A New Study Shows Why Everyone Hates Nickelback
Do you hate Nickelback? Does the news that they’re making a new record fill you with rage? Would you rather chop your own dick off with a cigar cutter than listen to them on repeat? Most importantly: have you ever wondered why you hate them so much?
One student, Salli Anttonen of the University of Eastern Finland, decided she could not leave that burning question unanswered. In her new study ‘Hypocritical bullshit performed through gritted teeth’: Authenticity discourses in Nickelback’s album reviews in Finnish media, Anttonen sought to determine why exactly critics were so utterly venomous toward Donald Drumpf’s favorite band. The results were interesting, if not terribly surprising.
Anttonen told Buzzfeed that much of critic’s hatred stems from a lack of believable emotional authenticity:
“The fact that the compositions suit the radio charts is a problem [for critics]…So then [the songs] are not authentic self expression, or have been made with commercial purposes in mind, rather than expressing your deepest emotions.”
She goes on to point out that Nickelback are also the worst of both worlds, both conforming to genre expectations and at the same time not doing anything interesting or powerful:
“Nickelback is too much of everything to be enough of something. They follow genre expectations too well, which is seen as empty imitation, but also not well enough, which is read as commercial tactics and as a lack of a stable and sincere identity.”
Before we go any further, I’d like to mention that Anttonen’s findings were published in a journal called Metal Music Studies, which obviously could only exist in a country with a nationally-sponsored headbanger emoji.
Second, her findings are actually quite fascinating. As a dude who thinks a Nickelback song coming on the radio is equivalent to finding a pickled dick inside my sandwich, I’m always ready to just blow them off as terrible without asking why. And while it’s easy to say that people only hate Nickelback because they’re popular, it’s harder to look at the emotions that popularity evokes, and what about them becoming popular is so infuriating. I totally agree with the statement Nickelback are both too by-the-numbers but also not strong enough within the genre they so diligently follow, thus resulting an incongruous sense of talent that leads to an all-around suckfest.
Anyway, hats off to Anttonen for questioning what we thought we knew, though, honestly, if she’d determined we were all the problem, I’d just claim her wretched science is the villain. Nickelback are actually good, you say? WITCH! WIIIIIITCH!
[via TeamRock]
