“If you think you’re going to hear an utterly original, powerful and freaky record when you put on Nevermind, as a young kid might, Christ you’re going to be disappointed. You’re going to think, ‘Who is this band that sounds just like Nickelback? What are these drug addicts going on about?'”
This is an excerpt from a piece Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips wrote for The Guardian this past summer. The article featured various musicians pontificating about one album they saw as totally overrated. Coyne gets a gold star for shoving it in the face of overrated/smelly
Nirvana, but in the midst of his hilarious unraveling of the grunge gods’ “classic” album, he drops the N-word . Nickelback.
A band getting compared to Nickelback, to many people, would be like a comedian getting compared to Joey Gladstone from Full House. I mean the Bullwinkle voices are hilarious, but all in all, not a name to be likened to. Nobody wants to be called the new Nickelback; or at least I thought so.
The other day I went on everyone’s favorite Web site, Billboard.com, to see if Kanye West beat 50 “lame-face” Cent in album sales, which he did. But by scrolling down the page, I made a shocking discovery. Nickelback’s album All the Right Reasons was the seventh best-selling album of last week. That album has been on the charts for 102 weeks! Quite possibly the worst band ever, excluding middle school Nickelback cover bands, has been selling tens of thousands of CDs each week for almost two years. That is profoundly disturbing. On www.thewebshite.com/nickelback.htm, someone has nicely shown how awful Nickelback is. They play “How You Remind Me” on the left channel of your speakers and then play “Someday,” a single released two years later, on the right channel. The songs sync up identically. I discovered this a few years ago online and it’s stuck with me since. I love pop music (J T-lake, Nelly Furtado, Ashlee Simpson), even a lot of pop rock. “Helena” by My Chemical Romance is a beautiful example of how great shitty radio rock can be. You can find me listening to many rather unhip singles from anyone from Bon Jovi to All American Rejects to Bon Jovi. But despite my love for music of all kinds, I cannot see any validity or merit in the Nickelback catalog. I don’t think I need to argue on a musical level why Nickelback sucks but even in an aesthetic, consumer, commercial aspect their immense popularity doesn’t make any sense. Chad Kroeger is a dirty, gross man. He has bugs in his hair and dust on his soul. The band consists of 40 year old tools that think its 1997, why does America love them so goddamn much? I don’t think people want to see them (ugly old men) and I find hard to believe people actually want to listen to them . so what’s the deal, America?
Electing George W. Bush for a second term makes more sense than buying a Nickelback record. At least Bush had a huge campaign of dirty tricks and coercion, Nickelback just writes bad songs. “Rockstar,” the newest single, might replace Hoobastank’s “The Reason” as the worst song ever.
In conclusion, I want someone to defend Nickelback. Explain them to me. I really want to know what makes people compelled to listen to them. Do people miss grunge that much? Is America so deprived of good mainstream rock and roll that they resort to the lowest of lows? Write to the buzz, or e-mail me. This is your chance to defend Nickelback, supposedly America’s favorite rock band.
Seriously, Brian is very interested and very respectful of all opinions. E-mail him about this or anything else on your mind at brianmcgo@gmail.com
