Why does everyone hate Nickelback?
For seemingly an age now, the Canadian rock band Nickelback has been unfortunately labelled as one of the most hated bands on the planet. Led by Chad Kroeger, for the past 21 years, the band has been churning out the same bro-rock material that is, evidently, commercially viable. But in terms of credibility, Nickelback always struggled, with many corners of music fandom poking fun at their material.
The band’s lineup consists of Kroeger on lead vocals and guitar, Ryan Peake on guitar and backing vocals, Mike Kroeger on bass, and Daniel Adair on drums. Brothers Chad and Mike Kroeger played a pivotal role in forming the band and laying the foundation for their future fame.
Nickelback’s debut album, Curb, was released in 1996 and quickly gained regional attention in Canada. However, it was their third album, Silver Side Up, released in 2001, that catapulted them to international fame. The album featured the smash hit single ‘How You Remind Me’, which topped charts worldwide and earned them a Grammy nomination.
In the years that followed, Nickelback attempted to solidify their position in modern rock. Releasing albums like The Long Road (2003), All the Right Reasons (2005), and Dark Horse (2008) achieved commercial success, making them one of the best-selling rock bands of their era, but heavy critical comments followed.
So why is Nickelback hated?
Some describe Nickelback as post-grunge, while others use words that can’t be repeated. However, a question that has long been on people’s lips still remains: just why do Nickelback get such a hard time?
Unsurprisingly, the reasoning comes down to a myriad of factors. It is easy to pinpoint the comments of Slipknot frontman Corey Taylor in 2002 as a pivotal moment, a time when he dismissed Kroeger as “Shaggy from Scooby-Doo” and the rest of the band as “fucking pretty boys”. These days, however, Taylor believes that Imagine Dragons have surpassed Nickelback as the worst band of all time.
Despite the debate around Imagine Dragons, Nickelback remain right up there in terms of bad press, and it is something that will never go away, despite dipping out of cultural relevance. The Alberta natives are so derided by legions of fans that it has become inescapable within the music industry. From meme culture repeatedly ripping into them, dreadful tracks such as ‘Photograph’ and ‘Rockstar’, or the time in 2011 when some music fans petitioned to have the band removed from the halftime bill during a Detroit Lions game, there are many indications of the how loathed Nickelback have grown to be.
This posits an interesting side question: where exactly are all the Nickelback fans? I ask this because ‘How You Remind Me’ was the most-played radio hit of the 2000s, with 1.2 million plays between 2001 and 2009, but no one has ever met a Nickelback fan in the flesh — or not an open one, at least.
Despite the mystery of where the Nickelback fans exist, this isn’t the case for why they are mocked so heavily. Of course, the first factor comes via the music. Objectively boring and lacking genuine substance, Kroeger’s gravelly voice has been labelled as a budget version of James Hetfield’s, and that’s not a good thing. Ultimately, the band have failed to create enough material of genuine originality, and their new single ‘San Quentin’ perfectly reflects this point. How anyone is releasing music so heavily reliant on the worst elements of Metallica and Mötley Crüe in 2022 deserves an inquest.
Much of the hatred Nickelback face outside of their music is because of Kroeger himself. Espousing loathable alpha male behaviour, in 2012, he made one of the most hilarious and least self-aware comments to ever leave the mouth of a prominent musician. Speaking to Playboy, he bragged about drinking a box of beer and alleged that he performed fellatio on himself. “I drank 13 Coronas in a row once, in Cabo San Lucas,” he said. “The little flap that seals off your stomach and keeps the food from coming back up in your throat, I fucked that up. I can get a Corona down in five or six seconds.”
This kind of attitude has unsurprisingly found its way into Kroeger’s music, with the singer rightly accused of misogyny over the years, again drawing comparisons between Nickelback’s music at that of Mötley Crüe. For example, the song ‘Something in Your Mouth’ contains the lyrics: “You’re so much cooler when you never pull it out / ‘Cause you look so much cuter with something in your mouth”. It’s enough to send a shiver down the spine.
That’s not the worst of it, though. The 2003 track ‘Figured You Out’ contains the shocking line: “I love your lack of self-respect / While you’re passed out on the deck / I love my hands around your neck”. Five years later, featuring on the 2008 song ‘S.E.X.’, Kroeger sings: “Sex is always the answer, it’s never a question”.
In short, the hatred Nickelback faces is self-inflicted. However, it was compounded in 2003 by comedian Brian Posehn during an appearance on Comedy Central’s Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn. As the show discussed topical issues with a panel, Posehn brought everyone’s attention to a study linking violent lyrics with violent behaviour in this episode. In what is one of his most famous moments, the comedian joked: “No one talks about the studies that show that bad music makes people violent, like [listening to] Nickelback makes me want to kill Nickelback”.
The clip was then featured on a promo that ran for months on the channel’s commercial breaks, which helped to spread the word that Nickelback suck to the masses. It was something the band never bounced back from, they just couldn’t help themselves from displaying such deplorable taste levels.
