Figured You Out Any band that derives its name from a lack of ability to enunciate properly shouldn’t be allowed to succeed. So why is Nickelback so popular these days?
Moreover, how exactly does Nickelback’s puerile frat-boy whining pass as actual music? Lead singer Chad Kroeger is little more than a poodle-haired, under-informed misogynist with a rhyming dictionary. But since he can also play three chords on his guitar, and has mastered the difficult songwriting concept of verse/chorus/verse, he is now a valid “musician,” and may vent the latent hatred he feels toward his mother on a hugely apathetic public, who will sing along to whatever terrifyingly mediocre Nickelback single is on rotation this month.
Nickelback’s most popular songs, “How You Remind Me,” “Feeling Way Too Damn Good,” and the most odious of the bunch, “Figured You Out,” are each blights on the world of music in their own special way.
“How You Remind Me” is the song that launched Nickelback as a household-name band. Nickelback had previous smaller hits on rock stations, but this song became a favorite on adult-oriented modern rock stations, pop stations, and rock stations alike. As I stated previously, I am completely befuddled by Nickelback’s success, and my feelings towards this song embody my feelings toward the unfortunate phenomenon of Nickelback's popularity, because if you actually stop and listen to the lyrics of “How You Remind Me,” they make absolutely no sense.
I respect the readers of AvoidPeril too much to go into a line-by-line analysis of such awful lyrics, but here are a few snippets of the nonsensical verses:
Example 1: Never made it as a wise man / Couldn’t cut it as a poor man stealing / And this is how you remind me / This is how you remind me of what I really am
Example 2: I’ve been wrong / I’ve been down / Been to the bottom of every bottle / These five words in my head / Scream “Are we having fun yet?” / (Repeat “yet” ad infinitum)
Uh huh. Well, Mr. Kroeger never made it as a wise man (can I get a “duh” from the crowd?), and he certainly couldn’t cut it as a thieving poor man. Okay, I’ll accept that. But how, precisely, does this unnamed “you” use these facts to remind him “of who [he] really [is]?” There is no instance where Mr. Kroeger gives his audience any indication of who he “really” is, never mind how his own realization of his inadequacies enables someone else to remind him of his identity.
In Example 2, Mr. Kroeger again starts off in a fairly lucid fashion (and when I say ‘fairly lucid,’ I do mean ‘predictably banal and pedestrian’), and then delves into the language of the utterly silly and hideously grammatically incorrect – the five words in his head are screaming? I realize that the phrase “Are we having fun yet?” is five words long, but the structure of the line implies that the words are screaming. Never mind the fact that there is no frame of reference as to whom or what might constitute the “we” who are “not having fun yet.” However, I can fully and readily accept Mr. Kroeger’s admission that he has “been to the bottom of every bottle,” as I would hope that no one would write this trash when sober.
The verdict? Nonsensical, tuneless and repetitive. “Feeling Way Too Damn Good” does not merit any dissection of its lyrics, as they merely outline a variation of Murphy’s Law (“Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong”) by declaring that “Something’s gotta go wrong / ‘Cause I’m feeling way too damn good.” While I fully agree that someone as full of themselves as Mr. Kroeger appears to be should find that things go wrong for them as often as possible, it makes my head spin that someone actually took the time to write a “song” about this superstition.
The verdict? Pointless, tuneless and repetitive.
Nickelback suffer from an innumerable amount of things – musicians whose lack of talent is far more noticeable than any approximation of talent, a lead singer whose voice is tuneless and grating, an apparent goal to sound as repetitive as possible during each song, and lyrics that gives new meaning to the word hackneyed. I would have been content to ignore them if they were guilty of nothing but these offenses, because God knows that there are enough bands that embody these selfsame qualities, but then they had to go and write “Figured You Out.”
“Figured You Out” is a vile, degrading song that has “angry frat boy anthem” written all over it. At its most basic, the song is about a sex-crazed, drug-addled girl that Mr. Kroeger loves and hates in equal measure. By giving his audience examples of this girl’s behavior and noting his emotional reactions it, we (the audience) are to assume that Mr. Kroeger has “figured [her] out.”
First, as one might expect, this song (all together now) makes no sense. Though it is all well and good for Mr. Kroeger to assert that he has figured this girl out, he gives no evidence or assessment as to what conclusions he has come to.
This song is not entirely a waste, however, as through a careful reading of the lyrics to “Figured You Out,” I have been able to figure some things out about Mr. Kroeger.
1) Mr. Kroeger is a misogynist. In his own lyrics, Mr. Kroeger states that: - “I like your pants around your feet - “I love the way you can’t say no - “I love your lack of self-respect
Without too much thought or effort, the listener can gather the following points from the above lyrics:
- Mr. Kroeger enjoys coercing submissive females into the woods to perform sex acts that are not in and of themselves dirty, but when filtered through Mr. Kroeger’s skewered perception, become degrading and shameful.
- Mr. Kroeger enjoys watching this girl succumb to her debilitating drug addiction.
- Mr. Kroeger enjoys it when this girl displays a total lack of
self-respect, allowing him to engage her in the aforementioned activities,
leading to her passing out because of over-intoxication.
2) Mr. Kroeger has psychological problems.
First and foremost, Mr. Kroeger has an awful lot of not-so-latent hatred towards his mother. Obviously, he has never passed through the stages of separation from the maternal figure (as delineated and explained by psychoanalysts from Freud to Jacques Lacan), and this has left him with a childish love/hate relationship with his mother, which demonstrates itself through his sexual relationships with other women.
In this song, Mr. Kroeger begins by saying that he “likes” the self-destructive behavior displayed by this woman – and then he turns around and states that he “hates” each of these selfsame behaviors. So in addition to having a dangerous psychosis about women, he is also apparently schizophrenic.
3) Grammatical skills and any level of linear storytelling are beyond Mr. Kroeger.
As I’ve stated many times through this article, these songs make absolutely no sense.
In “Figured You Out,” Mr. Kroeger effectively figures nothing out. He demonstrates his psychosis quite effectively by declaring his love and hate of this woman, but his song comes to no discernable conclusions about anything. The listener never learns exactly what he has figured out. “Figured You Out” is a contextual nightmare, full of non-sequitors and lyrics that seem like half-assed fortune cookies strung together with no rhyme or reason.
Case in point:
“And now I know who you are
I am not an advocate of forced rhyming in songs, but you would assume that a song by such a throwaway group as Nickelback would at least rhyme. Apparently they can’t even muster up the energy to adhere to a rhyme scheme. Without regard to the lack of structure of this snippet of the song, I don’t even know where to begin. The lyrics are simply awful. They are nonsensical, unstructured, and come to no point or conclusion. It’s like reading the work of a child who copied random phrases from the diary of a sociopathic, mentally underdeveloped thirteen year-old.
So why do I hate Nickelback?
Because they write boring, banal songs that make no sense.
Because they are cocky, and have absolutely no right to be.
Because, in the end, they are insipid, derogatory, charmless and insulting to anyone with a modicum of intelligence.
-- Jessica Netishen 8/13/04 |
