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“Right now it’s become trendy to hate Nickelback, and no one even knows why,” the band’s tour manager, Kevin Zaruk, told Bloomberg in 2012.
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I’d go as far to say Nickelback hate has become a unique sort of meme, and not just because the phenomenon often finds itself the subject of Grumpy Cat and Bad Luck Brian. People who’ve never really even listened to Nickelback say they hate them simply because hating Nickelback has become what you do. When it was announced Nickelback would play the halftime show at the Lions game on Thanksgiving four years ago, a petition to replace them as the entertainment garnered more than 55,000 signatures online.īy now, we all know that it’s become somewhat of a thing to hate this band. of the 2000s (behind The Beatles), and the eleventh best-selling music act of the decade overall.īut despite all of this, we hate them. I just Googled “Nickelback,” and after the band’s website, Twitter account and their Wikipedia, the first results are articles titled “ Bands That Are Actually Worse Than Nickelback” and “ A Night With the World’s Most Hated Bands,” as well as a crowdfunding campaign to keep Nickelback out of London. The band has sold more than 50 million albums worldwide, has sold out Madison Square Garden and has been nominated for six Grammy awards, including “Album of the Year” and “Best Rock Album.” They even rank as the second best-selling foreign act in the U.S. Believe it or not, Nickelback has been going strong for over a decade. Nickelback, however, has not only managed to earn the title of “the world’s most hated band,” but they’ve done it while being extremely successful. But what usually happens is that no one listens to their music and no one goes to their shows, and then they fade into oblivion. There are a lot of bands that people dislike and even hate. They bring it up now and then to poke fun at me, and when this happened the other night over drinks, it got me wondering how we as a society decided to hate Nickelback. My friends, however, have not forgotten about what they found on that fateful day. I quickly forgot the songs were even there. My parents had one of their CDs, and I loaded it into my iTunes because I just wanted to fill my new device with music. The songs had been in my iTunes for years-since I was gifted my first iPod as a pre-teen, in fact. A few years back, some friends found a few Nickelback songs on my iPod.
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