And it was partly a form of denial, since it wasn't just snottyВ critics, as Kroeger suggested, but a good chunk of the population at large, that mocked the band. It was mostly the shrug of the massively successful: the members of Nickelback played to adoring crowds they didn't feel like the most hated band in the world. We sell a lot of records and fill a lot of arenas, and we don't hear many complaints.' This, for many years, was the band's standard response to the invariable questions it received about its unpopular popularity. 'We've never really been a critics' darling or anything like that,' Kroeger told Billboard, in 2011. It was studied hitmaking disguised as mere good times: millions of fans rocked out, while critics smirked at the band's appropriations and responded to Nickelback's gestures toward history by comparing it unfavorably to forty yearsвЂ™ worth of better groups: the group was Pearl Jam without the intelligence, Metallica without the edge, AC/DC without the humor. Nickelback got its start in Alberta, in the mid-nineties, as a cover band, and, in effect, it has always remained one, taking what it liked from different periods of hard rock-grunge guitars, thunking stadium-rock drums, pop-rock hooks, and hair-metal lyrics about sexual and chemical excess-and putting it all behind the signature (and much parodied) low, raspy growl of the lead singer, Chad Kroeger. Billboard named it the top band of the two-thousands, and two of its signature songs, ' How You Remind Me,' from 2001, and ' Photograph,' from 2005, were among the most popular singles of the decade, in any genre. As of 2012, the band had sold more than fifty million albums.

(Howard seemed mostly confused when confronted about it after the game.) As the critic Steven Hyden wrote at Grantland, 'Hating Nickelback is the last form of pop music monoculture.' It is, in other words, the only thing on which music fans can seem to agree.Д®xcept, of course, not everyone thinks that Nickelback is terrible. A few years ago, a protestor in Chicago held up a signВ accusing Mayor Rahm Emanuel of liking Nickelback (Emanuel's spokesman said no way) this summer, an Atlanta Braves fan made a signВ that said the Phillies' Ryan Howard was a fan. (It played anyway.) Earlier this fall, a man from London started a fund-raising campaign to keep the band from touring in the United Kingdom. In 2011, more than fifty thousand people signed an online petition to protest the fact that Nickelback had been hired to play the halftime show at the Detroit Lions' Thanksgiving game. Nickelback is in the news this week because it has just released a new album, but usually the band makes headlines only when it is on the receiving end of some new expression of public disdain. Could all the people who have gleefully insulted Nickelback be the ones who have helped it to endure? Photograph by Buda Mendes/Getty

The state nickelback album cover