Perhaps it’s a bit ironic that “Creep”, the iconic single from Radiohead, remains by far their most commercially successful song to date. Especially when you consider the fact that the song eventually became so played out for the band that they stopped playing it at live shows for quite a while. Released right around the time that Britpop was starting to gain attention thanks to bands like Blur and Suede (and soon after, Oasis), “Creep” was more indebted to the grunge movement than anything else, stylistically speaking.
It’s even more interesting when you consider that the album it was included on, 1993’s debut full-length Pablo Honey, is usually considered the weakest Radiohead album. The band’s artistic output would increase as the years went by, with the trilogy of The Bends, the groundbreaking OK Computer, and the millennium reinvention Kid A giving the band massive critical praise, as well as continuing commercial success. As a single, though, it’s still the song that many think of when they hear the name Radiohead.
Thirty years after its initial release, though, the song has finally reached a massive milestone. “Creep” recently reached a staggering one BILLION streams on Spotify, which is something that’s pretty rare to have happen. In fact, it’s the band’s first song to reach the milestone, and for the statheads out there, it outnumbers their second most-streamed song on Spotify (“Karma Police”) by almost a three-to-one ratio. Pretty crazy!
