Blame ClearChannel. Nickelback emerged near the peak of one company fucking up commercial radio throughout the US. This new band played inoffensive pop-alternative-country melange, seeming broadly acceptable to everyone without exciting much of anyone. Their image was squeaky-clean while their conventionally attractive frontman looked vaguely rugged. All very saleable, but aggressively generic.

So: take an audience at peak rude irony. (This is the era of Celebrity Deathmatch, “Mike Tyson ate my balls,” and Game.com ads calling their customers morons.) Subject them to the same middling singles over and over. Ask how they feel about this merely okay experience taking up air time that could easily be Destiny’s Child, Third Eye Blind, or Shania Twain. Try not to act surprised when they smirk and say they hope the entire band dies.

People hate Nickelback because it’s fun to hate Nickelback. It is easy and rewarding to hate Nickelback. Everyone knew about them, but nobody was a diehard fan. You could perform ingroup bonding with nearly anyone by saying “Fuck Nickelback, right?” You could privately grumble about hearing “How You Remind Me” for the dozenth time this week, without any baggage like Creed’s religion-bait popularity or various artists’ public feuds. Hating Nickelback is uncomplicated. To this day, I have no goddamn idea what Chad Kroeger is like, or what he’s into, or what he’s done. But I still knew his name without checking.

And nobody’s replaced them. Rampant piracy deepened people’s musical tastes by letting them choose what to listen to, instead of the constant deluge of lowest-common-denominator payola. Streaming later made it polite and acceptable to pay artists nothing. Meanwhile, internet forums and thousand-channel cable packages allowed culture to splinter. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard a Taylor Swift song. I don’t care, and I don’t have to. Having any reputation become memetic like this is obscenely unlikely now. To have that reputation be… mediocre? Unthinkable.

If I remember correctly it largely started because of some joking comment by some famous person decades ago. And because of early internet it was a early form of meme. It was something you repeated, it was the cool funny thing to say. And then I think people started to forget that they weren’t to take it seriously. So they start saying they hated a band and had absolutely no idea why other than ‘that’s just what you say’

It’s weird, I hated them the very first time I saw their first video in MTV (just as mtv was about to finish killing off the music in their channel).

I think it was the combination of complete gener-rock, d-bag lead singer, and stupidly over dramatic nothing lyrics. All I know is it was instant that I know I didn’t like them.

Has a similar response to Bush (the soap ballad band) in the 90s.

Or getting kinky with The Kinks?

Would you rather do archery with Archenemy, or masturbate with Mastodon?