The fourth single from Stone Temple Pilots' debut was an acoustic dirge called "Creep." That statement is an anomaly for two reasons. First, when was the last time any album, especially a mainstream rock record, broke four singles? U2 pulled it off with All That You Can't Leave Behind, but I leave U2 out of this argument because A) Bono has managed to turn U2 into a lifestyle, so the songs don't really matter anymore -- saying you like U2 now only means that you think poverty is a bad thing; and B) I hate U2, so they're disqualified anyway.

Getting back to Stone Temple Pilots: The other reason that statement about "Creep" seems foreign now is because of the title of that song. "Creep" was just one of a long line of spectacular songs that came into being during the grunge era, had a rough time during the end of the '90s, and saw some sort of ironic death some time after the turn of the century.

In order to be considered a creep rocker, the song needed only to be a dirge and have a lyric sheet overflowing with self-loathing. If it happened to be an anthem, so much the better. STP's creep rocker was probably the biggest of the batch (at least at the time), but it was not alone. Alice in Chains specialized in creep rockers. Their debut albums contained "Bleed the Freak," and their breakout single, "Man in the Box," contains enough lyrics about Layne Staley hating himself to qualify. But the best creep rockers had monosyllabic titles, which is why Alice's definitive entry to the genre is "Junkhead" from 1992's Dirt.

The creep rockers marched on: Nirvana ("Dumb"), Silverchair ("Freak"), the Verve Pipe ("Hero"), and, of course, Radiohead, who first made it big with a creep rocker titled "Creep." But once grunge sputtered out and big rock was taken over by rap-rock and the new aggro, the rage turned outward again and the creep rocker fell off. Korn made a bunch of bids, but those songs were rarely slow enough and Jonathan Davis had a tendency to blame his parents and not himself. Nickelback doesn't appear to have made any entries. The less said about Limp Bizkit, the better.

The closest thing we've had to a creep rocker recently was the Strokes' "On the Other Side," where Julian Casablancas keeps mentioning how much he hates himself. But you have to assume that it's out of some sort of New York irony -- there's no way he hates himself the same way Scott Weiland hated himself back in '92 (interestingly, Velvet Revolver's album contained a creep rocker in "Fall to Pieces," so maybe Weiland is the genre's patron saint and savior). Here's hoping the forthcoming Velvet Revolver record's lyric sheet contains plenty of "jerks," "freaks," and of course, "creeps."

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