Why Does Everyone Hate Nickelback?
At this point saying you like Nickelback is no better than saying Hilter wasn’t that bad in terms of getting a negative reaction out of people. It’s not even that people react poorly to Nickelback. It’s that it’s widely believed that liking Nickelback invalidates someone’s taste in music and is often seen as a blemish on one’s personality. Another level of absurdity on the topic is that Nickelback was a hugely successful band in the 2000’s selling over 50 million albums with singles charting regularly until 2014, and having been nominated for six Grammys. And I’ll admit it: I don’t hate Nickelback. In fact, I actually like some of their songs, and they’re Canadian, so it’s nice to see other Canadians succeed internationally. So what is it that made this hugely successful band the most hated band on the Internet? Well I did some digging and here’s what I found.
The most common narrative about why Nickelback is so hated is that they’re too commercial and mediocre. This came up on every blog post, Reddit thread, and music article I read on the subject. Nickelback made this pop-rock music that came in the wake of 90’s bands like Pearl Jam and Soundgarden. I would categorize them with other rock bands of the 2000’s like Smashmouth and Counting Crows. They were all rock that was sort of descendants of grunge, but made more digestible to a wider group of people. Nickelback were the kings of making mainstream hits. They were more focused on making hits than artistically good songs. They were formulaic and not genuine. Their lack of pushing their artistry really got under critics and music enthusiasts’ skins.
In a way they were set up for failure because they were signed to a primarily metal label in 1999 called Roadrunner Records. Since fans knew the label for producing metal bands, Nickelback really paled in comparison. Then the label put a lot of effort and resources into Nickelback as opposed to their other metal bands because they were so commercially successful and therefore more profitable. As a result, a lot of metal fans resented Nickelback for taking funding and attention away from the metal bands that they supported at the label.
But it wasn’t just metalheads that were primed to hate Nickelback because so was the general public. From the years 2002 to 2004, Comedy Central aired a promo for their show “Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn” that included the punchline: “No one talks about the studies that show that bad music makes people violent, but listening to Nickelback makes me want to kill Nickelback”. This was before Netflix, or even taping shows to watch later, so people were being repeatedly told that Nickelback is awful for three years, which boroughed its way into many people’s subconscious.
Something minor that came up in my research was also the lead singer, Chad Kroeger, was very dislikable. Since the lead singer is the frontman of a band and lots of people don’t look behind the frontman, a lot rides on him. In Kroeger’s case, he has bad hair and facial hair, and comes across arrogant. His arrogance was perfectly manifested in Nickelback’s song “Rockstar”. The lyrics of the song are about people who want to become rockstars for the superficial things that come with the title instead of the actual music. This was just painfully and ironically meta for a pop-rock band that wrote radio hits and actually came across that way.
I have my own theory for why Nickelback is hated and it has more to do with Internet culture. First, I want to acknowledge that I didn’t know about the Comedy Central promo clip and I think that was major. I also think that their music being very commercial and mediocre probably contributed to their bad reputation. However, I think Nickelback is hated mainly as a scapegoat and as a result of mob mentality in the digital age.
A few weeks ago in my piece “When Did Popular Music Become Uncool?” I came to the conclusion that rap-rock or nu-metal is what killed the reputation of mainstream music. I see Nickelback in that same broad category of cringey 2000’s rock music. I don’t think their music was uniquely bad or commercial. Lots of bands were doing that kind of music, but Nickelback was very visible in that genre. Most bands that played that style of music only had one or two hits, but Nickelback was a hitmaker. They frequently charted and are more identifiable than those other bands with only a couple hits. As the face of 2000’s nu-metal (or nu-metal adjacent), they became the scapegoat when the genre fell out of fashion. Everyone wanted to distance themselves from that style of music and Nickelback was the easiest band to pick out. So ultimately, it was their success that became their downfall.
In my experience, I didn’t realize Nickelback was considered a joke until around 2012. They played “Photograph” over a photo montage at my middle school graduation in 2012 and it wasn’t until the next school year that my peers started making fun of Nickelback. I remember this time period as being a time when social platforms like Reddit, 9GAG, and 4chan really started to take off. They’re platforms where users can stay anonymous, discuss topics, and there was a lot of meme sharing on them. This was the time that memes really became a thing online. It was very simple back then and usually only consisted of an image and text. There were jokes about Nickelback in meme format. Since they were easy to make, share, and because people saw that making jokes about Nickelback got a response, more and more jokes were made about them. I don’t remember anyone sticking up for them either. So everyone just agreed that Nickelback was bad in fear of being outcasted and it grew from there. In a way, Nickelback was one of the first memes.
My conclusion is that Nickelback is hated for the sake of hating something. They’re not particularly offensive and they’re no more mediocre than lots of music on the radio. They were just low hanging fruit, and hating Nickelback became a fun group activity that everyone could be in on.
