I Love to Hate Nickelback Too, Part 1
I read the most astonishing grouping of words yesterday: “ … another Nickelback scholar …”
Not only is there such a thing, there is apparently more than one. What world are we living in?
A fascinating article titled A Scientific Explanation for Why Everybody Hates Nickelback referenced a staggering number of other research articles, predominantly Scandinavian, that deconstruct everybody’s favorite least-favorite band.
“Their songs are ‘optimally safe’, where ‘everything is up to par with the requirements of the genre’, and which create ‘an illusion of hard rock’ (Ojala 2002). The music is described as being ‘fake’ (Riikonen 2012), ‘forced’ (Hilden 2011) and ‘performed through gritted teeth’ (Riikonen 2012). Van der San (2011) claims that Nickelback is ‘calculatingly hit-focused’; … Overall, the descriptions imply that the songs are not genuine self-expression written willingly, but instead forced and made for commercial reasons.”
When Nickelback politely ambled onto airwaves about fifteen years ago with their aw-shucks brand of sentimental schlock I had a roommate who adored Tori Amos and Loreena McKennitt – to the exclusion of almost all other music. So I never put any stock in her “rock” preferences. She had been wallowing in a not-so-recent breakup while playing the same cds on repeat, chain-smoking and writing navel-gaze-y poetry on our back porch. I was thrilled when she unexpectedly discovered Audioslave and didn’t even mind when she start playing them to the exclusion of all Tori. Yes, she is one of those fans that only uses Tori Amos’ first name. Like Ani fans. Side note: if an artist doesn’t use a mononym as a stage name, and you don’t know them personally, you’ve got the time to use their last name too. Sure, it will cost you precious milliseconds of your life that you will never get back. But it’s a small price fans who don’t want to be dbag groupies can pay.
Had I known my roommate was going to discover Nickelback I would’ve let the whole Tori thing go. “His voice is just so real. It’s so raw,” she implored, her voice trailing off with her imagination, to a place where I hope she wasn’t imagining herself with him. I wanted to smack her in the mouth.
Chad Kroeger is no Tom Fucking Waits. His voice doesn’t splinter like timber splitting as it crashes toward the forest floor. It doesn’t fray and tangle like the braided rope kids swing over rivers from. But he sure tries to sound like he’s been swallowing scrap metal all his life. Gravelly though it may be, his is the McMansion of rock voices. And suddenly I have turned into that dbag anti-fan who loves to hate them just a little too much.
I never liked their music but never thought much of them after that unfortunate glimpse into my ex-roommate’s flat little world. There was that amusing little clip on the internet, circa 2005, that played two of their songs simultaneously to demonstrate their lack of range. I chuckled, emailed it to my sister and forgot about them again.
Years after that I was driving and singing along with the radio, which I love to do. Then a song came on that I’d never heard before. There was that “gravelly, raw” voice again but it couldn’t be Nickelback. It was too raunchy. From what I could discern of the lyrics, this was a loud, foul-mouthed song about getting a hand job and a blow job and somehow going down on girl while driving. The narrative is non-linear and not creative. It’s a convoluted high school mess about a girl with a curfew, a mother who’d be pissed and a father who catches them. Those Tim Horton-sipping Canadians used to sing about their hometown, old friends and favorite memories. They couldn’t possibly be singing about oral sex from an underage girl, right?
Right??
Wrong. Google confirmed it. The song “Animals” had actually been released in 2005 but by the time I heard it a decade+ later the soft-rock Canadians were apparently attempting to rebrand themselves as reckless teenagers exhilarated by their own youthful rebellion. Chad Kroeger had gotten his goldilocks relaxed and looked like Prince Valiant without bangs. I don’t know which teenaged virgin they paid to imagine what reckless sex would be like but that has to be who penned these lyrics. It has all the sexiness of a health and reproduction class and it reeks of inexperienced exaggeration. And the pathetic stab at being a “bad boy” we can only deduce from the fact that he just got his driver’s license back.
Even the Finns hate Nickelback and we know they’re quality people because they love Conan and have chart-topping child literacy rates.
Journalist Shaunacy Ferro is not one of the Nickelback scholars she references but what she definitely is is much more gracious than I. She says, “Nickelback is too much of everything to be enough of something. They follow genre expectations too well, which is seen as empty imitation, but also not well enough, which is read as commercial tactics and as a lack of a stable and sincere identity.”
And because I am not a musicologist and just an asshole with a laptop, I do not have a densely academic analysis of their musicology, or lack thereof. My primary criticism if of their insincere lyrics. And the not believable image they’re trying to fabricate with said lyrics. I’m pretty sure this Saved-By-The-Bell-looking bitmoji of me playing a keytar that’s not plugged in rocks harder than Nickelback. And that’s ok.
The lesson is simple. Stay in your lane.
Take the one-hit wonder duet Charles and Eddie. They sang Would I Lie to You. It’s a really sweet upbeat song about honesty, fidelity and monogamy in 1992. It’s charming and catchy and always makes me turn it up. I’m always smiling wide while I sing along.
The point is you don’t have to be hard to be good. And if you’re not hard, for the love of all that’s holy, please don’t try to be.
“The hope and memory of grunge can be seen to be soiled in the worst kind of way in the hands of bands such as Nickelback, who represent everything grunge was against, not least of all commercialism,” Ferro quotes Salli Anttonen. “The band’s very success undermines its ability to borrow from grunge and metal, because there’s nothing metal about a song your mom listens to on the radio—“horrifying radio rock,” as one critic called Nickelback in 2005.”
Subjective preferences notwithstanding, all I’m trying to hammer home is that you don’t have to market yourself as something you’re not. You do not have to write lyrics about getting caught getting a hand job while you’re driving. And, I cannot underscore this enough, if you are with a girl young enough to “get caught” by either of her parents and you reference both of them? YOU’D BETTER BE UNDER 18 TOO. I don’t know what the age of consent is in Canada. But I also don’t know why anyone would consent to fooling around with Chad Kroeger. Anywhere. Let alone in a car.
Not to mention, they’re boring. The similarities between Nickelback and older bands makes their music predictable, and as such, bland. No one feels like Nickelback—or its members—are dangerous. When they try to be edgy, they come off as trying too hard. They may sing about drinking hard, but the public doesn’t see Nickelback’s members living the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle.
They did just fine peddling their melted-ice cream nostalgic swill. They should’ve cashed out while the chips were stacked high and retired on radio-play royalties.