Our Hate Has Saved Nickelback
One of the arguments against Nickelback over the years has been that liking the band could not be the result of an active human decision: that everything about the band is, in effect, a default setting—sound blasted out by commercial radio run by robots.
.. And so the band’s music was dangerous because of its very harmlessness; its success suggested that rock fans could be swindled or lulled into liking anything, meaning that the genre itself had been rendered obsolete. Nickelback was rock’s black hole.