Considering: Nickelback's "Silver Side Up" also at twenty years (concluding our september 2001 trilogy)

​This is the one where I try to tell you we were wrong about Nickelback. If you aren’t receptive to that I implore you to keep reading. Twenty years into this century is long enough to draw out a new millennium’s malaise of ironic, self-sabotaging and arbitrary dislike of, well, anything. But perhaps nothing in music world is as universally loathed as Nickelback’s 2001 album Silver Side Up. For the band, it was an exciting and enormous breakout. For fans, it was the very end of their hard rock days, a final rattle before setting into more pop country and southern rock soundscapes on their more insipid, less fun work that is worthy of the disdain. “Photograph”? Garbage. Silver Side Up? Perfect hard rock album. Let’s go.
Despite what all your Tool’s or Smashing Pumpkins might suggest rock doesn’t need to be “smart,” I love Melon Collie as much as your average music fan, but damn, is rock supposed to be difficult? Despite the utterly indifference of a Julian Casablancas with long hair, dark sunglasses and a leather jacket strutting in their neat little outfits, isn’t the point of rock music that shlubby dudes in bad jeans and a ringer t-shirt get to be cool? I don’t want to relitigate Gen X’s war against commercialism but aren’t we, mostly, happy when our rock and roll bands get songs in tv ads? I couldn’t give a shit that The Raconteurs are trying to sell me an electric car, I get to hear “Salute Your Solution” during daytime tv now! Yes, The White Stripes playing little dive bars across the Midwest is more “cool” than seeing an alterative rock radio superstar group play a solid out sporting arena, but wouldn’t you rather riffs bounce off of the widest radius possible before slamming back into your brain? I’ll put it like this: The Beatles don’t make Revolver until they make “Hold Your Hand” first.
And now that I’ve evoked The Beatles I can give our good Canadian friends Nickelback their due. Similar to the lads from Liverpool, Nickelback are four dudes: two brothers Chad and Mike Kroeger (lead guitar and vocals, bass respectively) and two Ryans, Peake (rhythm guitar) and Vikedal (drums). Silver Side Up was their third album and was as inescapable as their massive single, “How You Remind Me,” released in June, ahead of the album’s September 11, 2001 release date.
Its funny to celebrate the milestone this album is crossing, and its even funnier to “celebrate” Nickelback. As the most hated band in rock and roll music, the idea of praise for their last true hard rock record seems as foreign as a time before Chad Kroeger’s weird ramen noodle hair was memed into oblivion. Not for nothing, the gang seems to have a pretty positive attitude about their universal hatred. Before Silver Side Up, they were an indistinguishable hard rock band from Canada. After, they slid into alternative pop country band.
In its moment, Silver Side Up neatly argues against the cool guy garage band rock moment in New York, Detroit, and elsewhere. Similarly, it makes for a nice antithesis to Radiohead’s dour and experimental Kid A/Amnesiac one-two punch. Instead of innovating, or instead of being challenging, Nickelback dared to do something conventional. This is not to say they are in a class of their own, but for every “How You Remind Me” there’s a dozen “Blurry” by Puddle of Mudd or “Wasting My Time” by Default. Both totally forgettable songs compared to what I believe is the single best rock song of the first decade of the new millennium. You know that Elvis album, “10,000 fans can’t be wrong?” “How You Remind Me” sold a million units, and a million people definitely can’t be wrong.
A counter-history on this band and this album is a fool’s errand though: you’ve already decided how you feel, and for better and for worse, Nickelback put the lightening in a bottle and moved on with their ridiculously successful career after Silver Side Up. So much for not making it as a wise man! We, popular culture, have a fixed opinion on this band and I can only suggest you reconsider, and give it a fair shake. There’s ten good rock songs, which is all anybody should expect from a rock record.
For a while, I wondered if sounding like a good rock song was different than being a good rock song. Twenty years with Silver Side Up presents an answer: a hard rock, riff heavy collection of unpretentious songs, made and presented in total earnest is not only the most perfect form of “Dudes Rock,” it is also the most perfect form of how fun, if not a little mindless, rock music can, and should be.
In “Good Times Gone,” the album closer, Kroeger asks, “where the good times gone? / all the stupid fun / and all that shit we’ve done / where the good times gone?” Man, they’re right in front of you. And in an assessment of Nickelback’s legacy (weird sentence to write I know) those good times are both before and ahead of Silver Side Up. The album is six times platinum in the United States. Every album they’ve released since has been huge and somehow, Nickelback still is a pop culture punching bag. I hate to evoke the same argumentative tactics I did in middle school, which coincidently was where I was at in my life when I bought Silver Side Up on CD, but maybe everybody shits on Kroeger and crew because they’re jealous! In “Woke Up This Morning,” which has as good a guitar riff as anything Jimmy Page every played, Nickelback laments: “I’m hating all of this,” and bemoans “I felt like shit when I woke up this morning.”
That song is more than likely another song about a former flame. But, what if the “I” in that song is actually one of Nickelback’s million antagonists preemptively calling the band dead on arrival: “I paid my last respects this morning on an early grave / already said goodbye nothing left to say” is as good a write off as anything else said about this band. Read that way, “Woke Up This Morning” holds a mirror up to the scores of joyless haters. Having to face yourself – “a loser all my life I’m not about to change / if you don’t like it, there’s the door nobody made you stay” – would make me feel like shit too.
This is to say in order to be in favor of Silver Side Up you also have to be against the concept of “guilty pleasures.” “Money Bought” describes a character who “has a toke and makes a joke about the alley man / never pleasured from the treasure in a garbage can.” Maybe its damning by faint praise, but I believe Nickelback dares us to consider the alternative: finding pleasure from “the treasure in the garbage can.” Not that an album peaking at number two (behind friggin’ Jay Z’s The Blueprint) after being released on the literal worst day in modern American history could really be considered garbage or anything.
In Silver Side Up we are given tales of scorned lovers, a ballad about a man who has lost it all, a Johnny Cash-meets-Megadeth domestic abuse revenge fantasy, and the biggest rock song of the 21st century. The songs are good, they come and go, never once outstaying their welcome. There’s a tight cohesion track and track, and the focus – despite the tone of each song – remains steady. These four dudes wanted to make us a rock record and they did exactly that. Who the hell are we to reject that?