The Nickelback Phenomenon

A wonderful little slice of hilarity popped up on my Facebook feed today, posted by one of those hundreds of friends that we have on the deliciously creepy social media site that we met once and never had the time or inclination to talk to again. But inspiration for blogging comes from the most unexpected sources...
The post simply said, "Check this out everyone!" with a link that posed the question: Is Nickelback the worst band ever?
When it comes to rock n' roll, music released that I like decreases dramatically after 1995 or so. Naturally, I was curious to see how the website creators would go about answering this question, that many have apparently posed. I won't spoil the surprise, click for yourself and see.
It makes one wonder... What is it about Nickelback? Every band has its fans and haters, but the ever-burgeoning anti-Nickelback camp is truly formidable, and is maybe Naturally every band has its fans and haters, but the anti-Nickelback camp is truly formidable, and might be even stronger (or at least better with social networking and the Internet) than their Kroger-loving counterparts.
I'm just not sure what inspires such passionate hate for the band. A lot of people out there must like them, as they've been making records and appearing on the Billboard 100 charts for several years now. Personally speaking, their music doesn't inspire a need to buy a domain name just so I can tell the citizens of Earth that they're the worst band in their midst. It's relatively homogenous, in other words, like every other popular group, most of their songs sound the same. Nonetheless, I'm not going to write the Grammy committee and insist that Nickelback's absence at the award show was a terrible mistake.
And one hates to even think this, but we know ourselves as Americans... it might just be because they're Canadian.