Underneath the housewife-hooking power ballads - "I'd Come for You," "If Today Was Your Last Day" - plus "Just to Get High," an ode to a fallen junkie friend that's part of the proud tradition that stretches back to at least Body Count's "The Winner Loses," Dark Horse seethes with ugly misogyny, as Kroeger trots out a parade of dirty little ladies in pretty pink thongs, porn stars, strippers, and sluts, all of whom are desired and despised for showing too much skin.
So, perhaps Nickelback's greatest gift to society is its service as our scapegoat.These two sounds have been the group's trademark for a while now, ever since Kroeger started plumbing the depths of his shallow soul to spit out invective toward lovers and fathers on 2001's Silver Side Up, but stardom has stripped away all lingering angst, leaving behind slow songs about love and fast songs about partying, all designed to woo women he'll later hate. There's a choice - why do you get wound up about this thing?" The main drive for these haters is, like the critics in Anttonen's essay, the sense of community that forms around the share hatred of the band. So when that happens, I try to get inside their heads as to why people get so wound up about it. He compared the hatred to the disco hate of the seventies: "I was just, like, 'Just don't listen to it.' You listen to what you like and you with what you like, and I don't get too wound up about it. "I think," Chad Kroeger said when asked about how Nickelback dealt with their critical reception, "we actually used to pay a little bit of attention to that, and we just kind of accepted it's, like, nope, we are never going to be one of those bands, we are never going to be the critic's darlings, and we're okay with that." Considering their success, which beats most bands that have ever existed, this seems like a decent tradeoff for them. If critics gave up on authenticity, they merge with the mainstream, thus losing their counter cultural capital." So the violent disapproval of Nickelback is an inauthentic pose. A band is a corporate enterprise and while Nickelback are duller than most, all their inauthenticity does is to show that music performances are performances What people really want is a pretense of pure authenticity that doesn't come off as a pose. "I would argue," Anttonen continues "that, by nullifying Nickelback's authenticity, critics are in fact authenticating themselves. "Nickelback provokes anger" Anttonen concludes "because of what it is not - honest, self-expressing, anti-commercial, and dangerous - what music should be." In addition to this, she also addresses the intrinsic ridiculousness of this complaint. Second, they seem perfectly calculated to appeal to soccer moms who aspire to appear edgy.Īs the title suggests, the crux of the discourse was that in the wake of grunge music and all the baggage of authenticity that came with it, Nickelback was perceived to be an essentially inauthentic band. First, their music carries the same turgid songs throughout, always sounding like a reference to another band. His main takeaway from his reexamination was that there were two strikes against the band. In March, Nico Lang attempted to articulate on the Daily Dot why so much vitriol was still directed towards a band that hadn't had a hit since 2006. Of course someone created a browser plugin called Nickelblock that eliminates "all mention of Alberta's finest swamp heshers from your web browser"! The direct, personal hatred of the Canadian band Nickelback is one of those aspects of popular culture that seem to simply exist. You don't drink and drive and we won't make you listen to it." As expected, people found this highly amusing. So please, lets not ruin a perfectly good unopened copy of Nickelback. In a Facebook post, as quoted by the BBC, they wrote "And when we catch you, and we will catch you, on top of a hefty fine, a criminal charge and a year's driving suspension we will also provide you with a bonus gift of playing the offices copy of Nickelback in the cruiser on the way to jail. In an attempt to dissuade the people of Kensington from drunk driving, the local police decided to threaten them with drastic measures.