, Bourdain found a natural appreciation for early punk bands like the New York Dolls, Dead Boys, The Stooges, and Bad Brains, to name a few. The inherent influence of punk carried itself over into the life and career of Bourdain. He blasted these bands in the kitchen and reclined in the places they drank.
Although he was never seen cooking with a Mohican-style haircut or bedecked in bondage trousers and safety pins, his own personal manifesto – with regard both to food and life in general – was as punk as they come.
As he put it himself, “The music and the musicians who started playing and hanging out with each other at CBGB were an appropriate reaction to the general feelings of hopelessness, absurdity, futility, and disgust of living in New York at the time.”
Amid this mire, he found a way of life to follow in the Ramones. “It’s what rock ‘n’ roll should be,” he said of the band, “simplistic lyrics, three chords and a powerful beat. It was the antidote to everything that was wrong at the time.” It was soul food.
Given his impressive punk credentials, it should come as no surprise that Bourdain’s love of music often made an appearance in his beloved series of travel documentaries, Parts Unknown. In fact, on the very first instalment of the programme back in 2013, when Bourdain visited Myanmar, he spent time hanging around with a local punk band called Side Effect, who are still going strong to this day. Over the course of the programme, Bourdain aims to find out more about the music scene of Myanmar, as well as the society of this contentious nation in general.
Much of the discourse featured in the episode, of course, revolves around food and local cuisine. However, Bourdain’s assessment of food has always invariably been linked to music, often linking the culinary delights on offer with the background music playing in the restaurant at the time. It was only a matter of time, therefore, before Bourdain and Side Effect began comparing notes with regard to the bands they loved and those they hated.
At one point, while the chef is eating alongside the band, he asks the lead singer, Darko C, “What American bands do you hate?” Bourdain could have given a pretty good answer to this question himself, as he has certainly never pulled any punches when it came to discussing the bands he hated.
Nevertheless, after some pondering, Side Effect landed upon the answer “Creed”, to which a delighted Bourdain responded, “Yes! They are, like, the worst band in the history of the world.” Hyperbole aside, it is easy to understand why both Side Effect and Anthony Bourdain would foster a healthy hatred for Creed.
The 1990s post-grunge outfit, in many ways, represented the antithesis of the punk movement, trading the subversive rebellion of grunge for overblown, soulless, corporate rock. This betrayal of the grunge years, in addition to the colossal commercial successes of the Floridian band made them the ire of rock purists and countercultural punks for much of the early 2000s.
The hatred for Creed expressed on Parts Unknown in 2013 is probably – at least partly – due to the fact that Creed had reformed in 2009 to record new material and embark upon many world tours that saw them through until 2012.
For somebody like Bourdain or Side Effect, who always had a defiant message and a plethora of challenging real-world experiences to back them up, the existence of a cash-in group like Creed was nothing short of insulting. And he let them know about it.
