Posted April 1, 200718 yr my friend/frat brother wrote this article. I know that it’s a little early in the game to make the above claim, as we’ve got 94 years left in the current century, but I’m going to put my journalistic and personal integrity on the line and call this one in favor of the boys from Alberta, Canada: the hard-rocking, ass-kicking, perm-reviving quartet known as Nickelback. Nickelback has been rocking your face off ever since their first big hit, “How You Remind Me,” put you on your ass back in 2001. That song set the bar high, but Nickelback has consistently lived up to the hype with single after single providing the framework for a musical style that can only be described as the sonic embodiment of a sweet-ass jean jacket. Frontman Chad Kroeger’s guttural vocals hearken back to simpler time when men were men and 3.2 beer was legal for high school seniors. His glorious blonde perm shines like a beacon in a dark sea of pussy emo-cuts. The supporting cast of Ryan Peak wailing on the axe, Dan Adair hitting the skins, and brother Mikey Kroeger on bass is as formidable as any out there in music today. However, it wasn’t until I heard Nickelback’s 4th album, All the Right Reasons, that I realized the simple and immutable truth that N-Back is not only the greatest band of our generation, but also the 21 century. Succinctly put, the album is a tour-de-force. The first single, “Photograph,” is a wistful reminiscence back to the days of youth, forever immortalized but impossible to return to. Many a night I’ve lain awake in bed wondering just what the hell was actually on Joey’s head. Thanks to the video, I know now that it was a silly hat. Kroeger may laugh every time he looks at that old photograph, but every time I hear him sing about it, I cry the tears of joy known only to those that have witnessed true beauty. However, it’s not until we examine deeper cuts on the album that Kroeger’s lyrical genius is fully exposed. On the driving track “Next Contestant,” Chad sings: “I judge by what she’s wearing/ just how many heads I’m tearing/ Off of assholes coming on to her.” In this song, Nickelback is exploring the common and completely legitimate urge to beat the shit out of anyone who looks at your girlfriend, especially if she’s dressed like a total slut. Given Kroeger’s brutish physique, I don’t doubt for a minute that he’s capable of bringing some serious pain to any Tom, Dick, or Harry with a wandering eye. Nickelback has also shown us their softer side on the current single, “If Everyone Cared.” Similar in sentiment to John Lennon’s “Imagine” (though superior musically), they envision the world as a better place where: “If everyone cared and nobody cried/ If everyone loved and nobody lied/ If everyone shared and swallowed their pride/ Then we’d see the day that nobody died.” With the current world population approaching 6 billion, some would say it’s statistically impossible for nobody to die on a particular given day. To them, I offer the following rebuttal: A lot of people would say that it’s statistically impossible for Chad Kroeger’s hair to be as sweet as it is, but that hasn’t stopped him. Also, Kroeger will beat your ass if you doubt his claims. What does the future hold for Kroeger & Co.? Having already solidified their icon status in the world of music, the group’s yet-unnamed 2007/2008 release will be icing on the cake. Word on the street is that the group is working on collaboration with ex-Creed frontman Scott Stapp. Should this prove to be true, the combination of Stapp and Kroeger on a single track may be too glorious for human ears- and thus may signal the second coming of Christ as described in the Book of Revelations. However, one thing is certain: the world is a better and more culturally enriched place as a direct result of the band Nickelback. The group seems to come to terms with their own significance on the song “Rockstar,” in which they sing: “I want a new tour bus full of old guitars/ My own star on Hollywood Boulevard/ Somewhere between Cher and James Dean is fine with me.” You know what, boys? I’m pretty fine with that myself. http://www.collegehumor.com/article:1724890
April 1, 200718 yr I hope your friend/frat buddy writes for the Onion. If not then I guess he lost all of the journalistic and personal integrity that he put on the line.
April 2, 200718 yr I have no idea what this band sounds like (goes to show how throughly out-of-touch I am with pop music). I did here three good acts last night at Canal Street Tavern...from Cincinnati The Hiders, from Cols, Chris McCoy and the Gospel, and from Dayton Will Cope (doing a solo acoustic thing)... Of the bands I really liked the Hiders. These guys play a lot at the Northside Tavern (?) if anyone in Cincy wants to hear them. I dont know where Chris Mcoy and Gospel play in Cols...there is slight bit of Richard Buckner in their sound. I am thinking Cols is developing a pretty good local live scene, based on what I hear at CommFest and what tours through Dayton. Will Cope has his own band here in Dayton, but he is suprisingly good as a singer-songwriter-acoustic peformer. I guess these acts are all on MySpace Music or elsewhere online if you want to listen to them.
April 2, 200718 yr This sounds like a good show. 05.19.07 - Saturday - 9 pm Dayton, Ohio The Oregon Express Southeast Engine with Sohiop.u Athens people? Anyone? Southeast Engine...worth it? Oh, yeah, that article. Pretty convincing parody, of the band and of "Rock Journailsm" .... Nickelback has also shown us their softer side on the current single, “If Everyone Cared.” Similar in sentiment to John Lennon’s “Imagine” (though superior musically) ...LOL! The classic of pretentious rock journalism is Greil Marcus' liner notes to Dylan's "Blood on the Tracks"
April 2, 200718 yr A hilarious piece indeed! I think your friend needs to do an article on American Idol.
April 2, 200718 yr C-Dawg, let me put it this way...I'd bed a a full cash advance on a credit card offer that your dude here doesn't listen to a number of bands not limited to...okay I'm not even going to waste much time with this post. The fact is there's tons and tons of stuff out there that never gets on the radio and surely is not on today's frat party rotation and there's no way to know about it unless you had a cool older brother, some kid up the street had a cool older brother, or something. Anyway, here's a couple links to the kind of junk playing at MY parties back when I was 20-21: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qC-W0_cv85E And last but not least, Athens' own We March playing at South by Southwest in Austin two weeks ago: http://www.vbs.tv/player.php?bctid=704328567&bccl=Njg2OTk3ODE5X19NVVNJQw==
April 2, 200718 yr Oh, btw Southeast Engine is a terrific band. I made the mistake of writing them off as a chick coffee shop band when I first saw them but the songwriting got cosmically better very quickly. Their faster and louder songs aren't nearly as good as their mid and slow-tempo stuff.
April 2, 200718 yr I don't know, it does take a certain amount of talent for Nickelback to make every song for however many albums they've made now sound so nearly identical. Just ask Matchbox 20. :whip:
April 2, 200718 yr "Rock Star" is one of the ten worst songs of all time. What do you mean...is there something wrong with the following lyrics: "I'll have the quesadilla..."
April 2, 200718 yr Oh yeah, it's April 1st and I was so worked up just two sentences into the article I skipped immediately to my response. Let me just say talking to people around the ages of 20 about music drives me crazy, they tell me what was big and how to interpret all kinds of stuff from when I was alive and can remember when it was new and they were playing four square. Like people telling me what a big deal Sublime was when...nobody freaking cared about that band and they were never on the radio until 2-3-4 years after the guy died. They sucked then and they will always suck! Calvin maybe you saw my May '05 column in The Post? It's highly chopped up by the editor but I still and will forever stand by it. Plus, cosmically has been in my regular vocab for some time: Contemporary tunes bring no satisfaction Letter to the Editor On Tuesday The New York Times reported that sustained cocaine use increases the risk of developing aneurysms by 30 percent. Later that day The Rolling Stones announced a new world tour. No doubt with their iPods tuned to Good Charlotte and Green Day, many OU students failed to notice. In fact today's youth are shockingly Stones-illiterate. Recently a Post staffer who will remain nameless asked me "Is this Modest Mouse?" when I put on "Miss You." That flirt wiith disco, a tune that would make only the most eccentric Stones fan's top 10, is alone cosmically better than the combined catalog of most groups heard on today's airwaves or iPods. Learning to double click a computer mouse is a lot easier than learning to play guitar. Gang, when you go back to your dorm room tonight, scroll past "Miss You" and nudge that little arrow over "Can't You Hear Me Knocking" or "Rocks Off." While your precious bandwidth is tied up with the task, take one last look at those Blink-182 and Simple Plan posters. This weekend take a break from scraping the tape marks off the wall and click on anything by The Stooges, MC5 or Black Sabbath. There aren't enough residual tape marks on this planet to rattle your RA the way Iggy, Ozzy and "Kick Out The Jams" are going to. A few years ago my mother's best friend from college confided to me, among other things, a great rock 'n' roll moment from her youth. A lone police officer pulled his squad car up to a house party just as someone put on "Sympathy for the Devil". He demanded silence; instead the party encircled him and his car, dancing and shouting "Who-whoo!" Rock & Roll won that battle, but it's a war out there. We have sunk to such lows that these grandpas are now needed to show you how lame your RAs, teachers, and parents are. -Jake Mecklenborg is The Post's photo editor. Send him an e-mail at [email protected]
April 2, 200718 yr Thank god it was a parody I had to come in and make sure someone wasn't delusional LOL Bye
April 2, 200718 yr I sometimes wonder if Nickelback was created to indicate the smart and the stupid. Almost like an Nazi arm band for the slow.
April 2, 200718 yr Recently a Post staffer who will remain nameless asked me "Is this Modest Mouse?" when I put on "Miss You." That flirt wiith disco, a tune that would make only the most eccentric Stones fan's top 10, is alone cosmically better than the combined catalog of most groups heard on today's airwaves or iPods. hah..yeah..I never thought of Miss You as disco, but I can see it getting there. Also, the Stones did their southern/country rock turn with some tunes on Goats Head Soup. This weekend take a break from scraping the tape marks off the wall and click on anything by The Stooges, MC5 or Black Sabbath. There aren't enough residual tape marks on this planet to rattle your RA the way Iggy, Ozzy and "Kick Out The Jams" are going to Black Sabbath. Oh dear. I must admit, Paranoid was a fun album. The song that got some top 40 airplay off it (at least in Louisville) was Iron Man, almost a novelty song. But that album really rocks out on "Fairys Wear Boots" and "Paranoid" (which is actually a pretty good tune, too). The lyrics on the songs was this strange mix of protest songs and science fiction and bad news personal issues. There was some real good music to come out of the era 1967-68-1973,74 or so (really the few years around the turning of the decades). ..one of my favorites to come from that era was early Steely Dan. There is a lot going on in their stuff, which makes it fun to listen to.
April 2, 200718 yr I can't stand the lead singer's voice. He sounds like he's one Marlboro away from lung cancer.
April 3, 200718 yr ^ That's hilarious! Nickelback: Greatest Band of the 21st Century « on: Yesterday at 03:30:21 PM »
April 4, 200718 yr >hah..yeah..I never thought of Miss You as disco, but I can see it getting there. Also, the Stones did their southern/country rock turn with some tunes on Goats Head Soup. Actually the Stones did a ton of country and disco songs. At least a dozen of each. That band is untopable for having written roughly 50 fantastic songs, of which about 15 get played on the radio regularly leaving tons wallowing in obscurity. "Citadel", "2000 Light Years from Home", "Some Girls", "When the Whip Comes Down", geesh I could go on and on. Sure they haven't put out a good record since 1981 or so but they did put out about 5 of the greatest records of all time. And btw the song "Rollin' Stone" by Muddy Waters is beyond incredible. One of the meanest, dirtiest, snarkiest, greatest songs of all time. Music doesn't get any hotter! I mean, if you put that song on in front of a bunch of rap kids today their heads would pop off. I doubt anyone in Nickelback's listened to this song or else they'd just give up. This is what Keith and the band were listening to when they were 18...compare that to say kids today listening to Nickelback! >>Black Sabbath. Oh dear. I must admit, Paranoid was a fun album. The song that got some top 40 airplay off it (at least in Louisville) was Iron Man, almost a novelty song. But that album really rocks out on "Fairys Wear Boots" and "Paranoid" (which is actually a pretty good tune, too). The lyrics on the songs was this strange mix of protest songs and science fiction and bad news personal issues. Yeah, a crushing record but so where all of their first five records. I know them all head to toe. Again, they were blues-trained blues-loving guys who managed to invent an all-new genre with just one song and ran with it. Tons of innovation in their first five records, great songwriting. Ozzy is a highly underrated lyricist and songwriter although the guitarist wrote most of the music. Fairies Wear Boots is in 6/8 time, again a direct carry-over from the blues. The most recent 6/8 songs I can recall are all on Weezer's first record (although theirs is not so much a shuffling 6/8). Still to this day, I've heard no rapper rap over 6/8 time. What's so awesome about 6/8 is that bands that play in it also get the shuffling in their 4/4 songs, again something entirely lacking in the last 15 years of American pop. The blues shuffle is a very subversive tool, to our ears as Americans it's hardly even noticed by most but it apparently strikes foreign ears quite boldly. It was invented here, as were the particular way pentatonic scales are used in our music, along with the particulars of jazz and blues improvisation and loose lyrical structures.
April 4, 200718 yr I actually liked Nickelback before they made it big.. Their first cd is actually grunge that Nirvana would be ok with. The vocals were not way out front. Now they totally annoy the hell out of me.
April 19, 200718 yr I'm not a Stone fan... but "Miss You" is certainly one of my favorite songs by them... I've always loved those rare hybrids of disco and rock a la "I Was Made For Lovin' You" by Kiss
April 19, 200718 yr Actually I realized after posting my last post that Coldplay has put out a few songs in 6/8 recently: A Wisper Shiver I only know this because I stole about 50,000 songs off of somebody's computer. I don't own any Coldplay records! This is one of those rarely-heard Rolling Stone pseudo-disco songs: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLWKzpCDxNs Nobody today can put out a song or video this fun!
April 20, 200718 yr This is hilarious and sad. http://www.thewebshite.net/nickelback.htm Saw that years ago. The terrible truth.
April 20, 200718 yr That entire band looks like they stock shelves at Kohl's except the guy in blue might work at the Sprint store.
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