Why does Nickelback warrant such hate?

[Vorocano]

One of the reasons for the hate up here in the Great White North is because they're Canadian. We have CRTC (Canadian Radio and Telecommunications Commission) regulations that stipulate a certain amount of Canadian content per hour on the radio, which basically means you're going to be hearing a lot of Nickelback and RUSH, and, as they say, familiarity breeds contempt. (Except for RUSH. RUSH is awesome.)

As far as them being sellouts, well that's really not much of an argument. Nickelback has always said that they're in it to make money and get chicks. You can only be a sellout if you started with some pretension about it "being just about expressing ourselves" and then decided that the money was more important than the music. Nickelback went into things with the attitude that it was about the money, and they happened to make it big. That's another reason for the hate; the pretentious indie fans can't abide the fact that a band that has never released a protest song or railed against the government or the music label system can be popular. Or, they're the most pretentious of all, the person who automatically hates everything that's successful. (Such a person really hates it when you point out that their taste in music is driven by exactly the same thing as all the teeny-bop pop fans. Had a friend who thought Evanescence was one of the greatest bands ever ... until "Fallen" started to do well in stores, at which point they magically became terrible.)

As far as I'm concerned, they're ... ok. They got some good tunes, they've got some that are less good. Let me put it this way: they rarely make it onto my mp3 playlist, but if I hear them on the radio I don't change the station.

 

[snow]

I hate them for a different reason than everyone else here, so cookies for me I guess...

I didn't mind them (Didn't listen to them either) until I started going out with my girlfriend, seems like just about every last person in this huge family of hers blasts this bands "music" wherever they go, and after that, I now curse their very name forever...

Wait till this girlfriend then buys you their albums for your birthday despite hints you dont like them and then are forced to put them on your phone and actively listen to them in front of her so as to not hurt her feelings. I feel your pain acutely.

If that's what happened to you, then I can't help but say that's your fault. Never hint! I've threatened to throw my gf's I-pod out the car window if she wouldn't put on something that sounded good in the ear area. Of course I would never do that though because I bought that for her and it was kind of expensive.. >.> But she listened!

 

[Volafortis]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2pXfAK8r1k

Damn, I mean, they've always sounded very bland and same-y to me, but the song dynamics there are EXACTLY THE SAME. They go loud at THE SAME TIME. They quiet down at the SAME TIME. AHHH!!!

 

[HardkorSB]

Chad is Jesus.
He has to take the hate and in the end he will die for our sins.
That and they're the definition of "generic rock band".

 

[KarumaK]

Were they trying to be artists? If not I don't believe they would be sell-outs, they'd be people who did what they were trying to do.

I personally reject the term 'artist', because I feel it's a load of bollocks. Adapting your music to fit contemporary taste, ensuring you to make lots of money is, in my eyes, a good definition of 'selling out' as any other.

See the problem here is that you assume that they created music with an intention other than fitting contemporary taste. If they in fact aimed for it from the start and missed, then they cannot be sell-outs agreed?

 

[Wordslinger]

I hate Nickelback because the lead singer is the single most pretentious and annoying person on this planet. He seriously gave a lecture to a crowd and refused to play after someone threw a pebble at him during a show. Plus the lyrics make me want to punch a baby.

 

[Gildan Bladeborn]

Rather than just parrot something everyone else has said over and over, I'll mention that I don't particularly like Nickelback because their tunes are not very good. I don't actually mind Kroeger's voice, and the instrumentals are neither terrible or exceptional, but the actual melody lines for many of their songs are quite simply rubbish. By rubbish I mean that if you were to play the lines Chad is singing on the piano, an uninformed observer would be hard pressed to guess that you are in fact playing a song and not just semi-random bashing of the keys - the melody just isn't there at all.

When you combine that with their usually banal lyrics and their inexplicable popularity, you have a recipe that breeds resentment in those with more sophisticated musical tastes - we tend to see the dominance of Nickelback and point to it as the embodiment of all that is wrong with modern pop-rock. Really though, there are far more offensively awful bands out there, in the grand spectrum of things Nickelback is pretty benign - there are certainly worse things to be than aggressively mediocre. But popularity breeds resentment, and undeserved popularity even more so, so the hate will continue.

 

[McNinja]

Their music is listenable, but what kills it for me is the lyrical content. It's on the same level as the worst rap or hip-hop music, and since I hate rap/hip-hop, I hate Nickelback too.

 

[Nanaki316]

No idea, I love them and I'm not afraid to admit it.
Yes their songs sound very similar, as do Linkin Park's, Bon Jovi's etc lots of bands I like.
Don't we like a band because we like their style of music afterall?

Bands can play within a certain style, but the good ones experiment,bring in diffrent influences of other genres and often try to get an interesting song structure.

King Crimson plays in a certain Avant-Garde/Symphonic/Jazz prog rock style, atleast in their 1969-1974 period, apart from the first 2(which hae alot of similarity), the albums are still very diffrent from each other, but they got the signature sounds in there.

Yeah I see what you mean, change isn't all bad but nothing too drastic x

 

[Small Waves]

Because they're boring, uninventive, creatively-bankrupt hacks who can't make music for shit.

 

[Ironic Pirate]

Because they have one or two decent songs and a bunch of horrible ones on every album. People hear the shit one (Rockstar) and run screaming before they can look for the good one. Also, the singer sucks.

 

[FretfulGnome]

I liked them when I first heard them, but then you hear a little more of them, and a little more, and after a while you wonder why you ever liked them in the first place. My dad loves them though, I even bought him Silver Side Up for Christmas one year. It was funny because he got confused as to how to put the cd in the cd player. He thought that "Silver Side Up" meant you had to put the cd in with the silver (bottom side) up. Yeah... my dad's not great with electronics.

 

[VanityGirl]

I just don't like how the majority of their songs sound the same.

I love Avenged Sevenfold, their music has diversity and me likey.