Daniel Parris noticed that Canadian post-grunge rock band Nickelback not only faces "considerable hostility" but that the dislike has eminent statistical characteristics that might explain its depth and persistence despite commercial success. The analysis hits on several hypotheses—their songs are overplayed relative to their success, internally repetitive despite it, and more successful with conservative consumers—but it comes down to the band itself suffering extremely peculiar PR incidents that turned it into a meme beyond the music.
On a now-infamous episode, the Tough Crowd panel examined a study linking popular music and violence, to which comedian Brian Posehn joked: "No one talks about the studies which show that bad music makes people violent. Like, Nickelback makes me wanna kill Nickelback." This wisecrack was not particularly memorable, but Comedy Central included the joke in a long-running advertisement for Tough Crowd. And this promo ran a lot. In a 2022 interview, Nickelback frontman Chad Kroeger pinpointed the Colin Quinn ad as a turning point for the band's reputation: "They took [that joke], they put it in a commercial for that one show. And that played on Comedy Central for six months straight, this Nickelback joke. That starts this whole thing going. That's where it really started, at that one moment."
However, Parris's in-depth study of Nickelback hate prevalence finds that it only became a thing years later, in November 2011. In fact, it was barely mentioned before then, but became an ascended meme immediately and permanently overnight. What was then? Their Detroit Lions Thanksgiving halftime show, coming after a jocular yet oddly intense campaign to prevent it from happening by local fans.
Perhaps this spirited petition formalized long-dormant Nickelback grievances. Suddenly, it was fashionable to dunk on Nickelback. All the long-standing frustrations—overplayed music, repetitiveness, cultural preference, and unique priming from a Comedy Central commercial—came together in a highly public spectacle of Nickelback bashing. The Nickelback meme had gone mainstream.
There's an indefinite quality to the dislike that I suppose statistics can't capture: the way Nickelback perfectly captured a complaintive, stodgy yet polished 2000s pop rock sound. Any one of the era's bands could be the avatar, sure, but what better than 2007's Photograph to signpost how the music industry had moved on from appropriating and capturing youth movements, which was at least an entrepreneurial and risky business on the edges of culture, to reprocessing its own tailings? We are trapped in an endless tour of the 1960s-1990s boomer loop and only the catastrophic failure of the American republic will free us from it. And when we are free among the blackened remains and the graying ruins we will yearn for Nickelback.
