NICKELBACK's RYAN PEAKE Didn't Realize His Band Would Be So Polarizing

July 11, 2020

NICKELBACK guitarist Ryan Peake says that he never expected his band's popularity to be so polarizing.

Arguably the most disliked band in America, NICKELBACK has earned a type of hatred so potent it's hard to fathom what they did that was so terrible to the public consciousness. It's gotten to the point that people who enjoy NICKELBACK are denying their fandom and hiding their CDs like criminal contraband.

Speaking to "Talk Is Jericho" about how he feels about the attention NICKELBACK has gotten because of this, Ryan said (hear audio below): "Everybody lives in their own miscrocosm. It's always worse for you, it seems. But everybody gets their degree of hate and degree of detractors and vitriol on the Internet. So you understand it more when you're in the eye of the hurricane and think of your own hurricane. You think you're the only one it's happening to sometimes…

"I didn't realize we would be so polarizing," he admitted. "That's the one thing that's kind of shocking to me. I wasn't really hyper aware, in any sense, in the '70s when the disco polarization was really going on. That was the first time I'd heard of people [going] crazy about disco hate — people getting mad about some kind of music. I was just, like, 'Just don't listen to it.' You listen to what you like and you with what you like, and I don't get too wound up about it. So when that happens, I try to get inside their heads as to why people get so wound up about it. There's a choice — why do you get wound up about this thing?

"I think people like to commiserate — they do. They love to just talk about what itches their ass, so to speak. 'Oh, you too.' 'Yeah.'"

Four years ago, a student named Salli Anttonen at the University of Eastern Finland conducted a study to find out why there is so much hate directed towards NICKELBACK. Anttonen analyzed Finnish reviews of the band from 2000 through 2014 for her paper, which was titled "Hypocritical Bullshit Performed Through Gritted Teeth: Authenticity Discourses In Nickelback's Album Reviews In Finnish Media".

Anttonen found that critiques of the band became harsher as they became more popular, noting: "It became a phenomenon where the journalists were using the same (reasons) to bash them, and almost making an art out of ridiculing them."

Even though the study was based solely upon Finnish reviews of the band, the critics' animosity toward the group has been a global phenomenon.

NICKELBACK frontman Chad Kroeger admitted a while back that the group has never been a critical favorite. "I think we actually used to pay a little bit of attention to that, and we just kind of accepted it's, like, nope, we are never going to be one of those bands, we are never going to be the critic's darlings, and we're okay with that," he said. "Even a lot of critics are kind of, like, 'We've done our best to try and get the word out there that as many people as possible should hate this band because we hate this band.' And they've just sort of gone, 'You know what? We can't do it. We cannot convince anybody else to hate this band as much as we do.'"

Anttonen concluded: "NICKELBACK is too much of everything to be enough of something. They follow genre expectations too well, which is seen as empty imitation, but also not well enough, which is read as commercial tactics and as a lack of a stable and sincere identity."

NICKELBACK has spent much of the last three years touring in support of its ninth album, "Feed The Machine", which was released in June 2017 via BMG.

Find more on Nickelback
  • facebook
  • twitter
  • reddit
  • email

Comments Disclaimer And Information

BLABBERMOUTH.NET uses the Facebook Comments plugin to let people comment on content on the site using their Facebook account. The comments reside on Facebook servers and are not stored on BLABBERMOUTH.NET. To comment on a BLABBERMOUTH.NET story or review, you must be logged in to an active personal account on Facebook. Once you're logged in, you will be able to comment. User comments or postings do not reflect the viewpoint of BLABBERMOUTH.NET and BLABBERMOUTH.NET does not endorse, or guarantee the accuracy of, any user comment. To report spam or any abusive, obscene, defamatory, racist, homophobic or threatening comments, or anything that may violate any applicable laws, use the "Report to Facebook" and "Mark as spam" links that appear next to the comments themselves. To do so, click the downward arrow on the top-right corner of the Facebook comment (the arrow is invisible until you roll over it) and select the appropriate action. You can also send an e-mail to blabbermouthinbox(@)gmail.com with pertinent details. BLABBERMOUTH.NET reserves the right to "hide" comments that may be considered offensive, illegal or inappropriate and to "ban" users that violate the site's Terms Of Service. Hidden comments will still appear to the user and to the user's Facebook friends. If a new comment is published from a "banned" user or contains a blacklisted word, this comment will automatically have limited visibility (the "banned" user's comments will only be visible to the user and the user's Facebook friends).