While wasting time scrolling on Reddit, I saw a post linking this article from Audacity, in which Nickelback frontman Chad Kroeger stated that he doesn't mind the constant jokes and criticism regarding his band, attributing such negative attitudes to their ubiquity and success. Good for Chad, right? He's rich and seems to enjoy performing. And he's right that on some level, people did hate Nickelback for their success. But it wasn't because they were constantly played on the radio. You still hear the Beatles and Elton John everywhere, and nobody really hates them. The hate stems from Nickelback's utter lack of artistry and self-awareness. They came up in the early 2000s post-grunge scene, when everyone was trying to commercialize the alternative sounds of bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam. Nickelback definitely understood the basic musical appeal of Nirvana--simple power chord progressions that implied a minor key, a softer verse followed by a louder chorus, a dour, affected vocal performance--but the nuances that made Cobain's music unique entirely escaped him. Kroeger never wrote a song about the mental health struggles of actress Francis Farmer (Francis Farmer Will Have Her Revenge On Seattle), nor did he base his lyrics on an obscure German novel about the relationship between smell and emotions (Scentless Apprentice). Kroeger was literally the segment of Nirvana's fanbase Cobain skewered in In Bloom. "He's the one, who likes all our pretty songs, and he likes to sing along, and he likes to shoot his gun, but he don't know what it means..." Nickelback infused their simplistic take on Nirvana's sound with a frat-boy misogyny borrowed from 80's hair-metal bands like Motley Crew. "I like your pants around your feet, I like the dirt that's on your knees, I like the way that you say please when you're looking up at me, you're my favorite damn disease," writes Kroeger on Figured You Out. Chad was Kurt's worst nightmare--a meathead influenced by Nirvana's post-punk pop who figured out how to marry grunge to lyrical abominations too crass for the likes of Vince Neil and Bret Michaels. In an 1993 interview, Kurt states the following:
“Although I listened to Aerosmith and Led Zeppelin, and I really did enjoy some of the melodies they’d written, it took me so many years to realise that a lot of it had to do with sexism,” Cobain remarked to Rolling Stone in 1992. “The way that they just wrote about their dicks and having sex. I was just starting to understand what really was pissing me off so much those last couple years of high school.”
“And then punk rock was exposed and then it all came together,” Cobain continued. “It just fit together like a puzzle. It expressed the way I felt socially and politically. Just everything. You know. It was the anger that I felt. The alienation.”
So despite sounding superficially like Cobain's band, Nickelback were really the anti-Nirvana, which was evident to any discerning music fan. Add in the fact that Nickelback's music lacked any sense of fun (unlike hair-metal, which no one ever took seriously) and you have a seriously repellent combination: a rip-off band that didn't understand the groups that they were ripping off, whose music featured brain-dead, sexist lyrics that attracted the sort of casual date-rapist that frequented toxic, machismo-soaked festivals like Ozzfest. Nickelback was successful because they were awful, and I feel that Chad probably knows this, which is why he feels compelled to defend the band.
Although, I do like that Spider-man song.
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