These days Nickelback is less of a band and more of a whipping boy for Canadians, Americans, music snobs, and the liberal left. So called music lovers have always found it easy to thrash this most polarizing Canadian band since Rush, formulaic songs, commercial success, and worse - a listener demographic similar to the lowest of the low: lovers of sold-at-Wal-Mart country music. Canadians on both the left and right of the political spectrum are united by hate, but among those more left leaning Canadians Chad Kroeger and co. might as well be George Bush and co. To them Nickelback is the musical branch of the Alberta oil sands. Every time they strike a power chord, a duck is smeared in tar, or an aboriginal community has its water source tainted. Actually being from rural Alberta, makes the band 35% more inexcusable than if they had come from, say, Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. In this whole cauldron of Nickelback loathing the group with the most reasonable argument is the Americans, at an American football game I would hope that they would find somebody from my own legendary town, Detroit (Detroit!), to play a castrated half time medley.
How much of this treatment is deserved and how much of it is people putting their coolness stock into a safe company? Sure it may look like you could hang up your hipster hat and retire on anti-Nickelback bonds, but at the end of the day these are just some guys playing music written and performed by themselves - hammering out some working class rock. Give them a break.
*these two guys are CRAZY similar, nobody likes them. It’s the face, one day kids will be born diagnosed with Cageface.
Also I'm loving the song below.