It seems that you can’t be a real fan of rock and roll without having some sort of concrete opinion on Nickelback. For as long as Chad Kroeger has been making waves in the rock scene, there have been just as many people calling them the worst thing that ever happened to the genre as there are those who are still ride or die and sing along to “How You Remind Me” whenever it comes on the radio.
Despite some of his divisive behavior over the years picking fights with other artists, Chad actually cut to the core of why he thinks people don’t like him and Nickelback.
During a recent interview, Chad basically broke down Nickelback’s hatred to just one word: overexposure, saying: “I think I’ve got a pretty good grasp of where things kind of went off the rails for us… I think that because we write so many different kinds of music, I think that if you were listening to a radio station any time between 2000 and 2010, ’11, ’12 even, we were kind of tough to get away from.
Cause if you didn’t wanna hear it and you changed to a different radio station, you’d probably hear it on there, and then changed to a different radio station, you probably were gonna hear it in so many different places. And we were really tough to get away from. And that’s not my fault. We just write the songs.” He continued:
“And so with that comes backlash. And then what happens is then comedians start making jokes, and then it starts making it on to TV, and then it makes it into movies and stuff like that. And then it just turns into this wave of, it’s fun to pick on and it’s an easy joke. And I get it. I understand. There are bands that when I hear them on the radio, I… And they’re very popular bands… I mean, we all have those. No one is exempt from that. There are certain bands where you just hear them and you just don’t like ’em.
And other people may — half the world may love them, and I’ll just be, like, ‘No. I just cannot hear this band one more [time].’ And just like everyone else does, I just change the channel.
But we became the whipping boy of the music industry for a while there. But whatever. It’s just part of the history of the band.”
Then again, there are just as many people complaining that Nickelback actually writes the exact same kind of music over and over again, with one song sounding like a cookie-cutter version of the other one again and again.
Even if they do have a set formula though, the band has actually gotten a fair bit of support from the old guard, with Chad remarking “we were at the American Music Awards, and we were presenting, and we presented to Def Leppard.
And when we walked backstage afterward, Joe Elliott and Phil Collen turned to me, and they were just, like, ‘Dude, thank you so much.’ I’m like, ‘For what?’ They were, like, ‘For taking the trophy. We get to pass the baton to you for being the most hated band in the world now.’ And I was just, like, ‘Oh, yeah. ‘Cause I want that.”
Regardless of overexposure, Nickelback is still one of the biggest bands in the world and seems to be pleasing their fans just fine without the criticism. Looking towards the future, the band will make more albums, rockers and music fans will complain, and the world will keep turning.