“They suck by virtue of their label mates at the time, and Roadrunner’s signing of them was akin to The Learning Channel signing John and Kate Plus 8 – forever turning into a shitpile of mass market garbage,” one Redditor wrote on a discussion thread in 2014.
As early as 2000, underground heavy metal fans were calling Nickelback “the band that ruined Roadrunner Records,” and to this day, their deal is viewed by many as the start of a trend of Roadrunner signing mediocre bands. Right off the bat, they were mocked mercilessly by most members of the metal community, who were generally the only ones hearing their music at the time. There was a culture around this label (as there generally was around labels during this time, and earlier), and Nickelback (even though their early music was a little less top 40 and little more heavy) did not fit in. In 1999, Nickelback signed with Roadrunner Records, a predominantly extreme metal label. It started-believe it or not-with their first record deal. Google’s autofill knew what I was wondering. But this is true for so many musical artists, so how did Nickelback achieve this viral level of hatred? How did this all start? There’s not a single moment in time that transformed Nickelback into the subject of a massive cultural joke, but there are some events we can point to, and it seems they’ve piled up on each other over the years to land Nickelback where it is today. The main argument people make for hating Nickelback is that their music is bland and generic, and all of their songs sound the same. “Right now it’s become trendy to hate Nickelback, and no one even knows why,” the band’s tour manager, Kevin Zaruk, told Bloomberg in 2012. I’d go as far to say Nickelback hate has become a unique sort of meme, and not just because the phenomenon often finds itself the subject of Grumpy Cat and Bad Luck Brian. People who’ve never really even listened to Nickelback say they hate them simply because hating Nickelback has become what you do. When it was announced Nickelback would play the halftime show at the Lions game on Thanksgiving four years ago, a petition to replace them as the entertainment garnered more than 55,000 signatures online.īy now, we all know that it’s become somewhat of a thing to hate this band. of the 2000s (behind The Beatles), and the eleventh best-selling music act of the decade overall.īut despite all of this, we hate them. I just Googled “Nickelback,” and after the band’s website, Twitter account and their Wikipedia, the first results are articles titled “ Bands That Are Actually Worse Than Nickelback” and “ A Night With the World’s Most Hated Bands,” as well as a crowdfunding campaign to keep Nickelback out of London. The band has sold more than 50 million albums worldwide, has sold out Madison Square Garden and has been nominated for six Grammy awards, including “Album of the Year” and “Best Rock Album.” They even rank as the second best-selling foreign act in the U.S. Believe it or not, Nickelback has been going strong for over a decade. Nickelback, however, has not only managed to earn the title of “the world’s most hated band,” but they’ve done it while being extremely successful. But what usually happens is that no one listens to their music and no one goes to their shows, and then they fade into oblivion.
There are a lot of bands that people dislike and even hate. They bring it up now and then to poke fun at me, and when this happened the other night over drinks, it got me wondering how we as a society decided to hate Nickelback. My friends, however, have not forgotten about what they found on that fateful day. I quickly forgot the songs were even there. My parents had one of their CDs, and I loaded it into my iTunes because I just wanted to fill my new device with music. The songs had been in my iTunes for years-since I was gifted my first iPod as a pre-teen, in fact. A few years back, some friends found a few Nickelback songs on my iPod.
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