I will give a Canadian perspective on Nickelback. Note I do not personally enjoy their music and laughed at your comparison to Creed/P.o.M. because I often voice my lack of interest for them by ascribing Chad Kroeger to being a Canadian Eddy Vedder (sorry Pearl Jam fans, but all his music sounds exactly the same).
In Canada, our federal regulatory body (the CRTC) requires radio stations (and to some effect streaming platforms) play Canadian music for a minimum of 30% of total air time; a rule implemented in January of 1971. As you can imagine, a top hits radio station trying to play fresh music have little selection in a Canadian market because of our population and industry size, so you end up hearing a lot of replayed Canadian "bangers" from the likes of Nickelback.
So why is Nickelback popular in Canada? For starters we don't have a lot of big name hard rock bands in the 21st century. We have a lot of indie rock, but boys driving truck or working the oil field aren't getting down to Arcade Fire and Theory Of A Deadman on their shift. Nickelback has a couple loud "bangers" such as 'Rockstar' and 'Burn It To The Ground' that are the anthems played at summer cottage parties and hockey games as the goal song.
Now onto the hate... I have personally never enjoyed Nickelback, dating as far back as middle school having to listen to 'How You Remind Me' every day after school on the bus. I know all the words because of the exposure, and I will sing along ironically in a crowd but I generally think its not good music. I feel there are many just like me, people who do not like their music but will pretend to like it in crowds to go with the flow... when it comes on in a more private/intimate setting I have the impresson few people could raise their hand when pressed to answer if they've ever owned a Nickelback CD or attending a concert to see them specifically.
In Canada at least it feels as though Nickelback is propped up by our music industry / regulators, so they probably receive more airtime and by extension a broader listenership than they would in an entirely free market. The spillover into the US I imagine has something to do with hockey, and like I said the band's music is used at games as hype up tracks and goal songs. The real question I ask is "What do you actually like / find unique about Nickelback?" to which I've never really found an adequate answer.
One tough thing about talking about stuff like this is threading the line between defending someone and convincing everyone that it's your very favorite thing. The other toughie is saying something like "There's a certain amount of insincerity regarding X" without implying ALL reactions to it are insincere. So know that I really do know that some people hate nickelback for reasons besides nickelbacking; like maybe Nickelback burned down some guy's house or something.
I think if I had to answer your question, I'd say they write a decent, serviceable rock song. They aren't super-geniuses, they can't do much in terms of variety and I don't think their music progressed much over time. But the one song they did write several times is fine, good-not-incredible. It's not my favorite thing ever, they aren't the messiah of tunes, but if a song comes on I'll generally listen to it and go "yup, that sure was a thing".
Not liking certain things (e.g., New Kids on the Block*) was more important to me as a youth. I think past a certain age, defining yourself by your tastes becomes not so much the done thing. In fact I define myself as a person who does not define herself by her tastes. So there!
*Could anything reveal my age more precisely than this, without being my actual age?
1) Some trends are annoying, and in some cases people complain about them. I think this is an overreaction, but if you think Wordle or Meghan Markle are annoying and wish they showed up in your feed less, that's not necessarily signaling so much as it's trying to keep the kids off your lawn.
2) We define ourselves by things we give up all the time. Catholics don't eat meat on Lenten Fridays, other people keep Kosher or Halal. Some people don't eat gluten, or potato chips, or whatever. Maybe Nickelbacking is in part some of that?
3) I'm reminded of the anti-Merlot movement after the movie "Sideways," which might be before your time. Paul Giamatti played a wine snob who went on anti-Merlot rants, and for several years, a lot of people saw Merlot as an overrated, underperforming wine, similar to the view of White Zinfandel. That was just sort of a meme, that only suckers enjoyed Merlot. Nickelback may have some of that, too - once the people around you declare that only rubes like Nickelback, you start feeling that way too.
None of those points really go to the need to aggressively announce how anti-Nickelback you are.
Music hipsterism and signaling is vastly complex, and deserves more scrutiny. What you describe about merlot might very well be the case; perhaps Nickelback is seen as having crossed the line from "representative of the period / style" into "utterly boring".
1. I think a lot of people live here. Like in any of the possible ways an accusation Nickelbacking might be seen, there's going to be some percentage of the people involved who just really, really are sick of all their news getting eaten up by shape rotators or whatever.
I remember an interview in a magazine with Shia LeBouf, and they asked why everyone hated him so much. This was around the time Transformers 2 was coming out, I think. And he said "listen, I get it. You like action movies, and everyone you want to see there's the same young man, he's everywhere, you can't get away." In his telling they might have disliked him a little bit, but then he's everywhere. Some of the stuff I see as Nickelbacking is actually this, for sure.
2. This, I think, is a different thing most of the time. With lent, you give up meat. With Kosher/Halal, you give up bacon and (sometimes) keeping your meat in the same fridge as cheese. These are inconveniences that are for most people pretty costly. There's still an aspect of signaling there, and it's part of group cohesion in the religious, but it's not free; you actually (usually) have to do the thing to get the points.
Nickelbacking is pretty cheap and for a lot of people actually free. I mentioned a guy who hated Nickelback but still loved Creed; that's like 9/10ths the same band. Somewhere there's a guy who gave up Nickelback to be on the bandwagon who really, really loved them but I think for most people it was just a shift from "don't listen to them much, don't think about them much" to "don't listen to them much, talk and think about them constantly in a negative way that gets me group points".
Part of the anti-merlot meme was that it was a wine aficionados' inside joke. Even if you didn't really dislike Merlot, a "f-cking Merlot" comment would get a chuckle from the other people at the table who knew the meme, and then after a while it just stuck.
I think the backlash against Dane Cook was similar. A couple big comics started doing riffs on how much he sucked, and then not liking Dane Cook was an in-jokey meme, and then everybody went on and on about how much they hated Dane Cook.
Report from the field: all day I've been asking coworkers their opinion of Nickelback, and the response I've gotten so far has been decidedly in the "hate them" bucket. So, the meme lives on, and is probably still being used in the sense that RC describes.
As far as I know*, this one is mine. And thank you!
*Once, a long time ago, I was writing these comedy scripts for this website, and I pitched this whole thing about Link from Zelda spending a lot of time basically fishing and doing random minigames instead of saving the world in a timely manner. I had this whole image in my head, I described framing of camera stuff.
I later found out I had seen a CollegeHumor video that was exactly what I was describing, enjoyed it, internalized it very deeply, and then forgot about it entirely. The people I was pitching it to had seen the video; the pitch went... poorly. It was an embarrassing time, they were verbally very forgiving but I think they were pretty sure I had done it on purpose and used me a lot less after that.
Jaco Pastorius famously said he knew where he had stolen every note. I envy his memory.
Man, I have been there, so often I rent a crash pad. At this point I pretty much just assume everything I put together came from one of five or six sources, and am genuinely surprised when something is new unless it has been the subject of "Why the hell did none of these guys point this out?"
The cost of reading a lot with a memory for stories and not names I guess?
"a group of people who aren’t particularly known for volunteering, charity or altruism"
Without getting into whether profit-seeking is better or worse than volunteering, charity, and altruism, I think in a lot of participants in wokeism and other agitation movements are instead/also bad at profit-making activities. Wokesters and the leaders of other movements (including right-leaning ones) are often highly credentialed but not traditionally successful. I think in some cases, these movements have a bit of a Road to Wigan Pier/elite overproduction aspect to them.
Imagine what that means for someone like, say, Rogan. There's this whole class of people who have been taught they are learning the right things, thinking the right way and having the right conversations. And then there's this guy who doesn't do any of that by their standards, but has this instinctive understanding of what will be interesting that matches up with a much, much bigger audience.
That almost has to be a big part of his problem, right? Like on top of all the other reasons they might want to take him down (nickelbacking being one) he's just getting all the rewards they promised young journalists focusing on intersectionalism or whatever.
The culture may have already passed me by on this (hate how many caveats I need to provide these days), but I believe there is a term "woke scold." Scolds are certainly not exclusive to woke ideology (caveat 2), but it's obvious why a person with a scold personality and woke leanings would find ways to try to take down Rogan. 1) The person is already a scold, so scolding is what they do. 2) Joe Rogan has a friendly personality that a lot of people like, and scolds almost by definition don't have that personality, which could make them envious. 3) Joe Rogan doesn't appear to be very woke. So not only are scolds gonna scold, but Rogan is a natural target because of both his personality and his perceived ideology.
I was saying something similar to my wife not more than an hour ago. Imagine that you spend your formative helicoptered youth diligently doing your assignments, avoiding any activities that might mar your permeant record, and scrupulously learning to strike a pose that perfectly balances the veneer of ironic detachment to your underlying concern for pressing social issues. All that, plus six figures in loan debt to get the right credentials under your belt so that you can jostle for a position on the bottom rung of an industry on the wane both in terms of financial rewards and social prestige.
At the same time, some guy who not only does not shy away from prole signifiers, but actively pursues them. He's fights. He relishes red meat, even hunting it himself. He has conspicuously un-curated political and social opinions. And het gets a $100,000,000 licensing deal from Spotify!?
That is bound to strike some people in exactly the wrong way. The funny thing is that those people could take away another lesson. The chances of any one of them becoming the next Joe Rogan is vanishingly small, but if they can follow Rogan's independent model and they can have even 1/1000th of his success, that would still be enough for a very comfortable upper middle class lifestyle. I guess it does not help that in some circles, expected value thinking is frowned upon.
All of this ties right into Nickelbacking. The Baby Boomers were not the first generation to elevate specific aesthetic taste to a sign of good character, but they might have been the generation that perfected it. So, it only makes sense that the Gen Xers would do the exact opposite. In this regard, the Millennials never had a chance. They were destined to be the generation that defines themselves by what they hate.
By the way, all of this has me surprised at your views on The Last Psychiatrist. This post seems well in the TLP tradition. Reading TLP was probably the key to me coming to understand this phenomenon of defining yourself by what you hate. Not that he invented it; just that he wrote about it in a way that really made it click for me.
I think you are on to something here with the taste <=> good character link. One thing that struck me reading RC's post is that there are so many interests to possibly take, so many things to love, that possibly it is hard to come up with an identity based on what you love that puts you in a group. More so, you have to be really serious about your interests before you are likely to be involved with "people like you" by pursuing them. As a result it might be much lower cost to define your personality or group by what you don't like, and even if the benefits are still really low you weren't getting a lot for liking video games or music before, were you?
I am thinking it is like playing some sport for a small school vs a big one. Small high school, pretty much everyone who likes to play basketball and isn't just awful gets to play on the team; big schools have try outs and if you are not quite good you don't get to play. Much easier to identify as "guy on the basketball team" in the small school. At the big school "liking basketball" is pretty meaningless if you aren't very good, just about as meaningless as hating some band.
(or to stay on bands, with thousands of bands and hundreds of sub-genres two random people with moderately similar tastes could probably write down 5 bands they like with no overlap, but probably could have a lot of overlap on the bands they hate, which will be the 5 most popular mediocre bands.)
Good article. Unfortunately the phrase I took away, somehow, is "it's like Nickelback on a pineapple pizza", which I fully intend to use to create humor and push social cohesion through outgrouping.
I hope you mean a dig at Nickelback and not at you.
Random side note while I've got you: I'm a fellow traveler in the "Scott shaped my last decade or more, and I like his thinking style, but holy moly, when we disagree, it's deep and structural" camp. And your Father's day story made me cry in a good way. (My dad is still alive but had a massive stroke, I like new dad, I miss old dad, I could relate). So thanks.
That's going straight into my lexicon, along with "the absence of mold does not indicate bread." Thanks!
Fun story: My wife laughed at me at a moderate intensity for this line. No man can be a prophet in his hometown.
I will give a Canadian perspective on Nickelback. Note I do not personally enjoy their music and laughed at your comparison to Creed/P.o.M. because I often voice my lack of interest for them by ascribing Chad Kroeger to being a Canadian Eddy Vedder (sorry Pearl Jam fans, but all his music sounds exactly the same).
In Canada, our federal regulatory body (the CRTC) requires radio stations (and to some effect streaming platforms) play Canadian music for a minimum of 30% of total air time; a rule implemented in January of 1971. As you can imagine, a top hits radio station trying to play fresh music have little selection in a Canadian market because of our population and industry size, so you end up hearing a lot of replayed Canadian "bangers" from the likes of Nickelback.
So why is Nickelback popular in Canada? For starters we don't have a lot of big name hard rock bands in the 21st century. We have a lot of indie rock, but boys driving truck or working the oil field aren't getting down to Arcade Fire and Theory Of A Deadman on their shift. Nickelback has a couple loud "bangers" such as 'Rockstar' and 'Burn It To The Ground' that are the anthems played at summer cottage parties and hockey games as the goal song.
Now onto the hate... I have personally never enjoyed Nickelback, dating as far back as middle school having to listen to 'How You Remind Me' every day after school on the bus. I know all the words because of the exposure, and I will sing along ironically in a crowd but I generally think its not good music. I feel there are many just like me, people who do not like their music but will pretend to like it in crowds to go with the flow... when it comes on in a more private/intimate setting I have the impresson few people could raise their hand when pressed to answer if they've ever owned a Nickelback CD or attending a concert to see them specifically.
In Canada at least it feels as though Nickelback is propped up by our music industry / regulators, so they probably receive more airtime and by extension a broader listenership than they would in an entirely free market. The spillover into the US I imagine has something to do with hockey, and like I said the band's music is used at games as hype up tracks and goal songs. The real question I ask is "What do you actually like / find unique about Nickelback?" to which I've never really found an adequate answer.
One tough thing about talking about stuff like this is threading the line between defending someone and convincing everyone that it's your very favorite thing. The other toughie is saying something like "There's a certain amount of insincerity regarding X" without implying ALL reactions to it are insincere. So know that I really do know that some people hate nickelback for reasons besides nickelbacking; like maybe Nickelback burned down some guy's house or something.
I think if I had to answer your question, I'd say they write a decent, serviceable rock song. They aren't super-geniuses, they can't do much in terms of variety and I don't think their music progressed much over time. But the one song they did write several times is fine, good-not-incredible. It's not my favorite thing ever, they aren't the messiah of tunes, but if a song comes on I'll generally listen to it and go "yup, that sure was a thing".
Not liking certain things (e.g., New Kids on the Block*) was more important to me as a youth. I think past a certain age, defining yourself by your tastes becomes not so much the done thing. In fact I define myself as a person who does not define herself by her tastes. So there!
*Could anything reveal my age more precisely than this, without being my actual age?
I too largely define myself by what joints are clicking that day.
I have a bunch of unrelated thoughts:
1) Some trends are annoying, and in some cases people complain about them. I think this is an overreaction, but if you think Wordle or Meghan Markle are annoying and wish they showed up in your feed less, that's not necessarily signaling so much as it's trying to keep the kids off your lawn.
2) We define ourselves by things we give up all the time. Catholics don't eat meat on Lenten Fridays, other people keep Kosher or Halal. Some people don't eat gluten, or potato chips, or whatever. Maybe Nickelbacking is in part some of that?
3) I'm reminded of the anti-Merlot movement after the movie "Sideways," which might be before your time. Paul Giamatti played a wine snob who went on anti-Merlot rants, and for several years, a lot of people saw Merlot as an overrated, underperforming wine, similar to the view of White Zinfandel. That was just sort of a meme, that only suckers enjoyed Merlot. Nickelback may have some of that, too - once the people around you declare that only rubes like Nickelback, you start feeling that way too.
None of those points really go to the need to aggressively announce how anti-Nickelback you are.
Music hipsterism and signaling is vastly complex, and deserves more scrutiny. What you describe about merlot might very well be the case; perhaps Nickelback is seen as having crossed the line from "representative of the period / style" into "utterly boring".
Thoughts on your thoughts:
1. I think a lot of people live here. Like in any of the possible ways an accusation Nickelbacking might be seen, there's going to be some percentage of the people involved who just really, really are sick of all their news getting eaten up by shape rotators or whatever.
I remember an interview in a magazine with Shia LeBouf, and they asked why everyone hated him so much. This was around the time Transformers 2 was coming out, I think. And he said "listen, I get it. You like action movies, and everyone you want to see there's the same young man, he's everywhere, you can't get away." In his telling they might have disliked him a little bit, but then he's everywhere. Some of the stuff I see as Nickelbacking is actually this, for sure.
2. This, I think, is a different thing most of the time. With lent, you give up meat. With Kosher/Halal, you give up bacon and (sometimes) keeping your meat in the same fridge as cheese. These are inconveniences that are for most people pretty costly. There's still an aspect of signaling there, and it's part of group cohesion in the religious, but it's not free; you actually (usually) have to do the thing to get the points.
Nickelbacking is pretty cheap and for a lot of people actually free. I mentioned a guy who hated Nickelback but still loved Creed; that's like 9/10ths the same band. Somewhere there's a guy who gave up Nickelback to be on the bandwagon who really, really loved them but I think for most people it was just a shift from "don't listen to them much, don't think about them much" to "don't listen to them much, talk and think about them constantly in a negative way that gets me group points".
3. I think this is a good example, and I wish I had it when I was writing the article. It worked the other way, too - I think Pinot sales actually jumped (https://vinarius.london/blogs/news/the-sideways-effect-for-the-love-of-pinot-noir#:~:text=A%202009%20study%20by%20Sonoma,price%20for%20Merlot%20based%20wines Confirmed! And merlot sales went down!). It's a real-world tracked instance where people demonstrably preferred certain wines, then started hating one in particular because someone told them doing so was correct. Wish I had thought of this.
Part of the anti-merlot meme was that it was a wine aficionados' inside joke. Even if you didn't really dislike Merlot, a "f-cking Merlot" comment would get a chuckle from the other people at the table who knew the meme, and then after a while it just stuck.
I think the backlash against Dane Cook was similar. A couple big comics started doing riffs on how much he sucked, and then not liking Dane Cook was an in-jokey meme, and then everybody went on and on about how much they hated Dane Cook.
Report from the field: all day I've been asking coworkers their opinion of Nickelback, and the response I've gotten so far has been decidedly in the "hate them" bucket. So, the meme lives on, and is probably still being used in the sense that RC describes.
"But an absence of mold does not indicate bread, and does not fill."
I don't know if this quote is original or not, but it's awesome.
As far as I know*, this one is mine. And thank you!
*Once, a long time ago, I was writing these comedy scripts for this website, and I pitched this whole thing about Link from Zelda spending a lot of time basically fishing and doing random minigames instead of saving the world in a timely manner. I had this whole image in my head, I described framing of camera stuff.
I later found out I had seen a CollegeHumor video that was exactly what I was describing, enjoyed it, internalized it very deeply, and then forgot about it entirely. The people I was pitching it to had seen the video; the pitch went... poorly. It was an embarrassing time, they were verbally very forgiving but I think they were pretty sure I had done it on purpose and used me a lot less after that.
Jaco Pastorius famously said he knew where he had stolen every note. I envy his memory.
Man, I have been there, so often I rent a crash pad. At this point I pretty much just assume everything I put together came from one of five or six sources, and am genuinely surprised when something is new unless it has been the subject of "Why the hell did none of these guys point this out?"
The cost of reading a lot with a memory for stories and not names I guess?
"a group of people who aren’t particularly known for volunteering, charity or altruism"
Without getting into whether profit-seeking is better or worse than volunteering, charity, and altruism, I think in a lot of participants in wokeism and other agitation movements are instead/also bad at profit-making activities. Wokesters and the leaders of other movements (including right-leaning ones) are often highly credentialed but not traditionally successful. I think in some cases, these movements have a bit of a Road to Wigan Pier/elite overproduction aspect to them.
Imagine what that means for someone like, say, Rogan. There's this whole class of people who have been taught they are learning the right things, thinking the right way and having the right conversations. And then there's this guy who doesn't do any of that by their standards, but has this instinctive understanding of what will be interesting that matches up with a much, much bigger audience.
That almost has to be a big part of his problem, right? Like on top of all the other reasons they might want to take him down (nickelbacking being one) he's just getting all the rewards they promised young journalists focusing on intersectionalism or whatever.
That's a pretty good observation.
The culture may have already passed me by on this (hate how many caveats I need to provide these days), but I believe there is a term "woke scold." Scolds are certainly not exclusive to woke ideology (caveat 2), but it's obvious why a person with a scold personality and woke leanings would find ways to try to take down Rogan. 1) The person is already a scold, so scolding is what they do. 2) Joe Rogan has a friendly personality that a lot of people like, and scolds almost by definition don't have that personality, which could make them envious. 3) Joe Rogan doesn't appear to be very woke. So not only are scolds gonna scold, but Rogan is a natural target because of both his personality and his perceived ideology.
I was saying something similar to my wife not more than an hour ago. Imagine that you spend your formative helicoptered youth diligently doing your assignments, avoiding any activities that might mar your permeant record, and scrupulously learning to strike a pose that perfectly balances the veneer of ironic detachment to your underlying concern for pressing social issues. All that, plus six figures in loan debt to get the right credentials under your belt so that you can jostle for a position on the bottom rung of an industry on the wane both in terms of financial rewards and social prestige.
At the same time, some guy who not only does not shy away from prole signifiers, but actively pursues them. He's fights. He relishes red meat, even hunting it himself. He has conspicuously un-curated political and social opinions. And het gets a $100,000,000 licensing deal from Spotify!?
That is bound to strike some people in exactly the wrong way. The funny thing is that those people could take away another lesson. The chances of any one of them becoming the next Joe Rogan is vanishingly small, but if they can follow Rogan's independent model and they can have even 1/1000th of his success, that would still be enough for a very comfortable upper middle class lifestyle. I guess it does not help that in some circles, expected value thinking is frowned upon.
All of this ties right into Nickelbacking. The Baby Boomers were not the first generation to elevate specific aesthetic taste to a sign of good character, but they might have been the generation that perfected it. So, it only makes sense that the Gen Xers would do the exact opposite. In this regard, the Millennials never had a chance. They were destined to be the generation that defines themselves by what they hate.
By the way, all of this has me surprised at your views on The Last Psychiatrist. This post seems well in the TLP tradition. Reading TLP was probably the key to me coming to understand this phenomenon of defining yourself by what you hate. Not that he invented it; just that he wrote about it in a way that really made it click for me.
I think you are on to something here with the taste <=> good character link. One thing that struck me reading RC's post is that there are so many interests to possibly take, so many things to love, that possibly it is hard to come up with an identity based on what you love that puts you in a group. More so, you have to be really serious about your interests before you are likely to be involved with "people like you" by pursuing them. As a result it might be much lower cost to define your personality or group by what you don't like, and even if the benefits are still really low you weren't getting a lot for liking video games or music before, were you?
I am thinking it is like playing some sport for a small school vs a big one. Small high school, pretty much everyone who likes to play basketball and isn't just awful gets to play on the team; big schools have try outs and if you are not quite good you don't get to play. Much easier to identify as "guy on the basketball team" in the small school. At the big school "liking basketball" is pretty meaningless if you aren't very good, just about as meaningless as hating some band.
(or to stay on bands, with thousands of bands and hundreds of sub-genres two random people with moderately similar tastes could probably write down 5 bands they like with no overlap, but probably could have a lot of overlap on the bands they hate, which will be the 5 most popular mediocre bands.)
Good article. Unfortunately the phrase I took away, somehow, is "it's like Nickelback on a pineapple pizza", which I fully intend to use to create humor and push social cohesion through outgrouping.
Oof. For some reason that hits really deep as a dig.
I hope you mean a dig at Nickelback and not at you.
Random side note while I've got you: I'm a fellow traveler in the "Scott shaped my last decade or more, and I like his thinking style, but holy moly, when we disagree, it's deep and structural" camp. And your Father's day story made me cry in a good way. (My dad is still alive but had a massive stroke, I like new dad, I miss old dad, I could relate). So thanks.