NICKELBACK suck. It's not a controversial opinion, but our right to express it is under attack — there's been so much Nickelback backlash in the last few months that we're starting to see Nickelback backlash backlash.A million crap news articles and lame Twitter jokes were written about that dumb online poll saying that Nickelback were the number one musical turn-off, and that dumb online petition saying Nickelback shouldn't play at some halftime show. The whole thing got annoying, boring, and unfunny, as Phoenix contributor Luke O'Neil pointed out on his "Put That Shit on the List" blog: "Making Nickelback jokes makes you the Nickelback of people, and every snide jab on Twitter and Facebook is like having to sit through a never-ending halftime show of hackery. Where do I sign the protest against you?"
It's true, but it's no reason to drop our guard: Nickelback is aware of this backlash backlash, and they're starting to roll with the punches in interviews and to make cute self-deprecating videos on Funny or Die. They're laying the groundwork for some kind of Journey-style ironic embrace, and we can't let it happen. Stop making Nickelback jokes and get serious; don't hate them because it's funny, 'cause it's not. Hate them because they're terrible, and hate them because they're not constantly ashamed of themselves.
NIRVANA fans, peep this recent Court tweet: "@SimonCowell you want some Nirvana songs? @JanetJealousy is from same town as Kurt? I have the perfect idea for that, call me babe."
Translation: she's offering to license Nirvana songs to Simon Cowell's British X-Factor TV show so that a contestant named Janet Devlin — who hails from the same Irish town as Cobain's ancestors — can do enormous justice to them. Perfect idea, right? Tragically, Devlin was eliminated from the program just days after that tweet, so we're denied the satisfaction of Courtney Love getting a bunch of money for something Kurt Cobain would have been totally down with.
Well, nobody can really know whether Kurt Cobain would have liked to hear his songs interpreted by reality-TV pop singers, but I trust Courtney to make that call — she clearly has great affection for her late husband, and has been protective of his legacy. "I don't need to see a picture of Kurt, asshole," she told a guy who held Kurt's photo up at a recent Brazilian show. "I'm not Kurt, I have to live with his shit and his ghost and his kid every day."
Oh, what? I guess that looks weirdly negative when you see it in print, but remember that by "shit" she means "lucrative publishing rights," and by "ghost" she means "tremendous pile of money."
"We were dubstep before there was dubstep," said the KORN GUY to Billboard, and I think he's right — most dubstep fans are just Woodstock 99ers born a decade late. Korn teaming up with SKRILLEX seemed silly at first, but it's a great idea: we should take all the shit music for idiots and combine it into a single supershit for double idiots.
In a world gone mad, at least we can take some small comfort in things that totally make sense, like BILLY CORGAN starting his own pro-wrestling company. "It's a serious endeavor," Corgan told Billboard, deftly heading off all possible mockery. "I want this to succeed strictly on its ideas."
