‘We will catch you. On top of a hefty fine, a criminal charge and a year’s driving suspension, we will also provide you with a bonus gift of playing the office’s copy of Nickelback in the cruiser on the way to jail.” This is how cops in far-flung Kensington, on Prince Edward Island, Canada, are disincentivising drunk drivers this Christmas – by threatening them with a blast of Chad Kroeger’s band’s 2001 drive-schlock classic album Silver Side Up, according to their Facebook page.
They’re not even the first police force to engage in these Chadist hate crimes. From the photograph meme (in which strange pictures are Photoshopped into a frame held by Kroeger in that song’s video) to parody songs, bashing the ’Back has long since become a sport. Not that the band have always taken it lying down. When Brighton rock duo Royal Blood tweeted a Nickelback gag in October, the Canadians hit back with: “Nickelback jokes are like @royalblooduk, they were a lot cooler a couple years ago.”
But they’re hardly the first band to be turned into a punchline that doesn’t require a set-up. Sting’s career has suffered for years from the notion that he is some kind of tantric sex god, based on a throwaway comment he made in a 1990 interview. In 2014, he clarified his comments by adding that the seven-hour tantric-sex goal “would also include dinner and a movie”.
Likewise, it only took a passing reference in an Alan McGee column in the Guardian in 2000 for the phrase “bedwetters” to hang moistly around Coldplay for ever more. Mick Hucknall’s reputation as a shagger was more self-imposed. “Between 1985 and 1987, I would sleep with about three women a day, every day,” he said in a 2010 interview. “I never said no. This was what I wanted from being a pop star.” Yet it blighted his already oily music with the thoughts of his oily maw bearing down on thousands of women.
Phil Collins probably didn’t deserve to be tagged for life with the factoid that he had divorced his wife by fax (actually, the marriage was already very much over – he was just confirming that), but the fact that it stuck, just as with Coldplay or Sting, indicates that the myth reflected something we had all suspected about the man.
It’s the same with Donald Trump’s “Crooked Hillary”. Even if the punchline doesn’t have any basis in fact, the sentiment becomes self-reinforcing. Nickelback are self-evidently the worst band in the world, because our idea of what the worst band in the world would sound like has become defined by that sweet, sweet Nickelback sound. Even marrying Avril Lavigne, and nursing her through lyme disease, couldn’t rescue Kroeger’s rep. He definitely wouldn’t cut it as a poor man stealing.
