Blame ClearChannel. Nickelback emerged near the peak of one company fucking up commercial radio throughout the US. This new band played inoffensive pop-alternative-country melange, seeming broadly acceptable to everyone without exciting much of anyone. Their image was squeaky-clean while their conventionally attractive frontman looked vaguely rugged. All very saleable, but aggressively generic.
So: take an audience at peak rude irony. (This is the era of Celebrity Deathmatch, “Mike Tyson ate my balls,” and Game.com ads calling their customers morons.) Subject them to the same middling singles over and over. Ask how they feel about this merely okay experience taking up air time that could easily be Destiny’s Child, Third Eye Blind, or Shania Twain. Try not to act surprised when they smirk and say they hope the entire band dies.
People hate Nickelback because it’s fun to hate Nickelback. It is easy and rewarding to hate Nickelback. Everyone knew about them, but nobody was a diehard fan. You could perform ingroup bonding with nearly anyone by saying “Fuck Nickelback, right?” You could privately grumble about hearing “How You Remind Me” for the dozenth time this week, without any baggage like Creed’s religion-bait popularity or various artists’ public feuds. Hating Nickelback is uncomplicated. To this day, I have no goddamn idea what Chad Kroeger is like, or what he’s into, or what he’s done. But I still knew his name without checking.
And nobody’s replaced them. Rampant piracy deepened people’s musical tastes by letting them choose what to listen to, instead of the constant deluge of lowest-common-denominator payola. Streaming later made it polite and acceptable to pay artists nothing. Meanwhile, internet forums and thousand-channel cable packages allowed culture to splinter. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard a Taylor Swift song. I don’t care, and I don’t have to. Having any reputation become memetic like this is obscenely unlikely now. To have that reputation be… mediocre? Unthinkable.
You also can’t discount the trend nickleback was the successor to. The 90s saw punk turn to grunge and gen x was telling the whole world they didn’t care. The frontmen at the center of the bands were so disillusioned from the inside that they were all dropping like flies while living people’s supposed dreams. It was very much an anti-establishment music movement expressed through self-sabotage and recklessness. That was then co-opted by, yes, clearchannel (now “Iheartradio.” Barf.) and turned into “post grunge.” This is your Stainds, your creeds, your PODs, and yes, your nicklebacks. Co-opting the sound with none of the attitude, none of the principled self destruction. If anything, they took the look and sound and made it a corporate forcefeeding. They are emblematic of so many things wrong music industry, while it’s direct predecessor was screaming and dying over what was wrong with the culture and the music industry. The music industry responded by prying that aesthetic off the corpses of music icons, cleansing it, and making it corpo-friendly. Kurt and Layne would’ve died all over again if they lived to see this shit.
C’mon, Keys To Ascension chased some trends, but it wasn’t-- oh I see.
Blink-182 was similarly emblematic but had none of the backlash. Some dorks found a properly talented drummer and turned pop-punk into juvenile dick jokes. This was a huge step down from its previous focus on erudite sociopolitical dick jokes.
Jonas Čeika has a video essay on Adorno’s critique of television… via the Emoji Movie. Adorno argues that any system worth hand-waving as “the system” cannot comprehend anything besides reinforcement of that system. Even direct populist rebellion simply gets treated as another valid path to a predefined outcome within that system. And that works. These power structures are effective and resilient. That’s how they became a problem.
Blame ClearChannel. Nickelback emerged near the peak of one company fucking up commercial radio throughout the US. This new band played inoffensive pop-alternative-country melange, seeming broadly acceptable to everyone without exciting much of anyone. Their image was squeaky-clean while their conventionally attractive frontman looked vaguely rugged. All very saleable, but aggressively generic.
So: take an audience at peak rude irony. (This is the era of Celebrity Deathmatch, “Mike Tyson ate my balls,” and Game.com ads calling their customers morons.) Subject them to the same middling singles over and over. Ask how they feel about this merely okay experience taking up air time that could easily be Destiny’s Child, Third Eye Blind, or Shania Twain. Try not to act surprised when they smirk and say they hope the entire band dies.
People hate Nickelback because it’s fun to hate Nickelback. It is easy and rewarding to hate Nickelback. Everyone knew about them, but nobody was a diehard fan. You could perform ingroup bonding with nearly anyone by saying “Fuck Nickelback, right?” You could privately grumble about hearing “How You Remind Me” for the dozenth time this week, without any baggage like Creed’s religion-bait popularity or various artists’ public feuds. Hating Nickelback is uncomplicated. To this day, I have no goddamn idea what Chad Kroeger is like, or what he’s into, or what he’s done. But I still knew his name without checking.
And nobody’s replaced them. Rampant piracy deepened people’s musical tastes by letting them choose what to listen to, instead of the constant deluge of lowest-common-denominator payola. Streaming later made it polite and acceptable to pay artists nothing. Meanwhile, internet forums and thousand-channel cable packages allowed culture to splinter. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard a Taylor Swift song. I don’t care, and I don’t have to. Having any reputation become memetic like this is obscenely unlikely now. To have that reputation be… mediocre? Unthinkable.
You also can’t discount the trend nickleback was the successor to. The 90s saw punk turn to grunge and gen x was telling the whole world they didn’t care. The frontmen at the center of the bands were so disillusioned from the inside that they were all dropping like flies while living people’s supposed dreams. It was very much an anti-establishment music movement expressed through self-sabotage and recklessness. That was then co-opted by, yes, clearchannel (now “Iheartradio.” Barf.) and turned into “post grunge.” This is your Stainds, your creeds, your PODs, and yes, your nicklebacks. Co-opting the sound with none of the attitude, none of the principled self destruction. If anything, they took the look and sound and made it a corporate forcefeeding. They are emblematic of so many things wrong music industry, while it’s direct predecessor was screaming and dying over what was wrong with the culture and the music industry. The music industry responded by prying that aesthetic off the corpses of music icons, cleansing it, and making it corpo-friendly. Kurt and Layne would’ve died all over again if they lived to see this shit.
C’mon, Keys To Ascension chased some trends, but it wasn’t-- oh I see.
Blink-182 was similarly emblematic but had none of the backlash. Some dorks found a properly talented drummer and turned pop-punk into juvenile dick jokes. This was a huge step down from its previous focus on erudite sociopolitical dick jokes.
Jonas Čeika has a video essay on Adorno’s critique of television… via the Emoji Movie. Adorno argues that any system worth hand-waving as “the system” cannot comprehend anything besides reinforcement of that system. Even direct populist rebellion simply gets treated as another valid path to a predefined outcome within that system. And that works. These power structures are effective and resilient. That’s how they became a problem.