Why Everyone Hates Nickelback

A calm discussion about music

Hating Nickelback is an American cultural pastime. A meme. It’s been a meme for 20 years. And to me it’s still funny.

They might be the most hated rock band of all time — even more than, for instance, Led Zeppelin back in the early ‘70s when no one understood them yet. (Granted, many people still don’t understand Led Zeppelin. Which is understandable.)

And yet, Nickelback is one of the highest-grossing bands in the world. They achieved peak fame in the 2000s, starting with their third album Silver Side Up, and have sold more than 50 million records. And they’re still at it. I genuinely don’t know who’s still going to their concerts, but… they are in fact still at it.

So what’s the difference? I mean, we can all agree that Nickelback will never have a die-hard following of classic rock fans the way Zeppelin does. But… why?

The beginning of a meme

Well to begin with, where did the meme come from? When and why did it become cool to slam dunk on Nickelback for being a shitty band?

From 2002 to 2004, Comedy Central aired a particular promo over and over from their show Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn. In this promo, guest Brian Posehn made a joke: “No one talks about the studies that show that bad music makes people violent, like… Nickelback makes me want to kill Nickelback.”

This is probably where it all started. This is what made it cool to hate Nickelback. It’s one of the earliest jokes anyone made publicly after Silver Side Up.

Also, what kind of album name is Silver Side Up? This is the kind of 8th-grade cleverness that you see repeated over and over in their music, and I suspect a major reason people hate them.

The obvious stuff

Let’s go over the painfully obvious stuff. The stuff that everybody who knows music notices immediately.

First of all, Nickelback doesn’t look like a serious rock band and they never have. They look like a group of suburban-raised frat boys going out as a rock band for Halloween. And they always have.

One early problem was that Nickelback was belligerently overplayed on all music stations — as is wont to happen with any popular music. Pop stations, rock stations, alternative stations… for the entire decade of the 2000s, Nickelback’s music was inescapable. By the time it all stopped, we had all puked all over ourselves and were ready to be done.

Also, people on the ever-judgmental internet have commented that Chad Kroeger (the lead singer) is a budget version of Metallica’s James Hetfield. That’s one of those things you don’t know you know until someone says it out loud. If you listen to Nickelback’s “harder” stuff, you’ll hear it.

Why did I put “harder” in quotes? Well, because Nickelback is a hard rock band in the same way that Joe Pesci is a good actor: he isn’t.

He just gets treated like he is.

When Nickelback signed with the label Roadrunner Records, they began to take the spotlight from the metal bands on that label. Roadrunner began focusing tremendous resources on Nickelback in order to push them forward as some sort of post-grunge game-changer. So it’s possible that a lot of the earliest resentment towards Nickelback came from metalheads and hard rock fans who were sick of them stealing production and marketing resources away from bands that deserved it more.

Notice how I didn’t put deserved it more in quotes.

Building a mystery

Here’s something that has always caught my attention in rock music.

Mystique (noun): an air or attitude of mystery and reverence developing around something or someone.

Source: Merriam-Webster

Great rock music has a mystique to it. Some intangible something or other, some darkness or artful otherness, that can’t be boiled down into anything simple and replicable.

Here are two examples:

Michael Stipe, the chief songwriter and lyricist for R.E.M., had an extremely unique lyrical style. He sang what basically amounted to nonsense lyrics but still managed to convey deep and real emotion. He could sing about going into town or swimming in the night and make it a profoundly emotional experience that made you contemplate the hurt of relationships.

Chris Cornell of Soundgarden (and later Audioslave) managed to write some hauntingly meaningful lyrics and some deep, dark rock melodies… without ever coming right out and singing about heartbreak. He took you somewhere without naming where he was taking you.

Neither Stipe nor Cornell ever came right out and named the hurt of their music. They didn’t come directly at the subject matter. They didn’t write lyrics that an 8th grader could write amidst his first breakup. That’s the key.

Nickelback comes right at it. They don’t leave anything artistic for you, the listener, to do. There's nothing to be in awe of; there's no sitting around with, in Herman Melville's words, a "childish fire-side interest" at what it takes to write one of their songs.

Now that’s not to say that Nickelback doesn’t have any good or artistic lyrics. For instance their first hit, How You Remind Me, contains the line “Been to the bottom of every bottle,” which has always been one of my favorite lines in rock music. Because I relate to it, and it’s a clever way to describe the reverse goose chase of trying to forget someone.

But that’s just it — it was clever. All of Nickelback’s lyrics are clever. They’re not moving, they’re clever. They’re not mysterious and otherworldly, they’re clever.

They’re not artistically compelling, they’re clever.

Clever lyrics are like chewing on a fresh piece of gum. They’re fun but they won’t stand the test of time. At least not anywhere outside of hip-hop.

Which leads me to another observation about Nickelback’s lyrics: they’re perfect. So good, they’re bad. They’re sterile, they’re clean. They rhyme perfectly, they contain a precise message. They write perfect lyrics about nothing.

Nickelback, like any 15-minute pop star, has always organized its music in a way that is catchy at the expense of authenticity.

One might compare Foo Fighters to Nickelback. After all, Foo Fighters puts out a similar kind of predictable, formulaic rock, along with other much-hated rock bands like Creed and Three Days Grace. You know… the kind of rock that pretty much follows a recipe. And, as much as I love some Foo Fighters songs, most of their music is a miss for me.

The difference is, Dave Grohl and Foo Fighters have always preserved that gritty, raw imperfection that defined rock and roll for decades. Their music has something real in it that Nickelback doesn’t have. It doesn’t have an overproduced, over-bassed, rhythmically perfect feel. It still sounds like 4 dudes sitting in a room playing their fucking instruments like musicians.

I can dance (but I don’t want to)

A lot of people have danced or sung to Nickelback’s songs. Myself included.

And a lot of people hate themselves for it afterwards. Or even while they’re doing it. Myself included. You have to be particularly bad at music to make people simultaneously dance and sing and hate themselves.

In order to understand why that happens, let me explain what I think music “is.”

Music is that which organizes reality for our minds and bodies (and spirits, if you’re into that kind of thing), through our senses. Music is that which takes the messiness and chaos of reality and gives us just a brief respite from that chaos by making order out of it. Organizing it for us into something we deeply, deeply understand — without knowing how or why we understand it, or what is there to be understood.

Music is that which gives us a visceral experience of organized reality.

As far as I’m concerned, music contains the very meaning of life. It’s the only thing in life that is an answer in and of itself. A real answer that leaves no further question. It makes you feel like part of something, and, in the best cases, it makes you want to move. To it. With it. In it.

But there are different levels of that organization. Different levels of quality, if I may; different levels of visceral meaning. For example, Mozart organizes reality but in a relatively superficial way. It’s not emotionally profound. It’s just dinner-party music. As opposed to, say, Debussy or Vivaldi, who produced masterpieces that feel like entire spiritual journeys — entire sections of reality that are walled off as their own kind of other experience.

The issue with Nickelback’s music is that it’s the cheap way to achieve that deep organizational feeling. It’s candy instead of a nutritious meal. It’s leverage in the stock market instead of the patience of waiting for returns.

They make punchy, clever melodies instead of timeless ones. They artificially make their music hit harder with production tricks. Their “harder” stuff has fuzzier guitar distortion, heavy-handed guitar riffs, and a darker and more punchy feel than mainstream rock. When you turn on some of their harder songs (Side of a Bullet, Burn It to the Ground, or their newest single San Quentin), it's hard not to immediately like the heavy riffs that open the song. They feel solid.

But these riffs are likeable in the same way that superhero movies are likeable: they’re too perfect. They might as well have been written by AI. They appeal, almost scientifically, to the parts of our brains and bodies that like rhythm and organization and the up-down effect of 4/4 music.

Nickelback has done to its own music what the music industry did to hits like Carly Rae Jepsen's Call Me Maybe, or Ke$ha’s TiK ToK, or Selena Gomez’s Love You Like a Love Song: jam it inside your body and turn it into a viscerally appealing experience without making real art. Made you obsessed with it for a while and then left you hung over from overusing it.

Nickelback's music is like taking a pill — musically, it’s cheating. It’s not art, it’s science.

Tchaikovsky, Vivaldi, and Debussy give you a much less punchy experience… but reward you for your patience with beauty that no pop-rock band could ever come close to.

People also hate what Nickelback represents: that a mediocre band can be made one of the biggest musical acts in the world by the music industry. People hate that "the machine" can take in something mediocre and spit out something gold. That bothers musicians the most — but even regular people can smell it when there’s bullshit on the radio.

The less obvious stuff

And then there’s the less obvious stuff.

Like for instance many people describe Chad Kroeger as a self-righteous, alpha-male douchebag. The lyrics in some of his songs would also suggest a misogynistic character. That doesn’t seem like a main reason to hate Nickelback, but a small bonus.

And then there’s simply internet culture: memes are memes. People like to conform to whatever view is going to make them fit in and get likes. So the hatred for Nickelback kind of snowballed out of a desire for clout and internet points.

The funny part is, Nickelback has continued to be a relatively successful band that tours the globe. And yet… nobody in my life has ever said out loud that they’re a Nickelback fan. I have never met one person who said Nickelback was one of their favorite bands.

That’s weird. It’s like their entire fan base is a ghost.

So maybe the situation is something like this: people have continued to buy their albums for their fill of bubble-gum rock and punchy riffs, all the while denouncing the band publicly to save face. People that have continued to support the band and go to their shows don’t want to blemish their personal reputations by admitting it.

Because they know what they’ve done.

Another part of what got the snowball rolling was that people were still riding the grunge and post-grunge legends of the ‘90s when Nickelback broke onto the scene. People who liked Kurt Cobain and Eddie Vedder were never going to step aside for some pseudo-hard-rock frat boys. I mean, come on. ‘90s rock fans had incredible self-respect and incredibly good taste. Nickelback never stood a chance with them.

Overall, there’s a lot to learn from Nickelback about what it is in music that we like and don’t like.

To summarize, I’d say this: Everyone hates Nickelback because Nickelback is not music, it’s a consumer product. Even people who aren’t musicians can tell. It’s too perfect. It’s inauthentic. It’s like the AI-generated art of music: it’s imitation, not emotion. It doesn’t have mystique… it doesn’t have personality. It’s rock music for the sake of rock music. Some people have a problem with that. Some don’t, but they keep it to themselves.

Furthermore, a lot of people think Nickelback’s success came from luck and timing, not talent. It’s hard to disagree with them.

And probably the worst part is — Nickelback gets credit for being a real hard-rock band. I think that bothers people most. At least with pop music, you get to just call it what it is. It’s just pop music.

As I wrote last week, I want to see people dance. As a writer and a citizen, that’s important to me. So if people want to turn on these artificial riffs and dance, I will vote for them. But the other half of me is a musician. And, as a band, I think Nickelback is fucking terrible.

The Eagles are what you get when 4 people get together and write music. Selena Gomez, Ke$ha, and Nickelback are what you get when the music industry gets together to put out a consumer product.

Here’s the real litmus test:

When asked “who are your influences,” no great rock band is ever going to respond, “Nickelback.”

Drink some water and listen to something that requires some patience.

JDR

“You are the music while the music lasts.” - T.S. Eliot