Lament wrote:What's amusing to me is that the people who most passionately and vocally hate them are usually people who like stuff that, in the grand scheme of things, isn't all the different from them (Foo Fighters, Pearl Jam, etc.)
This actually isn't surprising at all -- it makes a lot of sense that people would be inclined to hate what they see as a lowbrow desecration of a type of music they really like more than they would an analogous band from a genre that doesn't interest them. And anyway I don't think it's the superficial style of Nickelback's music that people respond to so much as the specific
character of it: Lots of artists (mainly in 80's metal and, more recently, commercial country music -- the two genres that are probably Nickelback's closest spiritual relatives) have made careers writing crass, brutally literal uptempo songs about partying, and heavy syrupy ballads that present sentimental cliches as though they're life-altering epiphanies. However, Nickelback were not big-haired clowns in eyeliner and spandex, or redneck alpha males who sound like they were born in a barn and don't know better; they were, strictly in terms of their
musical character, lineal descendants of "hurr durr" -- humorless, overly serious, exaggeratedly masculine "regular guys." These musical and lyrical traits do not go well together. Hearing Nickelback makes me think of some sweaty troglodyte who can barely string together a sentence coming up and farting in my face and then taking the girl of my dreams to the prom. Musically they're no worse than Daughtry or Creed or whoever else -- but ideologically they make me remember all the times when I felt like the world belonged exclusively to idiots and douchebags, and then they frame that moment as an ever-present reality. They were dreadful beyond words, they
were difficult to avoid (even if you never listened to the radio, you would hear them in stores, restaurants, offices -- quite often if you happened to work in one of those places), I hope they never produce another piece of music as long as they live, and I consider the undying hatred for them from people of even marginal taste despite their decreased prominence to be a small moral victory for modern society, lest their return appear imminent.
As you grow older, the idea of "hating" a rock band seems silly; when you're young, the bands you hate are as integral to your tastes as the bands you like, and kids often have "archnemesis"-type bands (usually the bands that espouse the opposite of whatever values the bands they admire do) the same way they have favorite ones. But the fact that Nickelback inspires such a strong reaction from so many people -- and, perhaps more specifically, the same type of strong reaction -- never ceases to be interesting to me. It also doesn't mean that the reaction is necessarily disingenuous in each specific instance.
