Do you find yourself involuntarily wincing whenever Chad Kroeger’s mumble-growl wafts from your radio speakers, but you are not sure why?
Allow yourself to be blinded by science.
Finnish student Salli Anttonen has completed a study determining why Canadian pop-grunge combo Nickelback is so universally despised.
The findings: People can’t stand them because there’s not much there. And yet, there’s too much there. (Yes, this is complicated. It’s science, after all.)
After combing through 14 years of Nickelback reviews, Anttonen determined that the group suffers from an authenticity deficit in music journalists’ eyes.
“Nickelback is too much of everything to be enough of something,” Anttonen told the BBC. “They follow genre expectations too well, which is seen as empty imitation.”
In studying the reviews, Anttonen found that initial stories on the group weren’t particularly damning. But as the Nickelback’s popularity increased, the animosity toward the group likewise grew. Anttonen attributed music critics’ self-appointed roles as “protectors of originality” as one of the reasons for widespread Nickalback hatred among the journalistic ranks.