Nickelback, "How You Remind Me" & The Slow Death of Grunge

Every now and then I get people asking for a playlist of every song mentioned in my videos: Well here's a Spotify link for this one: open.spotify.com/playlist/2Jg6nnKc3p7FiD29mGU2Sf?s… and the YouTube Music one: youtube.com/playlist?list=PLooaZ33lSaldt4iszpwBPDk…

Referring to Coldplay as the closest thing to a rock band is genuinely the most depressing thing I have heard in a very long time.

Don't hate Nickelback. Hate the Telecom Act of 1996, the death sentence for independent radio stations. Big media companies like ClearChannel took full control of local radio stations and standardized their playlists. This resulted in a tsunami of repetitive and unoriginal music being played constantly across different stations. Nickelback was a perfect fit for ClearChannel, a turd sandwich stuffed without mercy into everyone's ears.

I don't think they would have gotten the level of hate if the listening public wasn't sandblasted with the song for almost a year straight. Beyond that, there are plenty of artists who done actual despicable things who are much more deserving of the hate, but also the hate is a blessing and a curse since they're infamous now. Look at Creed; they turned the memes about them into a successful reunion.

Bubblegrunge...never heard that and never heard a more perfect way to describe some of that crap.

I think that's how I realized Nickelback was Canadian, when in "How You Remind Me," they rhymed "story" with "sorry."

That story about the Drum Tech singularly made me appreciate this band a bit more.

My favourite last word on grunge is Todd in the Shadows describing The Calling as "The final boybandification of Grunge". It's accurate, and it can be repurposed for the decline of many other musical eras.

Your comments are Clear Channel are an understatement, to say the least. They destroyed music in a way, due to their control over not only stations, but management, and venues. It was a monumental moment, that destroyed music in a lot of ways.

I love that you brought up the Clear Channel buyout. I've been reading a lot of articles about how rock faded from the mainstream and I think there are lots of reasons for it, but that's reason no 1 right there. It's funny, I've been reading a lot of music mags from the late '90s/early aughts and there's just this excitement I feel whenever I read about some tiny indie band getting any attention. It just feels like an era where anything could've happened, and any number of amazing, unique underground acts like Stereolab, Hey Mercedes, the Sea and Cake, Engine Down, Mogwai, Rainer Maria, Superchunk, Hot Water Music, etc, bands that were big on college radio, could've crossed over. It feels like they were on the cusp of something, but a handful of corporations managed to get a stranglehold on the industry and that was that. Unless you sounded like Nickelback, Evanescence, or Blink-182 your chances of getting mainstream radio airplay were next to nil.

Post-grunge and post-britpop were both a kind of dreary hangover. The parallel between Nickelback and Coldplay isn't an unfair one. Frankly, both deserve the musical memory hole if you asked me.

I remember the bassist in a band I was in once talking about this era of music and ending with "The cruelest part is, Candlebox really WAS left far behind," with such sincere sadness in his voice. It's one of the funniest things I've ever heard.

Clear Channel not only bought up Radio Stations, they took over Management of concert venues from clubs to stadiums AND just as importantly they bought out booking agencies keeping young local bands who were not clear channel affiliated from opening and support slots which previously acted as a minor league for bands.... along with using their lawyers to start to shut down indie/underground shows at places like VFW Halls this killed the next wave of rock that should have emerged..... while a host of "The" bands did get some traction the Hi Energy Rock underground - The Hellacopters, Gluecifer, Turbonegro, Thee Ultra Bimboos, The Soundtrack Of Our Lives, The Bellrays, Electric Frankenstien, Adam West, Hellride and a host of other bands who appeared on the A Fistful Of Rock N' Roll and other comp series were largely locked out of the major labels, radio and opening slots on major US tours that could and should have made headway into the Rock landscape around 2000 due in large part to what was tagged as the Anti-Rock n Roll Conspiracy by more than a few at the time.......

Thanks for mentioning Clear Channel. If you're overseas it's probably hard to really appreciate how much of an impact it had. I'm not sure it's possible to overstate how much damage it did.

I live in Brazil, here we had Orkut before Facebook or any social network. When I was around 12-13yrs old, I really enjoyed Nickelback (and most generic mainstream bands from early 00s, just like many young people like me back then). I entered on the Nickelback community on Orkut (it was something similar to a Reddit sub, for comparison). I've made so many friends from all over the country, people that are close to me even after almost 20 years now. I don't like Nickelback anymore, I honestly don't listen to them since the Dark Horse album, but man, this band gave me the best friends I could have and for that I'm grateful for Nickelback existence.

Minor nitpick - would just like to point out that the Goo Goo Dolls are not Canadian (though Buffalo is right on the US-Canadian border)

Call me crazy, but I feel like Pacific NW indie bands like Built to Spill, Sleater-Kinney, and Modest Mouse were the more natural evolution of "Grunge" from the early 90's into the 2000's. I feel like the bands that often get denigrated for being a zombified, commercialized grunge (bands like Nickleback, Bush), don't really do much to stress an outright continuity with that musical scene. The similarities always seemed superficial to me. I don't even like the idea that "grunge died" (grunge being a meaningless label notwithstanding)in 94 - just because it wasn't getting glazed as the big thing by record labels anymore doesn't mean it "died" it just went back home and grew up a bit. I'll die on the hill that one of the best "grunge" albums actually came out in 1997 - Lonesome Crowded West does a lot things during its runtime, one of those things is being a grunge masterpiece. I think the shift was that it went from being a noun to being an adjective, that bands weren't defined by it in so much as they used it as one tool in their sonic toolbox.

It’s incredible how much mainstream rock had faded by the end of the 2000s. The oversaturation of grunge rippled through other sub genres.

I loved how people were referring to Nickelback as "alternative" even though they were a huge selling, very popular top 40 band at the time.

I find it ironic as a 20-something in the mid 90's I was discovering older bands like CCR for the first time. "Grunge" was just rock to us then as it is now. "Hot funk, cool punk, even if it's old junk...something something something."