‘Hate My Life’: Everything wrong with 2000s rock in one song
The entire wave of grunge in the early 1990s seemed to be a godsend the minute Nirvana crashlanded on MTV. Everyone had been sick of the same tired tropes that hair metal bands had fallen into, so seeing someone like Kurt Cobain making music based on raw frustration brought a voice to everyone feeling the same way circa 1991. But while the first wave of grunge was a fireworks show for almost every band that made it, you could see diminishing returns on the genre by the time the 2000s kicked in.
Then again, grunge was no longer the dominant force of the culture at the time. Most people had moved on to different flavours of the genre, and when looking at the same scene circa 2001, there were three camps to pick from. Either you were an indie kid who was into The Strokes and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, a nu-metal fan listening to Linkin Park and Deftones, or a pop-punk brat listening to whatever new record Blink-182 had out at the time.
Although you wouldn’t get that impression listening to the charts in America, the radio was convinced that post-grunge was the way of the future, and every other band went out of their way to make their tracks sound clean for airplay but just edgy enough to be played by kids who thought they were listening to something “dangerous”. While most of this can be thrown into the same divorced dad rock pile that we dumped bands like Nickelback and Staind in years ago, Theory of a Deadman needs to be properly assessed.
Because why not try to suffer one’s way through an entire Nickelback album when they can get the discount version? Although the band can certainly play a handful of decent riffs occasionally, a lot of Tyler Connelly’s vocals sound like a more sanitised version of what Chad Kroeger was doing back in the day. But whereas Kroeger came off like a typical macho-type you’d find at a party, ‘Hate My Life’ highlights the core problem with this strange subgenre melded into one tune.
While Kroeger couldn’t claim to be the same lyrical wordsmith as Eddie Vedder, Connelly takes what is supposed to be a song with a message and turns it into the worst kind of pity party anyone has been subjected to. In the age of second-wave emo, a song called ‘Hate My Life’ should have been a slam dunk for people who didn’t know any better, but once Connelly starts listing out his grievances, he comes off even worse.
Before even giving us time to hear him out, he’s already complaining about hobos on the street begging for change. By his logic, he’s earned his money and thinks that these homeless people make their living by acting like they’re destitute. I don’t know if the man needs a refresher, but given the state of the world and the recession that was about to happen in America when this song was released in 2008, maybe there’s more than one reason why a majority were in a less-than-stable financial situation.
Still, let’s hear him out. Moving on, he proceeds to talk about how he hates his wife for asking him to buy her things, hates all of his rich friends, and in what is probably the most damning complaint, hates when he can’t tell if a girl’s underage and gets his ass handed to him by her father. Given those last few words I had to type out, Connelly’s lucky that he walked away with only one punch from this guy rather than the clubbing of a lifetime.
So, how does Connelly decide to let off this steam? Well, in retaliation for the universe being mean to him for some reason, the only thing he can think of is to raise two middle fingers to the sky and scream his pain away. Think about that for a moment. The world can take anyone to a dark place, but if you saw someone, presumably someone you know, shouting obscenities at the sky in the middle of the day, that’s usually a sign to either cut things off with that acquaintance or see if there’s something genuinely disturbing going on.
But Connelly isn’t in dire need of help or anything. He’s simply a by-product of what the post-grunge genre had come to by the late 2000s. Not every grunge song had to be the most coherent thing in the world, but by combining the anger of Pearl Jam with the creeper misogyny of hair metal, he came up with a song that feels hateful towards the world for the sole crime of it not bending to his will.
More than anything, the problem with ‘Hate My Life’ is that there’s no joy to be found anywhere in it. That’s probably obvious from the title, but the greatest rock songs of all time have been about trying to work one’s way through the pain and finding some way to see the beauty in the world. Listening to this man croak out each line of this song, it doesn’t sound like he necessarily loves anything in this world, so why should we care about what he feels?
And while Connelly did mellow out a bit more when releasing ‘Rx (Medicate)’ in 2017, that doesn’t make his previous efforts any better. This was simply a mellower version of what he had done previously, and since this is the same man who was totally cool with checking out underage girls, it’s safe to say that he’s only a more subdued version of the person he was before.
