Are Nickelback Being Huge Dicks to Their Fans in Their New Video?

Photo via Nickelback's Facebook

Nickelback is a love 'em or really, really hate 'em band—this is not news, nor has it been news since their first single, the saccharine "How You Remind Me," skyrocketed up the charts like a Russian warhead. They've built a career upon the premise that they're just like you, man: hard-working guys who like beer, pretty ladies, sex jokes, and easy cliches. They've built a gilded empire upon the backs of the working class stiffs, Middle American radio listeners, and good ol' boys who they seek to emulate, in aesthetic if not in practice.

Theirs is a quintessentially American image, as well; despite their Canadian citizenship and small-town upbringing, Nickelback constantly reaches for sturdy, star-spangled tropes like horses, trucks, and Hollywood. They lift from mainstream country, from classic rock, from grunge (though god only knows what Kurt Cobain would've thought of the hamfisted misogyny on "Something in Your Mouth"). As our esteemed colleague Drew Millard has noted, Chad Kroeger and the fellas have created the ultimate radio-ready cocktail. A huge, eager swath of America—19 million and counting on Facebook alone—sucks it down like mother's milk, and as a result, Nickelback keeps on keeping on.

They've just released a new music video for the track "Get 'Em Up," and while the song is as mindlessly catchy and steeped in macho bravado as anything they've done, the video itself gave me pause. As Kroeger explains it, the music video concept is meant to be light-hearted, funny even: two guys, a plan, a bank, an unhappy ending. He references Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, and joshes himself for dreaming of bank robberies when he was young and stupid. The story is simple—two broke, dumb rednecks kitted out in cutoff shirts and Wranglers plot to rob a bank, practice their gun-slinging outside the busted-up trailer they inhabit, head down to do the deed, find out the bank's closed on Sundays, and get nailed by two loitering cops. It's not exactly Tarrantino, but at least there's a clown mask.

Watching the video, though, one gets the distinct impression that Nickelback is not-so-subtly shitting on their fans. By making a video mocking lower-class American stereotypes, they're by extension mocking their own fan base. Of course not all Nickelback fans are dummies, but a huge portion of their listener base is comprised of straight white people who have a high school education, work retail jobs, listen to the radio, and identify with lyrics about partying, booze, and sometimes love. They don't fuck with Spotify or give a shit about Tidal; they just want to turn the radio up and listen to some rock music on the drive to work.

By lampooning people who seem to fit this image to a tee, the band is basically smirking in the faces of the people who own their CDs. They're either saying, "Hey, check out these nimrod peckerwoods who're too damn stewpid to rob a bank!" setting them up for mockery with their trailer and flannel and generically hot, disinterested girlfriend. Or, they're trying to hunker down alongside the audience, like "Hey man, we ain't too smart either, we're all on the same team here, lemme buy you a beer," as if the band itself wasn't generating literal millions of dollars of revenue taken directly from the pockets of the flyover state denizens they're mocking. Either way, it sucks.

Am I overthinking it? Probably. But I do know that if a band I really cared about—or at least liked enough to spend money on—made a video depicting me and the rest of their fans as a bunch of bumbling backwoods idiots, I'd be a little pissed. And really, don't Nickelback fans have it hard enough as it is? The last thing they need is the band itself turning on them.

Kim Kelly never expected to ever spend this much time thinking about Nickelback, here or on Twitter: @grimkim