War Criminal: Nickelback

Douchebags.

Many questions have plagued mankind since the beginning of time. Who built the pyramids? How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop? What's this bump on my crotch?

Over the last 5 years, an even more confounding question has arisen:

Why the hell do people love Nickelback?

Perhaps we should look at things from the other angle. Why do people hate Nickelback?

My own personal hatred for Nickelback didn't start when they made a splash in the US in 2000. Hell, I actually enjoyed Leader of Men, the first single off The State. They seemed like one of the many flash-in-the-pan bands of the era, such as POD, Eve 6 and that Limp Bizkit fella.

2001 is when things got horribly, horribly out of control. The first time I heard How You Remind Me was shortly after I arrived at college. I thought it was a catchy little number, but ignored it for the most part. This must have angered the Gods of Crappy Music, because the song rose to such popularity that it could not be ignored. Resistance was futile. I would turn on the TV and Nickelback would be there. I'd wake up to my alarm in the morning and I would hear Nickelback. I'd walk to class and there on the front porch of his frat house would be "that guy" playing Nickelback on his acoustic guitar trying to get girls 6 years younger than him in bed.

And things only got worse from there. Nickelback followed up How You Remind Me with Too Bad, a rousing rock anthem about how instead of dealing with your hatred toward your father in a healthy way, you should just hang on to that anger and funnel it into an awful song.

From there, the crappy hits kept coming over the course of 3 albums, each worse than the last. The worst part is that the record companies kept releasing so many singles that by the time they ran out, Nickelback's next album would be ready for release. We haven't had a Nickelback-free month of radio since 2001.

So why exactly does everyone seem to hate Nickelback?

1. They're Canadian. Everyone knows that only 2 good things have ever come from Canada: Fergie Jenkins and porn.
2. The lyrics to their songs are terrible.

If everyone cared and nobody cried
If everyone loved and nobody lied
If everyone shared and swallowed their pride
We'd see the day when nobody died

Riiiiiight...(Those weren't even their worst lyrics. It's just the only one I could type out and still suppress the urge to vomit.)
3. Chad Kroger, lead singer of Nickelback, looks like a player in the WNBA.
4. A bystander once tried to politely tell Chad Kroger that he didn't care for Nickelback, and Chad punched him in the head.
5. Chad originally formed the band with 2 of his brothers. When they got famous, Chad kicked one of his own brothers out of the band.

Perhaps the biggest reason everyone in their right mind is anti-Nickelback is that they treat their fans like they have no intelligence. When How You Remind Me was such a big hit, Nickelback spoonfed America the same crappy song, only this time they called it Someday. After all, it had been 2 years since How You Remind Me had hit the airwaves. Who really remembered anything from 2 years ago? Nickelback probably looked at their average fan and thought they could totally fool them. And you know what? It worked! People loved Someday and it shot up the charts. All the while, Nickelback sat back and laughed at the inbred hicks that lapped up the same garbage they had been fed 2 years prior and counted their Euros or Shillings or whatever currency Canada has.

Luckily, not everyone was fooled. A website was assembled that pumped How You Remind Me through one headphone and Someday through the other, showing America that Nickelback had indeed been recycling their own crap. I guess that while they were busy interviewing melancholy teenage girls for potential song lyrics they forgot to change up their re-used garbage enough to sound different.

So now we're back to our original question: Why do people love Nickelback so much?

People love Nickelback because they're safe. Older guys like Nickelback because they think it makes them hip and cool to their kids. Older ladies love Nickelback because it lets them feel like they're "rocking out" without getting too heavy or offensive. Well guess what? Rock music isn't supposed to be "safe" or "friendly". Rock music is supposed to fill young minds with profanity and images of violence, demons, and fire. I've had enough of Nickelback playing it "safe" with their music, much like Canada itself. Where is Canada? On top of the United States, the safest place for a pansy-ass country to be! That's like living above Gary Busey for safety because you know that no one is gonna mess with the guy downstairs.

I'll leave you with this to chew on: How You Remind Me started getting popular in September of 2001. Did anything else happen that month? Now I'm not saying that 9/11 happened as retaliation for releasing Nickelback onto the world...but I'm not not saying that either.

Think carefully...didn't this guy try to slip you a roofie your Sophomore year?