There was mass before the Big Bang, but it was so condensed that it wasn't anything but a bunch of atoms.
We don't actually have any idea what happened before the big bang. There may or may not have been a universe. We don't have a model to explain the existence of our universe, and it's quite possible we never will.
You can read about it here.
Food for thought: When was the last you saw an explosion create something?
This is actually the function of an explosion. An explosion is a sudden and violent conversion of some kind of energy into another. Explosions produce heat, light, sound energy. The combustion reaction frequently produced gas and water. The kinetic side effects of explosions include pressure or shock waves. If these aren't creating something, then I don't really know what you would consider to be creative. From our viewpoint, and explosion may appear to be a form of destruction, like a building collapsing or blasting rock out of a mine, but this is a matter of interpretation. If you consider that planets exist due to explosions of stars, then you may see that explosions can also be a creative force.
I should note that by creative force we're talking about in terms of ordering things from a human perspective. In terms of energy and mass an explosion neither creates or destroys, it converts one form of energy into another.