Look What Your Money Bought
- Posted by mariteaux on January 11th, 2021 filed in Strong Opinions
- Comments Off on Look What Your Money Bought
Nickelback fascinates me. I grew up in the age of both their commercial peak and their cultural rebuke. They were kind of the cornerstones of 2000s radio rock, a swampland any serious rock fan would consider the musical equivalent of Michael Bay movies. You can still readily find articles about the band that frequently break out into editorializing “who even likes these hacks?” diatribes–yet Silver Side Up went 6x platinum in the US. And I had “Never Again” stuck in my head this evening.
I’m far from the first to think about the discrepancy. Six years ago, Baldazar666 on Reddit posted a thread succinctly titled “[Serious] Why do people hate Nickelback so much?”, and over 200 people chimed in. I think the most upboated answer is the one that makes me the most curious.
People hate Nickelback because they represent the idea that a record label can take any band, no matter how bad, and make them popular. The label can use clever PR and good advertising to make loads of money off a band that is just mediocre. People don’t hate the band nearly as much as they hate the idea that the band represents.
My reason for writing this really isn’t Nickelback. I’m not their biggest fan, but they’re hardly offensive. Curb is good, I want to give The State another spin, Silver Side Up sits fine on my shelf, having yet to explode or give me AIDS, and I’ll even give a little nostalgia nod to The Long Road. Past that, yeah, they lose me, but I like the occasional Nickelback song. Shock horror.
No, it’s more something I think about sometimes, something that Reddit comment touches on: bad music, the myth of the industry manufacture, and how the optics of authenticity matter more than actual authenticity.
You see, Nickelback–are authentic! Yeah, how’s that one work? Have a peak at some of their pre-breakthrough press, specifically the local Canadian press, because it’s actually pretty enlightening.
“I love knowing how to play the game, because information is power,” he says. “I’m just as much a businessman as I am a musician. It might even be a little more on the business side. I love it. I love the business of it.”
During a recent phone interview in which we talked about little except business, the 25-year-old singer drops terms rarely heard outside of corporate boardrooms: BDS, “active rock,” target markets, and so on. He even refers to music as “product,” but only when talking about bands he produces at Vancouver’s Greenhouse Studio and not his own music.
[…]
“If we couldn’t get played on the radio, I wouldn’t have a brand new Dodge Stealth out on the street, I wouldn’t have financial security – and that’s just as big a part of the game as the rest of it.
“Why not get the best of both worlds? Why not make some money and get to do what you love? Hockey players get to do it. People who make movies get to do it. Why should everybody get to do it except musicians?”
Elsewhere on that page, you’ll read about how there was no label behind the band’s frantic attempts to build buzz–it was all internal:
“I made all the radio tracking calls myself,” says Chad Kroeger. “My brother (bassist Mike) handled the money and went to all the stores in every town by himself and Ryan Peake (guitarist) did all the Internet work.”
The music world is built around bands trying to break through into the mainstream. There are tons of blogs out there ready to give your scrappy little indie rock outfit a nice blurb to stick in your EPK. Bands are forever trying to maximize their audience, reach more people, play more stages, and that’s all okay–unless your music is too commercial.
To be clear, if Nickelback were slightly less commercial, say, a throwback blues rock outfit or pandering to the alternative metal crowd, people would be fine with them. Even with the heavy marketing and the shrewd businessman-like outlook, people would happily give them a pass if Nickelback gave them the illusion of intelligent music.
I only need to look elsewhere on my shelf for proof of that: Nirvana. Nirvana is, to this day, still the go-to band for moody teenagers to mood to and moody musicians to ape. Nirvana shirts still sell. We’re still getting releases from the Geffen vault. They’re a legacy band that I betcha still makes millions. That brand would make anyone a millionaire overnight.
Kurt Cobain could’ve easily been a Gavin Rossdale if he didn’t have stomach problems. He was a pretty man who happily played with crowds and dicked around with reporters. People still talk about his sense of humor. He was personable. The reason Nirvana isn’t a dirty word in music circles is because he also had that artiste streak–his bizarre, warped paintings and sculptures and stories of sitting in the corner during the Smart sessions. The difference between Bush and Nirvana was that Bush was happy to pose for magazine covers any day of the week. Nirvana only did it when Kurt was in the mood.
And if you’re about to retort with shit about Nirvana’s music having “substance” while Bush’s was a cynical marketing ploy–that’s bullshit. The push leading up to Nevermind was littered with songs written with intentional nursery rhyme-like simplicity–pop appeal. Nirvana was touring to eat, not touring to get good music out to the masses.
Nirvana’s commercial successor in the Foo Fighters sits even more uncomfortably on that line between commercial schlock and “acceptable” listening. In any other band’s hands, the premise behind Wasting Light would be considered shlocky and gimmicky. “It’s all analog like a garage rock album from the 80s!” Yes, and made with highly expensive tape machines not like garage rock albums from the 80s. Or how about the premise of Sonic Highways, which is shlocky period?
We really only give Dave Grohl that pass because of his hardcore punk roots and because he’s a likable guy, despite the Foo Fighters pushing zero boundaries and only getting more staid the further away the 90s get. Dave Grohl is worth millions and has been for many years now. Their reviews look more like the reviewer awkwardly reasoning with himself–“yeah, it’s not exciting or new at all, but it sure is…dependable rock music.”
Now for me, none of this matters. I was telling Caby on a recent call we shared that I’m pretty much impervious to pretentiousness in the way I listen because it’s about sounds and songwriting to me. Connecting to themes and lyrical ideas is certainly part of it, but there’s nothing about, say, a Hives record I feel emotionally attached to. You’ve either got the sounds I like or you don’t. This is how people actually listen to music. You want the reason people like Nickelback? There you go. Catchy guitar sounds.
I think a lot of music reviewing online, and indeed a lot of communal music listening online, rewards high concept fucking around more than it rewards quality songwriting. There’s no good song behind “Everything in Its Right Place”, or indeed, about half of Kid A; lyrics were written by picking lines out of a hat, and Thom Yorke wanted to do anything but write more songs with his guitar. Correctly, his bandmates recognized it going in as masturbation, art-rock nonsense for the sake of it:
The Greenwood brothers, however, are rather less upbeat on this subject. Jonny remembers the two-groups experiment as a crushing bore, while Colin seems to feel Radiohead are not out of the woods yet.
“The trick to try and carry on doing things that interest you,” he says, “but not turn into some awful art-rock nonsense just for its own sake so that it looks like you’re cutting your nose off to spite your face. […]”
As for the other members of the group, Phil Selway, who became a father last year, inevitably has a mature outlook on how Radiohead’s activities will need to change to accommodate their personal lives. […] Only O’Brien is anything like excited about Radiohead’s projects to come.
And yet, people fucking ate it up. Some have called Kid A the best album of the 2000s. Why? It seemed authentic. There’s everything self-conscious and calculated about that record, in an entirely different direction, yet it’s beloved instead of reviled.
Everything about music is image–the punk bands playing dirty squats, rappers coming from the ghetto, and at every turn, real artists making a big show of rejecting the limelight. You can want the money, but if you make it too obvious you want the money, people hate you. What often comes down to “bad”, ultimately, is that it doesn’t satisfy people’s feeling that they’re listening to something real. They don’t care if it is real–they just want to feel like it’s real.
To be clear, you can want music that’s more interesting, detailed, textured, and mentally stimulating. Hell, demand it! There is a happy middle ground between purely commercial and “my music challenges normies” pretentiousness. But all your favorite bands touring and selling cassettes? That’s an industry, and industries don’t get built on stray artistic tendencies.
Or, as the great American poet Joshua Michael Homme put it: “You’re insulted, you can’t be bought or sold/Translation: offer too low”.
