They were turned into a meme. I was giving people shit for listening to them before I had ever heard any of their songs because the internet told me to.
Country lyrics are consistently better than pop or rock lyrics.
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I kinda like this take, but the logical next step is āif nickelback isnāt the worst guitar rock band ever, who is?ā and I canāt really get to there. Creed? Staind or something like that?
I will accept either of these two answers. They are both absolutely horrendous and, unlike Nickelback, deserve every bit of hate they get.
I think it depends on what worst means. Nickelbackās drummer can lay it down, and there are a lot of bands who are ābetterā that would be improved if he took the sticks. The lyrics are hollow and juvenile, but how much would they improve if they swapped with RATM and had a woke political message? Significantly I think, but you still run into this problem of the song structures and harmonic architecture being radio-friendly pop songs dressed up in alt-rock tonality. Itās not hard for me to imagine Weezer doing How You Remind Me and no one batting an eyelash because it has more of an indie geek rock sound and is obviously tongue in cheek.
Here is my music hot take
The only possible objective measure of how good or bad music is how enjoyable humans find it. Therefore popular radio songs are by definition the best music, no further discussion needed.
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I dunno about this because there are too many factors not really related to how much humans might enjoy it or why it ends up on the radio that arenāt necessarily related to the quality. Some of it is probably genetic but I think a lot of it is environmental or structural. For example, I was fascinated with music from a young age but didnāt really develop an ear for jazz harmony until my late teens and then even more dissonant stuff even later, and I donāt see how someone gets to that point without a lot of exposure to a wide variety of music (that you often have to go searching for and isnāt served to the public en masse). A lot of popular music metaphorically sounds like black and white television episodes on repeat to me.
Said another way: Starbucks is the best coffee because they sell the most coffee and people must like it. But people buy Starbucks coffee because itās easily available and their palates are trained on that being the proper taste of coffee. Most people have never had great coffee, and itās so wildly different from their expectation of what coffee should taste like that trying it once wonāt convert many of them.
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Nickelback got memed because they got too popular basically.
The comparisons to Weezer arent bad. I will defend Pinkerton and the Blue Album forever. They are absolutely elite 90s albums. But theyve had 12 albums since with like 6 good songs.
If Nickelback were playing to 2000 people and barely on the radio compared to 20,000 people it would be different.
We get it much worse in Canada because radio laws here make it so 1/3 of songs have to be canadian. Rap/edm stations basically dont exist for this reason.
THATāS SOCIALISM!
Iām so glad I donāt have a Nickelbag take
ETA keeping the typo
LOOK AT THIS TYPOGRAPH
EVERYTIME I DO IT MAKES ME LAUGH
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