Nickelback – ‘How You Remind Me’

13 April 2002

I’m sure that if you took a random selection of people and asked them if Nickelback’s ‘How You Remind Me’ is good or bad, they’d all say it’s bad. Its badness was apparent even in 2002. And yet Nickelback with this song spent three months in Ireland’s top ten, including five weeks as our number one. Even worse, they kept the Sugababes’ patently better ‘Freak Like Me’—one of the best singles of the decade—off the Irish top spot. But as I’ve said here before, a number one is a measure of quantity, not quality.

So, does Nickelback’s ‘How You Remind Me’ have any quality? Yeah, right. It’s a turgid hard-rock ballad in which some sad sack of a guy unleashes his male pattern whinging at whatever woman came to her senses and passed this loser like a hot gallstone. Post-grunge Phil Collins, we can call it, and there’s always an unfortunate rump of assholes to lap up the latest variant of Phil Collins-ism. As to why exactly this overheated diarrhoea bubbled up to mainstream hit status (and number one in the US, Ireland, Austria, and Denmark) I suspect a misplaced ironic or kitsch fondness. Look: ‘Total Eclipse Of The Heart’ gets a kitsch pass because its wild-eyed OTT-ness is at least enjoyably daft. But ‘How You Remind Me’ is completely humourless: the song and its nasty video (below) are four dour minutes of earnest, embittered misogyny. Just because something is bad, that doesn’t always mean it’s ironically good. Are we having fun yet?