Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Jeremy Ney's avatar

Look at this graph!

Expand full comment
Spouting Thomas's avatar

Good research, and yet I'm still not really satisfied.

Pretty sure I was a junior or senior in high school when what I think was their first hit dropped ("This is how you remind me"), so I'm probably the target demographic. I viscerally hated them from the first time I heard that song, and the feeling seemed to be unanimous among my high school peer group (located in a conservative part of a Blue state). I'm also a rightist, for the record.

I don't think overexposure and a lack of sonic variety is enough to explain it. And I don't really buy that there's a political angle -- country music is way more politically loaded. And I don't think the band itself is overtly political. Maybe there's a class angle -- was the white working class listening to them?

I do think there's something uniquely irritating about Nickelback's sound. But I'll introduce another concept: it's easier to hate music that's adjacent to music you might like. There's a sort of uncanny valley effect where it's hard to truly, viscerally hate music that's too alien to your own tastes, even if you seek to avoid it. But if you're a fan of rock music, and specifically what we now call "post-grunge" that was popular around the time, then Nickelback seemed way worse than other 90s bands that had either faded away or had never achieved Nickelback's success in the first place. And Nickelback was everywhere.

This might sound hyperbolic, but I'll go so far as to say that Nickelback marks the death of mainstream rock music. The golden age of rock and roll was over. This crappy band was what we were left with. 10 years later, rock songs wouldn't even be charting anymore, so go ahead and savor these scraps, kid.

Expand full comment
21 more comments...

No posts