Sort Of Defending Nickleback, Without Really Meaning To

I come not to praise Nickleback, but to bury Klosterman, because he wrote this sad lead-in to his Grantland column, “A Night With the World’s Most Hated Bands“:

The moment you tell people you’re seeing Creed and Nickelback in concert — on the same night, at roughly the same time, in two different venues — it suddenly becomes a stunt. Just describing the premise seems schlocky; it’s like Def Leppard playing on three different continents in 24 hours, or maybe something David Blaine would attempt if he worked for the Fuse network. The immediate assumption is that this is some type of sonic endurance test, and that no person could possibly enjoy the experience of seeing the most hated (yet popular) rock band of 2001 followed by the most popular (yet hated) rock band of 2012. But this is what I wanted to do: I wanted to see Creed at New York’s intimate Beacon Theatre (performing their 1997 album My Own Prison in its entirety), followed by Nickelback in front of 18,000 people at Madison Square Garden.

Last Thursday, this dream was accomplished.

I did not do this because I particularly like or dislike either band. I did it because other people like and dislike them so much.

This article is bad in many ways; it is disingenuous, pointlessly referential, lacking in intellectual honesty or even the intent of honesty, and it is unfortunately, deeply, sadly revealing of the critical animus of most of Klosterman’s oeuvre.

The first sentence is disingenuous because it poses the idea that this article is not a stunt, was never a stunt, until ‘people’ hear about it, and their perception of a stunt somehow transmutes an honest program into a stunt. It doesn’t matter what ‘people’; that canard is never again addressed. Does he mean Grantland’s editors, or us readers? He certainly doesn’t mean the concert-goers around him:

The first sister (her name is Nia) rejects the idea that Creed’s lack of respect is remotely meaningful to the experience of loving them. “I don’t listen to what anyone says about music,” she tells me. “If I like a band, I like a band. I’ve seen Creed six times. They’re never boring. Never. And I’ve seen a lot of boring shows from other people.”

This was always a stunt, conceived and executed as such. That’s fine, in and of itself. Lot’s of great writing is built around stunts, like Jamaica Kincaid’s Girl is one long run-on sentence, Hemingway’s Hills Like White Elephants never directly addresses the abortion. These are stunts that reveal something unnoticed about the world, or about ourselves. Klosterman’s stunt only shows, and is only ever intended to show, that others’ perception is important.

The deeply revealing part, which is so sad, is the line about why Klosterman felt compelled to write this piece. Because other people like and dislike these bands so much. Klosterman is interested in the dilemma of Nickleback’s lead singer:

It’s hard to get inside the existential paradox of [Chad] Kroeger’s life on tour: Every day, he gives interviews to journalists and radio DJs who directly ask him why no one likes his band. Every night, he plays music to thousands of enraptured superfans, many of whom love him with a ferocity that’s probably unhealthy. Every concert ends with a standing ovation; if he feels motivated, he spends the remainder of the night partying with forgettable strangers who will remember him for the rest of their lives. Eventually, Kroeger falls asleep. And then he wakes up in a beautiful hotel room, only to read new articles about how everyone in North America hates his band.

I see no paradox. The ‘people’ who like love Nickleback aren’t the same ‘people’ who hate Nickleback. Sure, that’s obvious, but Klosterman is taking (and, in most of his work, has always taken) consensus to be the same as “good”. This assumption is ridiculous, and sometimes even Klosterman seems aware of this, like when he examines what it “means” to be an critical darling.

Consensus is mostly meaningless, because consensus doesn’t have any motive force. When Klosterman writes about “the culture changing”, he’s glossing over what really happens. Individuals make literally millions of choices, and there are literally billions of arguments. Consider, just as an isolated example, the sheer number of comments on a site like Reddit or Youtube. That kind of argument, or conversation, is happening literally billions of times every second, both online and in the world. That’s how culture changes, at the speed of conversation. Consensus, any consensus, is just one moment of that conversation, frozen at an arbitrary time.

This isn’t the right way to look at life, and it’s not the right way to look for goodness, whether it’s creative, innovative, or in the remains of a man’s life. Look, statistics are crazy. Consider the Birthday Paradox. Trying to derive “meaning” from the whole is pointless. What’s important aren’t the aggregates, the ‘culture’ as such, but what’s substantively happening in the billions of interactions that constitute it, and continually change it. Nickleback’s popularity isn’t that interesting, regardless of how you feel about them. What’s important is that they make you feel something or they don’t, and what that leads you to do next. This isn’t a duality or a paradox, it’s just looking at something in the most facile way possible.

As for Chad Kroeger, the ‘people’ who hate him aren’t the same as the fans who love him, and the affirmation he gets in return for his creative output is likely more than enough for him to sleep at night. After all, he’s got his solid gold house, and his rocket car, he’s not a greedy man.

For my own part I don’t particularly care about Nickleback. Their songs are catchy in a straightforward, unmoving way. But writing this has made me consider how often I’ve reflexively said “I hate Nickleback”, or feigned a disgust I don’t particularly feel when changing the radio station. That impulse seems stupid now, like performing for an audience who didn’t come to the theater. This dark and creeping self-awareness is at best a limiting, defensive, crutch. Klosterman’s point seems to be that if we just have enough crutches, we won’t need to use our legs. He’s the critical equivalent of the hover chairs from Wall-E.

Tagged as: Birthday Paradox, Chad Kroeger, Chester Lampwick, Chuck Klosterman, Creed, Ernest Hemingway, Girl, Grantland, Hills Like White Elephants, Jamaica Kincaid, Nickleback