Burn Me to the Ground: Why I Hate Nickelback, Pt. 2
Some very erudite critiques of Nickelback make my trash-talking look like sophistry. And it basically is. Because Nickelback is the ick-factor incarnate for me. It stems from a simple distaste for anyone acting like something they’re not. It’s a disdain for dishonesty.
Music journalist and critic Shaunacy Ferro quotes the Scandinavian scholars who studied the anti-Nickelback phenomenon.
One Finnish researcher tried to get to the bottom of why music critics love to hate on Nickelback. Her study in Metal Music Studies, beautifully titled “‘Hypocritical Bullshit Performed Through Gritted Teeth’: Authenticity Discourses in Nickelback’s Album Reviews in Finnish Media,” argues that it’s a matter of authenticity. Critics don’t see Nickelback as genuine.
This critique is easy to see in the lyrics for Burn It To The Ground:
We’re going out tonight
To kick out every light
Take anything we want
Drink everything in sight
Canadians hold the global gold standard for civility. They should embrace that in a world rife with crisis and violence instead of claiming to mouth off to a bartender when we all know damn well you didn’t. Get your hands off of this glass, last call my ass. Canadians are famed for apologizing too much and we’re supposed to believe that schmaltz-rocker Chad Kroeger is flouting liquor control commission regulations? Where I live, last call is set by the OLCC, not the bartender. And no bartender is going to do anything but have your drunk ass bounced if you challenge that with aggression. It’s an unconvincing narrative of a “wild” night out. Sure, what constitutes wild is perhaps a spectrum rather than one static definition. But our cultural tolerance for the aberrance of celebrities has waned. So not only is Nickelback a tangible fake, they’re too late anyway. Celebrities are now largely expected to follow the same rules as the rest of us. And when they don’t we see it as harbingers of a looming breakdown – Britney Spears shaving her head, Justin Bieber smuggling a monkey through an airport or Dave Chappelle moving to Ohio.
But Nickelback, being devoid of true artistry, in that they don’t actually have anything to say that motivates their music, (let alone determines a genre as a vehicle, a natural fit for their message), just tries on different musical styles like Halloween costumes. Like when my boss’s nine-year-old daughter dressed up as Joan Jett. But rather than a fun outing for a child once a year, they are professionally marketing a false product, the hard-drinking, hard-living, womanizing life on the road – the iconic rock-and-roll lifestyle.
We’re screaming like demons,
swinging from the ceiling,
No.
The 70s are over. No one is riding motorcycles up and down hotel hallways and throwing tvs out the window anymore. That kind of unbridled debauchery died out when the true kings of rock stopped rocking. And that’s ok. That bacchanalian revelry wasn’t just symptomatic of rocking too hard, as Nickelback sadly tries to imply. The permissive wildness that defined the 60s and 70s were the fumes from a stirring cauldron of counterculture, political protest and every kind of drug. We were collectively tripping and rolling on an alternate universe that allowed and pardoned our bad boys’ bad deeds – behavior we now recognize, unequivocally, as degenerate and criminal. We don’t need to normalize Jimmy Page’s unapologetic and unprosecuted pedophilia. We don’t need to wonder about an astrology of singers dying at 27. The days of drug overdosing and choking to death on your own vomit are not behind us but at least we don’t adulate the tragedy of those who die young.
Even Robert Plant himself, the crown prince of curly-haired blonde frontmen, “surrendered gracefully the things of youth“. He evolved with time and age. While Pedophile Page kept re-releasing different iterations of LZ classics Robert Plant recorded and released a critically acclaimed duet album with bluegrass royalty Alison Krauss.
But Nickelback decided to regroup and rebrand themselves by regressing to an unconvincing youthful depravity that even kids on rumspringa would call good old-fashioned bad manners.
Concert footage of them performing this song is stultifying. A massive arena throbs, mostly with women. A camera pulls back to pan the crowds. It zooms in on young women’s faces, their smiles mouthing all the lyrics. One girl throws up the most wholesome horns I’ve ever seen.
We got no fear, no doubt, all in, balls out
Actually. Chad Kroeger. You looked pretty nervous performing this song for the WWE Tribute to our Troops concert I came across. Almost as though you knew a stadium full of military personnel might not think this the rock anthem of their lives. As if they just might call you a poser, (to use an insult popular when I was in middle school in the 90s) and call bullshit on the whole damn charade.
Even when we can’t quantify it, we instinctively recognize authenticity. It instills a trustfulness even in the consumer. But the lack of authenticity, Nickelback’s in particular, creates a schadenfreude that has clearly consumed me.