Hi, I’m Alli, and I’m an aficionado of horrid late-nineties-to-early-aughts-alt-rock.
But seriously. That’s how I got baby’s first Nickleback album. And I listened to it A TON. I put it in my discman and listened to it walking home from school, I made my parents put it in the CD player of a rental car on vacation, I heard it on the radio. It seemed perfectly passable to me as a sad 15-year-old who thought KISS was a great band and was just getting over my Beatles phase and hated the boy bands and pop divas whose careers had taken a nose dive the year before.
It turns out I like terrible songs about abuse (see also my obsession with all of Everclear’s music pre-2004 and the only reason I know the words “Red Jumpsuit Apparatus” go together. And, fuck, System of a Down and Korn and Linkin Park too, what the fuck was wrong with us from 1997-2006 were we okay?) because I use awful, angsty music to cope.
Anyway I’ll concede that Nickleback makes generic-but-well-produced music that is ignorable enough to make it as filler on radio stations BUT I’ll add that Chad Kroger is a fucking awful lyricist and that’s what really makes the suckitude stand out. Because when his lyrics are at their worst they stick in your head and drag you kicking and screaming into actually putting thought into considering Nickleback and Nickleback-as-an-okay-band falls apart under anything more than a passing glance.
First off “How you remind me” has pretty dang good lyrics. They’re repetitive and memorable and evoke feelings and a sense of what’s happening (we’re bad for each other and I’ve been getting shitfaced over it) without getting too detailed. You can angry-shout along with this in a bar or a car and not feel too embarrassed. Which is why this was their breakthrough song.
Have you checked out the lyrics to “Never again”? Dreck. The chorus ends on the lines “She’s just a woman/never again” and “haven’t you heard don’t hit a lady/kicking your ass would be a pleasure” is an actual part of the breakdown. That is not good. That is very bad.
Have you checked out the lyrics to “Photograph”? I know we’ve all seen the “Look at this gra-aph” Vine. (Excellent). But the actual lyrics to the song are the verbal equivalent of the the generic distorted progressions they turn out. EVERYONE can relate to the lyrics (we’re looking at pictures, I’m getting older, my life has changed and I’m facing down the inexorable march of time) because they are so bland as to be nearly universal. And that’s revolting.
People FUCKING HATE IT when you point out they’re an unoriginal gremlin just like everyone else, and when you do that not as an insult but as a kindly dude throwing his arm around your shoulder and reminiscing about the past to get buyers to move more units on the North American distro arm you come across as a fucking pod person.
“Photograph” isn’t even Nickleback’s worst song (oh my god, I know, HOW?) but I think it’s the one I hate most aggressively. The milquetoast twangy bullshit country vibe combined with the weakest, most simpering power-chord progression in the choruses combined with the lyrics that are so universal that they circle right back around to being repulsive just mixes together into an unholy brew that triggers my gag reflex.
And look, I’m so contrarian that I’ve tried to tolerate Nickleback just to infuriate my hipster friends but I can’t do it. They’re that bad.
You know that friend who describes his dreams to you in excruciating detail? That’s Chad Kroeger and that’s the lyrics to “Photograph.” I don’t know what the hell is on Joey’s head, Chad, I wasn’t there and couldn’t see it, why are you describing your fever dreams and meandering thoughts about finishing high school to me Chad? Not only is this uninteresting to me it is infuriating - it’s like hearing one side of a phone conversation; it is distracting. FUCK YOU FOR MAKING ME IMAGINE STUPID FUCKING HATS CHAD.
Also I know we can dig into arguments about performative authenticity, but the quest for the next big pop song from rock bands is a gross, slimy part of the nineties that made Weezer increasingly unlistenable as they distilled themselves from fun/moody/broody/emo/pop-punk into whatever the fuck Hurley was (they’ve gotten a bit better since). And that palpable pandering and quest for saleable songs is Nickleback’s whole deal: Kroeger has been very open about “studying every piece, everything sonically, everything lyrically, everything musically, chord structure. I would dissect every single song that I would hear on the radio or every song that had ever done well on a chart and I would say, ‘Why did this do well?'” before trying to replicate that for his own music.
Nickleback is full-bore, balls-deep in the uncanny valley. You can fucking hear it. You can hear the way they found the least-offensive, most saleable, highly relatable things they could to cram into each song. It is unwholesome, unholy, loathsome music perfectly crafted to blend into the background of all the other songs on the market. And it’s so cunningly and revoltingly done - any band that makes it to the radio these days is going to be highly produced and have the sound flattened in pursuit of “loud” so all that Nickleback has to do is be “loud” and similarly produced and not be too far off base and they’ll get picked up by ClearChannel and they are safely camouflaged in the haze of Imagine Dragons and Stone Sour and Black Keys and other stuff that may seem a bit too polished but is genuinely made by people who wanted to sing a song to make their listeners *feel* things that the band felt instead of singing a song to move units regardless of feeling. This is where I get really grossed out by the relatable music; it feels like a betrayal to hear someone singing about a breakup or abuse or not graduating high school, to relate to that song and find comfort in it, and then to discover that the people who made this thing that reached out to you had no idea what they were talking about and just thought they’d be able to get a good market price for it. Everclear may fucking suck but at least I know Art Alexakis has been through some shit.
Yes, they are technically competent musicians who can arrange a song quickly and efficiently and fill the spaces with words that at least mostly scan, but they are the Jeff Koons of the music world: hugely popular, mostly accepted by mainstream consumers, and talentless hacks who farm out the hard work to people who don’t know any better.
You know those bots that write Tom Clancy novels? That’s Nickleback.
You know how those bots sometimes fuck up and give us something from the nether realm and should not be:
[imagine the video for "She Keeps me Up" here]
Also Silver Side Up was their third album and it came out on 9/11 ILLUMINATI GOD DAMNED CONFIRMED.
But seriously my theory is that they fall firmly into the uncanny valley and that’s why they’re so hated by such a large group of people BUT because of a combination of factors (humans are more sight-reliant than hearing reliant, we’ve been desensitized to uncanny sounds by computer voices, lots of people are just tone deaf, not everyone is an obsessive music snob, a lot of people just stop listening to new music at some point and have their tastes formed so don’t engage in criticism) the people who think they’re fine or who continue to buy their music don’t have the same reaction of visceral horror. At fifteen I hadn’t heard enough music to really understand why “Never again” was a bad song with bad (and actually yeah kind of sexist!) lyrics.
This has some interesting parallels with the big mac example - children like uncomplicated sweet or salty food like Chicken Nuggets or Mac and Cheese or Twinkies more than they like complicated or spicy or bitter flavors because they have more tastebuds and so taste things more strongly but fear novelty - Adults have fewer tastebuds and seek out more complex flavors than children do (generally) - and the elderly have trouble tasting anything and that’s part of why every grandparent seems to have a disposable bucket of sickly-sweet hard candy. Music appears to be similar but on a much shorter time-scale: You don’t really start listening to music on your own until you’re probably around 8-10 but by that point you know if you hate the music your parents like, you branch out and get real experimental by your teens or early twenties, and by 34 (for the vast majority of people) your musical tastes are set and you want to listen to only a small selection of music you’re familiar with (thus why the next generation’s music always sounds like crap to older folks and why people are still shelling out cash to see Axl Rose AND why people forgave Metallica for St. Anger).
In conclusion: FUCK YOU FOR MAKING ME IMAGINE STUPID FUCKING HATS, CHAD.
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