Saturday, 04 April 2009

  • Nickelback and Xanga



    Remember Nickelback?

    OF COURSE you remember Nickelback! How could you possibly forget them? Today your co-worker was playing his radio a little too loudly and you heard "Gotta Be Somebody" 4 times. And then you heard that song once more during the drive home. There is no possible way for you to forget about Nickelback, as much as you'd love to try.

    But remember when you liked Nickelback?

    Admit it. When you first heard "How You Remind Me", you immediately fell in love. You just had to hear it again. It was angsty in a way that spoke to your heart, but it wasn't too angsty. It rocked hard, but not too hard. You needed to hear it again. And again. And as much as you want to deny it, deep down you still love that song. It's playing right now in your mind as you're reading this.

    This is how you remind me of what I really am.
    This is how you remind me of what I really am.

    Nickelback is still going strong. But now you wish they weren't. It grates on your nerves that you had to listen to "Gotta Be Somebody" 5 times today. You kinda wish Chad Kroeger and the guys would just go back to Hanna, Alberta, and disappear from public life.

    And why is that? As much as you might like to think so, it isn't because they got worse. Like anyone who plies a trade for a while, they've gotten better the longer they've been at it. Listen, honestly listen, to "How You Remind Me" and "Gotta Be Somebody" back to back. From a musical standpoint, "Gotta Be Somebody" is a far superior song.

    Thing is, when "How You Remind Me" came out Nickelback was new to the public consciousness. You'd just discovered them. Perhaps not everyone had heard them yet. There was an excitement at discovering a new good band.

    But then they started to get really popular. They sold out all their concerts. And suddenly they were beneath you. Because you're too smart and sophisticated to become enthralled with anything the masses love.

    It's not like you to say sorry
    I was waiting on a different story
    This time I'm mistaken
    for handing you a heart worth breaking

    We do this with a lot of things. There was a time when if you were cool you had a Xanga. So everybody got on Xanga. Suddenly everybody decided that Xanga was for losers. So people headed over to MySpace. And MySpace became "MySpaz". So everybody went to Facebook.

    Meanwhile people discovered Twitter, a way to share snippets with a wide variety of people quickly and easily from a wide variety of sources. And of course as it's become popular, it too has been made fun off relentlessly. As a friend of mine "tweeted" earlier this week, "So I guess Twitter is like your favorite band in high school: they're cool until they start selling out stadium concerts."

    Why do we do this? Are we so desperate to prove that we're so much better and smarter than everybody else that we just pathologically hate anything that's popular, no matter its merits? Isn't that just as much letting others control what we like than if we automatically followed the crowd? It strikes me as kinda stupid. And oddly enough, this particular form of stupidity seems to be more common among people with higher intelligence. Believe it or not, intelligence and stupidity are not opposites, nor are they mutually exclusive.

    Be real to yourself. Like Nickelback or Xanga or MySpace or Facebook or Twitter. Or dislike them. But decide what you like for your own reasons.

    I've been wrong, I've been down,
    to the bottom of every bottle
    these five words in my head
    scream "are we having fun yet?"

    yeah, yeah, yeah, no, no
    yeah, yeah, yeah, no, no

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