Members of NICKELBACK were asked by Eddie Trunk about the copious amounts of hate constantly directed towards them, to which frontman Chad Kroeger replied (as transcribed by Ultimate-Guitar.com):
“We are the cilantro of music – some people just can’t get enough of it, and some people would die not to have ingested it.
“It’s just one of those things. We don’t take ourselves that seriously. I mean, you can tell just by sitting in the room with us – four clowns – we’re just goofing off and picking on each other and being silly.
“And a lot of people just take us too seriously for whatever reason. And they just wanna get on the internet and…
“The way I kind of look at it is if there’s a band I don’t like, I wouldn’t sit through 30 seconds of one of their videos. They sit through the whole thing, watch it, and then comment, and then get in the fights on YouTube.
“I can’t imagine going to someone’s video on YouTube that I didn’t like and watching it. That would just be hell for me. I don’t like this band, I don’t like this music, I don’t wanna watch this.
“But these people take the time. And you know what I honestly believe? I think they like us!
Guitarist Ryan Peake chimed in:
“There is a bit of a perfect storm going on where we were getting played on rock radio, we were getting played on pop stations for some of the later songs.
“So when you switch radio stations you just couldn’t get away from it. So I understand when your songs kind of become ubiquitous, you start to hate that. You start to resent that.
“And pair that with social media and internet, and it starts to really explode at that point.People share their innermost thoughts. And back with Circuit Magazine, these old rock magazines you’d have to furiously write a letter and send it in to them to the editorial page.
“And add on to that, what’s human nature? People like to bond through what they hate. And I get that. That’s human nature.
“So I think all that being put in the pot together and served around just kinda… The tails starts wagging the dog to a degree. It just becomes a thing on it’s own and people don’t know why they don’t like something.
Drummer Daniel Adair added:
“[Anthrax drummer] Charile Benante, he came to one of our shows. Great guy, love his drumming.
“He came to the show and afterwards he’s like, ‘When I showed up I was supposed to not like you. You guys play your ass off, I love these songs.’
“And he scratches his head like, ‘I don’t know why, I just thought I was supposed to not like you.’ I think it’s almost becoming built in a little bit. It’s like a herd mentality.”
Chad concluded:
“I don’t mind being someone’s guilty pleasure, as long as I’m their pleasure. I think when people have our songs cramped up and they’re singing along.
“And then all of the sudden they roll down the window, ‘I don’t wanna anybody to know I was just singing my ass off to Nickelback!’
“Nobody gets more radio play than Taylor Swift or Justin Bieber. They’re on every 15 minutes! We were never played that much.
“I used to think back to how many times we get played, how many spins we might get on some radio station. ‘We’ve got daytime play in this city, we can go there and we could play to people now!’
“They play some of the core artists now every fifteen minutes! And they still don’t get that backlash!”
Asked whether they ever had to deal with hecklers and haters during live shows, Chad replied:
“Yeah, at festivals. You can go to festival and you’re that band that that person doesn’t wanna see. But that happens to everybody. That doesn’t just happen to us. That’s been going on since the dawn of live music.”
