Nickelback's Generational Rebound

Gen Z is on board?

I am old enough to remember when Nickelback first came out. That doesn’t mean I was aware of them when they came out, as I wasn’t following the minor-league hockey afterparty butt-funneling scene, but in fact they’d been around since 1996 doing a barroom Nirvana hack that should have stayed in a place with peanut shells on the floor.

I heard about them the same time as everyone else, in 2001, with the debut of their hit single “How You Remind Me.”

As a side note: I do share an affinity with Nickelback’s breakout single, but it’s through no fault of those, how do you describe Nickelback’s image anyway, Guitar Center salesmen paying their way through culinary school?

So, the opening lyrics of “How You Remind Me” are “Never made it as a wise man/couldn’t cut it as a poor man stealing.”

At the time me and my best friend had summer jobs as landscapers, being back in Alaska for the summer after our first year of college, and we had a mutual mondegreen where we thought Kurt Faux-Bain was belting out, “Never made it as a wise man/Couldn’t cut it as a poor LANDSCAPER,” so, we were like, let’s give these guys a chance, they have some street cred, they respect landscapers (it’s a hard job.)

My initial reaction to Nickelback though, like that of everyone else I knew (although the people I knew were admittedly cool) was to point at the TV and laugh at these dorks. It wasn’t really even their fault, I mean, we were still teenagers, not snarky rock critics, but something just felt very off, very, as this twenty-three-year-old chick I know would say, sus, but more on that later.

This was the end of the 90s (technically the beginning of the aughts, when everyone still watched MTV in passing before it bit the bullet.) Nirvana was still being blasted at parties, Sublime was still cool, but unfortunately their frontmen were long dead. The charts were dominated by hip-hop and R&B, the former having some definite bangers, but Train’s “Drops of Jupiter” was the year’s chart-topping rock song, so obviously there was a shortage of alternative rock or hard rock or grunge or whatever you want to call it, and the people at MTV obviously held several meetings and decided Nickelback would be the new guys, like, some guy on coke literally said, “They’re the next Nirvana!” and hopefully that guy is dead now (probably VP of Sony.)

Hence something seemed off. It wasn’t that Nickelback had obviously hired stylists who shopped at Target and in retrospect were very obviously Canadian, it was just so heavy-handed. I mean, we could see it, Alaskan teenagers, you would think a thirty-year old guy with a baseball hat who drove a pickup truck and had much more life experience would get it too, right?

No. Nickelback is still around. It worked!

To be fair, I was grunge. We were all grunge. We were Alaskan. We grew up hanging out in mud bogs and rolling Swisher Sweets, I myself sometimes ate firefighting rations as meals. We weren’t music nerds, but we knew what authenticity looked like, in fact, we were landscapers literally caked in dirt drinking tall boys of Busch, we were grungy.

To my enjoyment, Nickelback became a punchline in the following years. You could often as a litmus tell if someone was cool if they made fun of Nickelback within two minutes of talking to them.

“Hey, this is my friend Josh, he just got back from the Nickelback concert,” Josh can’t keep a straight face and blows the joke. Josh is cool.

The guy behind Josh suddenly puts his hand down.

After Nickelback had inadvertently supplied pretty solid comedic material to the other half of the American public for about four years, they then, in 2005, came out with arguably the worst art ever created.

At this point it wasn’t really funny anymore, although it was still funny, but who was the joke on?

I’m not sure if the song Rockstar is supposed to be a meta artistic statement on the music industry or if Nickelback were trying to hit back at their haters, or, as I suspect, Nickelback actually thinks this shit is cool.

This peaks to what I’ve labeled The Nickelback Paradox: If they think their songs are good, they suck, but if they know their songs suck, they are brilliant. All I know is one of the lyrics of this song is, “I’ll have the quesadilla.”

It was basically a Trumpian effect at this point where everyone was so exposed to Nickelback that they never made much an effort to talk about how much Nickelback sucked anymore.

A few years went by, and it happened: Hipsters started claiming with a straight face that Nickelback was a pretty good band. They had taken the joke and made it their own, the logic going: You think you’re cooler than Nickelback? Well, I like Nickelback, so I’m cooler than you, your move, Millennial.

Up until this point I really thought I could bond with any white guy who was an asshole a Nickelback dog whistle. This hurt, and it wasn’t right. These guys were bullies, thinking they were better than everyone else.

Now, I understand that hipsters (white people who ruin things) are contrarian by nature. They like the least practical cars, like a Gremlin. They enjoy antiquated modes of playing media. They buy smelly clothes at thrift stores. They’ll order the worst thing on the menu, such as a meatloaf sandwich, and pretend they aren’t trying to get attention.

Their whole schtick is that they like the worst things and that being impractical is a statement. A statement of what? Growing up being upper-middle class I believe.

Pouty little jerkoffs for sure, but this was taking it too far. They ruined the joke. Nickelback should have been something we could all enjoy feeling superior to for decades to come, and now when I make a joke about Nickelback I seem like a hack.

So, I was talking to this girl who happened to be twenty-three, I’m forty-three, we were having a nice time of it, just hanging out.

I’m not one of those people who brings up things that nobody of a certain age would probably be aware of and follows it up with, “You’ve never seen that!”

I’ve been on the other side of it, and it’s pathetic. No, I’ve never seen Night Rider, and I never will, but anyway we were talking about how 90s music is popular among people who weren’t even born in the 90s.

“I noticed Pearl Jam is popular with some of my friends’ kids, like teenagers,” I said.

“Yeah, I always listened to that stuff growing up. Nirvana, Soundgarden. (pause) I like Nickelback.”

I couldn’t read the situation. I glanced over. She didn’t appear to be joking.

“Nickelback?” I queried, arching an eyebrow.

“Yeah,” she shrugged.

Apparently, I’m getting older. Old enough to see the wrinkles in time, the rise and fall of nations, and even the coming of fascism. History repeats itself, not for the best.

I had a choice. Talk shit about Nickelback for the next ten minutes or change the subject.

I changed the subject. I don’t feel good about it. Either this country is going down fast, or I’m old.