One day, I would like to have a chat with the the guy who reviews a Nickelback album, fills his review with the most comical, vitrolic hate...and gives the album a 4 out of 10.
"Really? A 4? That's not too bad."
"But you don't understand how indescribably...average...these guys are!"
"Uh huh."
"They're despicably mediocre."
"That doesn't sound so bad, really."
"I-It's not! Um...but they're everywhere!"
And so we reach the crux of the matter. Throughout my life, I can safetly say that I have listened to at least 20 hours of Nickelback. I can hear the band everywhere. I assume that the same can be said of many or most of my readers: they're one of the best-selling music acts of the last decade, one of the most-played groups on radio--in short, they are really well-known and expertly-promoted.
"Wow!" I can just hear some culture theorist in the future saying. "They must have really liked this group!" To which a better-informed culture theorist would say "Well...meh. The general consensus was, 'they have that one good song'..."
If you had never heard a Nickelback song before and just happened to hear one of their singles playing in a bar one day, you'd probably think it's okay, if you thought about it at all. Not that great, but average: sometimes worse, sometimes better. But we hear Nickelback on a pretty regular basis, and that's where it comes from.
It seems weird that a whole generation of people are either apathetic towards this band, or disproportionately hateful towards them. (I suppose there are fans on the opposite end, too: people who legitimately enjoy the band's music, and would defend its quality. There must be a great number of these people, if sales are any indication--but I have yet to meet one of them. I have seen places on the internet suggesting that an army of out-of-touch grandmothers are buying Nickelback albums for their 'hip' young grandchildren, but I'm certain that there are a number of people who like the music itself, too.) Aside from really, really solid promotion from their labels--and, if you want to get technical, the consolidation of radio stations into 5ish really big companies, allowing the same song to be played up and down the country--I attribute this to the fact that we expect more of the music we're exposed to. If a band is one of the most popular acts of the decade, and contains some of the most well-known songs in history, you'd expect them to be pretty good, too. It's a little subjective at this point, but the fact is that most people don't think Nickelback are that great. (I'll throw the Nickelback fans in my readership a bone here: sure, the band might sound pretty good. But you gotta understand: they just don't sound like one of the greatest bands in the world. And maybe they should be.)
And you'd expect a band that is played on radio constantly to be rather good. But it's understood surprisingly widely that they're not. You can see the same thing, on a smaller scale, with any other artist that happens to be really popular but makes music considered to be only above-average, if that. Like, I just searched "I hate miley cyrus" on Google, and it got just shy of 4.7 million hits. What did she ever do to you people?! Make average to above-average music? (http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=I%20hate%20miley%20cyrus&meta=)
No. She made such music, and we were forced to listen to it everywhere we go. And given that the music (hers; Nickelback's; hell, even something more well-liked like The Beatles) will always be disliked by someone, the question will be begged: why are my ears being invaded over and over by this group/artist without my consent? And that is what causes the dissent. I went to a party in downtown Toronto last year featuring 3 bands, and the third band sucked; my friend and I left. This is the second time in the last year I've thought about the band since then--but if I heard the group as often as I hear Nickelback, you can bet your bottom dollar I would have thought more about them than that. When you hear a band over and over that you don't like (much), it will likely seem unnatural, and annoy you. And that's why every popular band on the planet has a list of detractors to match its fans.
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