Believe it or not, there’s something ridiculous going on on the internet right now. On Facebook, someone started a group called ‘Can this Pickle Get More Fans than Nickelback?’ The group’s concept is pretty self-explanatory: a bunch of people who hate the band Nickelback hoped they could persuade more Facebook users to click the ‘Become a Fan’ button on the ‘Pickle’ Facebook fan page than have clicked the ‘Become a Fan’ button on Nickelback’s official Facebook fan page. Though I also dislike Nickelback’s music, the existence of this group bothers me.
I have to say that, as far as comedy goes, this was a pretty lame idea.
I used to have a really awful job in which I had to talk to people from all over the country about problems they were having with their cell phones. While performing call-backs, I noticed a trend: people who lived in rural areas of Oklahoma and Arkansas were far more likely to have Nickelback songs set as “Answer Tones” on their phones. This is predictable; Nickelback’s music sounds like southern rock, so it stands to reason that their songs would be more popular in southern, rural areas of the United States.
It also stands to reason that rural, southern areas of the United States would have a lower concentration of people who own computers, and thus, there are probably proportionately fewer Facebook users in certain parts of Oklahoma and Arkansas than there are in, says, Portland, OR, a city that I imagine is not very Nickelback friendly.
My point is, creating a Facebook group in order to prove that a large number of computer users dislike Nickelback is kind of like listening to a middle-class, college educated, liberal person talk about how much they hate Nascar. My reaction is, “Duh! Of course you wouldn’t be interested in that. Where is the joke?”
Maybe I’m just bitter. Though I find Nickelback’s music bland, I don’t find it nearly as screamingly, god-awful unlistenable as the music of, say, Kid Rock. So, if people are going to go to elaborate lengths to diss a rock artists, their tastes should at least be aligned with my own.
-Warren
