Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/06/03/a-statistical-analysis-of-why-people-hate-post-grunge-band-nickelback.html
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I don’t hate you, Nickelback
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Becuase it makes my brain have to process the concept of “post-grunge”
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the cerulean blue of music
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Reminds me of how Beavis and Butthead tanked Winger.
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I used to really like this one song by Nickelback called “Kryptonite.”
I was embarrassingly old when I finally realized that it wasn’t even a Nickelback song.
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To me, nothing was more damning than this
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I couldn’t remember what any Nickelback songs sound like so I listened to the starts of two and immediately remembered – just awful. Made me worried that I’d have that stuck in my head today, but just 60 seconds later and I already forgot what they sound like. So there is one positive to them having nothing original in their music
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I have to listen to them several times too. This is how you remind me.
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Other than their music being aggressively banal, trite, repetitive, over-processed, not dynamic, and lacking originality?
Yeah, I suppose that’s what some people like.
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I don’t hate Nickelback. There’s a song or two of theirs I even kinda liked (“Burn It to the Ground” is a simplistic yet fun party anthem. Yeah, I said it. 
Fight me. 
)
That having been said, my ex loved the band, so my appreciation for the music did suffer from the association after we split. 
Fun fact: I once got sneered out of a snooty record store trying to find the band’s CDs for said ex as a Christmas gift. Never went back.
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There was a recent article tracking where and how it started. The first thing was even before Youtube, in 2003/2004 where someone overlaid their two big hits, This is how you remind me and Someday, where the structure and chord progression is exactly the same, and it rolled from there.
The post-grunge period was brutal for rock in general - see Woodstock '99.
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I was in a punk band in the 90’s, as was the style of the time, and took some of my bands CDS to the local record shop to sell them on consignment. So there was my CD up on the wall with the other independent /garage/upstart bands. So I checked out other bands to see how they were doing their art/packaging, skimming though the backs of the albums I found one that had a free email address / free web hosting account just like we did. “Oh,” I thought “they are just like us…”
Put it back on the shelf. “Nickelback”
That summer they broke on the radio.
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Did it look like this?
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So exactly the same as 95% of popular music for the last 40 years? People hate Nickleback because they’ve been told that cool, free-thinking, independently-minded people hate Nickleback, and they want to be just like them.
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I watched a YT video recently where they were talking about a number of bands and their hits, Nickleback was among them and the selection of songs they played were ones i definitely loved when they came out and honestly speaking? They still slap, they have good music. The issue is as others have already mentioned is that a lot of their music sounds samey, but also their overall musical sound also feels pretty dated and makes them come across as corny. Though i could say that for a lot of 90’s and 00’s music, and its unfortunate that Nickleback became the poster child for played out music from that time. I’m more inclined to sneer at Creed or Limp Biscuit.
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I never liked Nickelback to begin with, the very first time I heard their music I thought it was kind of derivative and uninspiring (so it’s an honest grievance on my part. Your mileage may vary.)
This initial dislike was later confirmed when I noticed a guy I worked with, who had really horrible taste in music (and who was kinda dumb) loved Nickelback.
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Apparently, I disliked Nickelback before it was cool. Does that make me a hipster NB hater?
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That’s up there with, “Don’t go away mad. Just go away.”
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Our (Detroit metro) local ‘alternative’ station did that way back in the day, easily could’ve been that long ago. The thing to know about the old ‘alternative’ station is that it was a Canadian station, thus subject to Canadian content law. I never really knew if any of the Canadian groups played on the station were actually popular in the wider US, nor did it become obvious that Nickleback was disliked in the wider world until that fateful petition trying to bar them from playing Superbowl halftime in '11.
Don’t worry, they still suck. 
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