Grant's Rants
I know the title's trite, but I don't run the site. Sorry.
Who knew the road to Hell was paved with free quesadillas?
So. You’ve heard Rockstar, right? The Nickelback song. Its one of the most popular singles to emerge from the churning abattoir of that has been pop music that last few years. And its at least partially responsible for the continued success of one of the blandest albums of the decade. But I’m not going to talk about the lack of quality in the kids’ music these days, I’m really depressed enough as it is.
What happens when
you won't cut your hair and change your
name
What I brought you all here to talk about is a quandary that has had me stymied, (yay! 500 pretension points for me!) ever since I saw the video for this Lego model of a chart topping hit. And, to be honest, it scared the hell out of me as well. Have the people who are listening to the song and singing along with it, (often screaming the part about wanting to be a big rock star and living in hilltop houses, driving fifteen cars) actually listened to the lyrics they’re so fervently chanting? Do they understand the snarky purpose of the song? Or is the purpose what I really think it is? The way I see it there are three possibilities: the annoying, the horrifying, and the somewhat awesome. Just to keep us all on track, I’ll go in listed order:
Possibility #1, The Annoying:
- Chad Kroeger wrote the lyrics to Rockstar and intended it to mean what it sounds like it means.
This is what is claimed to be established fact. Kroeger writes the songs that make the people dance and wave their little pudgy fists around. And if he truly did write this one, then I would have to begrudgingly grant him +3 respect points (granted, he’s already several thousand in the negative as of press time). After all, here is a song that decries the lifestyle of the successful rock musician as grossly excessive (“...a bathroom I can play baseball in”) while pointing out the obsession of the musician (and the public?) to achieve said lifestyle even at the cost of their own identity and soul (“I’m gonna trade this life for fortune and fame, I’d even cut my hair and change my name”).
Now the lyrics don’t do this in a particularly subtle fashion, but it is done in a fairly sarcastic and venomous way, which, of course, are two qualities which generally deserve applause. And if Kroeger is self-aware enough to actually write a song with this point, he must at least be smart enough to know that his band sucks. And that’s a much higher intellectual peg than I would’ve put him on. This would annoy the hell out of me.
However, a simple flipping through of the lyrics to some other Nickelback songs lends little credibility to this hypothesis. They are, to put it bluntly, positively Fergian. In fact, look no further than one of Nickelback’s more recent hits, “If Everyone Cared”:
If everyone cared and nobody cried
If everyone loved and nobody lied
If everyone shared and swallowed their pride
Then we'd see the day when nobody died
Who’d have thought the key to immortality was so simple? If only we didn’t lie. Of course. Thank you Chad. Thank you so much! You did good. Really good. That’s very deep. Very profound. High five, little buddy.
But playtime’s over now. Now its nap time. No, you can play with your crayons after you get up and have your snack. That’s right, after you have it. Yes. Yes, you’re a big boy! How big? How big? That’s right! That big!