The cultural phenomenon of making fun of Nickelback
By Caroline Ho, Arts Editor
There might be no truer Canadian pastime than hating Nickelback.
Their wannabe-angsty lyrics, their slew of Billboard-charting hits that all sound basically the same, and frontman Chad Kroegerâs hairstyle that is reminiscent of old ramen all make the band so easy to mock. But for all the flak they get, itâs hard to deny that they must be doing something right, seeing as theyâve been commercially successful on a large scale since the early 2000s. When and why did we start deciding that hating Nickelback was the cool thing to do?
The bandâs been subject to some scorn since its early days. Formed in Alberta in 1995, Nickelback signed in 1999 with EMI Canada and with Roadrunner Records in the US, a predominantly hard rock and heavy metal label. Even though early Nickelback music is somewhat heavier and grungier than their later âradio-friendlyâ fare, theyâre still nowhere near other Roadrunner acts like, say, King Diamond or Slipknot, so right off the bat metal fans were incredulous of the band.
Of course, Nickelback hate couldnât become popular until Nickelback themselves gained mainstream attention. In Canada, some of their early success came from CRTC regulations requiring at least 40 per cent of music on radios to be Canadian content. However, on both sides of the border, the band really shot to success with their 2001 album Silver Side Up and its lead single âHow You Remind Me,â which received several Juno awards and was named by Billboard as the most played song of 2002 in the US. The song drew from watered-down aspects of â90s grunge, aided by Kroegerâs slightly hoarse vocals singing lyrics about relationship angst, and transformed their form of grunge into a more relatable format. The sound certainly worked for one song, but when the band released âSomedayâ in 2003, the lead single off their next album, a lot of listeners thought it sounded far too similar to âHow You Remind Me.â
Widespread disdain for the band started to take solid shape around this time. Between 2002 and 2004, Comedy Central repeatedly ran an ad for the show Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn where a comedian made a quip about detesting Nickelback. From there the sentiment became increasingly normalized, and hating Nickelback became a cultural norm.
The bandâs own attitude toward their fame/infamy only bolstered the trend. Kroeger himself has acknowledged in interviews that heâs tried to write music thatâs as catchy as possible by taking the elements of top hits from other successful artists. To a lot of critics, this only succeeded in making the group as bland and fake as possible. Then in 2006, Nickelback released the single âRockstar,â a song about the most hedonistic, materialistic, inauthentic aspects of a famous musicianâs lifestyle. The band has claimed that the song is meant to mock the very image Nickelback seems to represent, but to a lot of listeners, the song isnât self-aware so much as it is ironically terrible. âRockstarâ went on to achieve massive commercial successâwhile simultaneously being labelled by many as one of the worst songs of all time. In 2008, the song was used in a commercial for British furniture retailer DFS, an ad that was later banned from TV. The ad was actually banned because DFS had doctored the size of its sofas, not because âRockstarâ is too terrible for TV, but this incident certainly didnât help the bandâs reputation.
Nickelback hate has only continued to grow ever since. At Thanksgiving of 2011, Nickelback was slated to play during the NFL halftime show in the game between the Detroit Lions and Green Bay Packers, and over 55,000 fans signed a petition to stop them. For years, likingâor even listening toâNickelback has been one of the darkest of slurs: During Trumpâs presidential campaign last year, the then-presidential candidate had a protestor removed from a Republican rally for carrying a âTrump Likes Nickelbackâ sign. Late last year, a policeman from PEI even (jokingly) used the threat of listening to Nickelback as a scare tactic against drunk drivers.
In April 2016, a Finnish graduate student named Salli Anttonen conducted an academic study on the phenomenon of Nickelback hate. Anttonenâs paper, titled âHypocritical Bullshit Performed Through Gritted Teeth: Authenticity Discourses in Nickelbackâs Album Reviews in Finnish Media,â claims that Nickelback is âtoo much of everything to be enough of something.â By trying to write music that appeals to everyoneâs tastes, critics assert, Nickelback ends up actually taking the worst elements of everything.
So is Nickelback actually that bad, or do people mainly hate the band because it just seems like everyone else does? Judge for yourself, but the writer of this article, at least, will unashamedly admit to liking some of their songs.
