Art & Creativity Quote by Mark McGrath

McGrath is poking a thumb in the eye of rock culture's favorite invisible scoreboard: credibility. In the late-90s/early-2000s pop-rock ecosystem Sugar Ray came up in, "cred" was a kind of currency minted by gatekeepers - critics, tastemakers, radio programmers, the kind of fans who treat liking the right bands as a personality. His line lands because it refuses to play defense. Instead of pleading that the music should speak for itself, he admits the uglier truth: for plenty of people, the social meaning wrapped around the song matters more than the song.

The subtext is strategic. "Fed up" signals exhaustion with an argument he knows he can't win on traditional terms. Sugar Ray were massively successful in a lane that invited suspicion: sunny hooks, beach-party vibes, crossover polish. Credibility talk is often just class anxiety in a leather jacket - a way of separating "real" taste from mass taste, and punishing artists who make it look easy.

"We don't care for credibility" is also a brand statement: anti-snob, pro-pleasure, give-the-people-the-chorus. It's half defiance, half liberation. McGrath isn't saying standards don't matter; he's saying the standard he's being graded on is rigged toward suffering, obscurity, and "authenticity" performances. In an era when pop success was still treated as a moral failing in rock, the quote reads like an early admission of what streaming culture later made obvious: the audience vote is its own legitimacy, and the purity police don't get to be the only judges.