To get a sense of the Canadian rock band Nickelback’s standing among music fans, consider this: last year, readers of Rolling Stone named it as the second-worst band of the nineteen-nineties, despite the fact that the group’s first major-label album wasn’t released in the United States until 2000. The band has been scorned by people ranging from bloggers who can’t be bothered to spell the band’s name correctly (“I don’t even need to explain why Nickleback sucks.”) to peers in the music industry (Patrick Carney, drummer of the Black Keys: “Rock and roll is dying because people became O.K. with Nickelback being the biggest band in the world.”)
Nickelback is in the news this week because it has just released a new album, but usually the band makes headlines only when it is on the receiving end of some new expression of public disdain. In 2011, more than fifty thousand people signed an online petition to protest the fact that Nickelback had been hired to play the halftime show at the Detroit Lions’ Thanksgiving game. (They played anyway.) Earlier this fall, a man from London started a fundraising campaign to keep the band from touring in the United Kingdom. A few years ago, a protestor in Chicago held up a sign accusing Mayor Rahm Emanuel of liking Nickelback (Emanuel’s spokesman said no way); this summer, an Atlanta Braves fan made a sign that said the Phillies’ Ryan Howard was a fan. (Howard seemed mostly confused when confronted about it after the game.) As the critic Steven Hyden wrote at Grantland, “Hating Nickelback is the last form of pop music monoculture.” It is, in other words, the only thing on which music fans can seem to agree.
Except, of course, not everyone thinks that Nickelback is terrible. As of 2012, the band had sold more than fifty million albums. Billboard named them the top band of the two-thousands, and two of its signature songs, “How You Remind Me,” from 2001, and “Photograph,” from 2005, were among the most popular singles of the decade, in any genre.
Nickelback got its start in Alberta, in the mid-nineties, as a cover band, and, in effect, it has always remained one: taking what it liked from different periods of hard rock—grunge guitars, thunking stadium-rock drums, pop-rock hooks, and hair-metal lyrics about sexual and chemical excess—and putting it all behind the lead singer Chad Kroeger’s signature (and much parodied) low, raspy growl. It was studied hitmaking disguised as mere good times: millions of fans rocked out, while critics smirked at the band’s appropriations and responded to Nickelback’s gestures toward history by comparing them unfavorably to forty years’ worth of better groups: they were Pearl Jam without the intelligence, Metallica without the edge, AC/DC without the humor.
“We’ve never really been a critics’ darling or anything like that,” Kroeger told Billboard, in 2011. “The people speak. We sell a lot of records and fill a lot of arenas, and we don’t hear many complaints.” This, for many years, was the band’s standard response to the invariable questions they received about their unpopular popularity. It was mostly the shrug of the massively successful: the members of Nickelback played to adoring crowds; they didn’t feel like the most hated band in the world. And it was partly a form of denial, since it wasn’t just snotty critics, as Kroeger suggested, but a good chunk of the population at large, that mocked the band. Yet this year, ahead of the release of their latest effort, “No Fixed Address,” Nickelback and Kroeger took a slightly different position. In an interview last month with the Pulse of Radio, he shot back at his detractors: “All these critics, they’re just tireless,” he said. “They keep ragging on the band. If they had stopped writing all this stuff about us, there would be no controversy left in the band and we probably would have died out years ago. They don’t know that they’re still responsible for us being around today.”
Could this be true? Could Kroeger, a man who for many years wore his hair like this in public, be right? Could all the people who have gleefully insulted the band really be the ones who have helped it to endure, and, along the way, have helped create a Cult of Nickelback where, once, even in the band’s most popular phase, none existed? Kroeger’s statement is partly a provocation, but it is also a rather frank concession. If we take his word for it, Nickelback continues to be culturally relevant only because it remains famously hated.
As Hyden points out in his Grantland piece, the hatred of Nickelback is, by this late stage, mostly passé and largely misplaced. Ask a group of fourteen-year-olds if Nickelback sucks, and they’ll probably just be confused. Nickel what? Nickelback sells many fewer albums these days than it did at its peak, which was somewhere between 2005 and 2008. They don’t represent what people think they represent, and probably never did; they aren’t the band that ruined rock and roll, and even if they were, they aren’t currently ruining anything. All Nickelback is, as its members age into their forties, is a rock band clinging to a pared-down, niche audience—which makes them a lot like most other pop musicians, and so not really the most anything.
Take that 2011 halftime show, the one that inspired the online protest: within the hermetic-seal sterility of a domed stadium, the band’s single “When We Stand Together,” a generic anthem of empowerment, was airless and limp. Any hope for authenticity or urgency was further undermined by the accompanying stage production, which included choreographed dancers and an African-American drum line, who later received reinforcements in the form of dazed “fans” milling about in front of the stage. It was a grab bag of corporate-pop pageantry, with fireworks and swooping camera shots—a reminder of how Nickelback got its name from something that Kroeger used to say to customers when he worked as a barista at Starbucks. Latte metal. The only thing that made the halftime show interesting was that fifty thousand people had said that they didn’t want to see it.
Nickelback isn’t the first or the last band to go soft when given the chance to play during a football game. But the purportedly “hard” aspects of the band never held up against much scrutiny anyway. In 2008, they released the sexed-up album “Dark Horse,” which was full of unsubtle tracks like “Something In Your Mouth,” “I’d Come for You,” and “S.E.X.” Not to downplay the grotesqueness of such stuff, but these guys didn’t seem very sincere in their lust or menacing in their intentions. Many of Nickelback’s hits are party anthems about whiskey and tequila (“Oh, we got no class, no taste, no shirt, and shit faced.”), but the band can’t quite sell this flavor of hard-rock idiot insouciance—you get the sense, listening to them, that Kroeger and his bandmates are drinking water while their fans are doing the Jäger shots. A few years ago, a reporter for Bloomberg Businessweek found Kroeger looking fit and happy and at ease, a far cry from his id-based anthems of frustration and aggression: “I always thought it was strange when these artists like Kurt Cobain or whoever would get really famous and say, ‘I don’t understand why this is happening to me. I don’t understand! Oh, the fame, the fame, the fame!'”
This week, on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” Nickelback performed its latest single, “What Are You Waiting For?,” a schmaltzy anthem about reaching for your dreams, etc.—the kind of thing that the bad version of Van Halen was good at making. (The whole album is mishmash of pop styles, and includes a cameo by the hip-hop artist Flo Rida, along with the requisite single-entendre track, “She Keeps Me Up.”) The assembled crowd responded with the slowest, least urgent fist pumps in the history of live music. The sound and tepid fury of Nickelback is perhaps best summed up by the cover image on their megahit album, “Silver Side Up”: an eye crying metal tears.
One of the arguments against Nickelback over the years has been that liking the band could not be the result of an active human decision: that everything about the band is, in effect, a default setting—sound blasted out by commercial radio run by robots. This argument revealed a lack of musical empathy among Nickelback’s detractors; there were Nickelback fans out there who cued up their favorite tracks as eagerly as you did yours. But it also felt true: it was hard to hear the band’s polished repetition as anything more than hard-rock background noise. And so the band’s music was dangerous because of its very harmlessness; its success suggested that rock fans could be swindled or lulled into liking anything, meaning that the genre itself had been rendered obsolete. Nickelback was rock’s black hole.
But to be hated is to be something. And to be hated by an army of anxious, élitist, Pitchfork-reading coastal snobs may be enough of a foundation on which to build a enduring fan base in the shrunken marketplace of the digital age. I think that Kroeger is probably right that the haters have made Nickelback stronger, in that they have given what had been a bland, soft-metal, post-grunge band the outsider, bad-ass edge that it had always projected but never earned. As an old saying goes, “To be loved is to be fortunate, but to be hated is to achieve distinction.”
