Is Coldplay the internet’s new Nickelback?
Coldplay was the old Nickelback. That said, I still dig Coldplay’s old stuff.
Yeah their old stuff was actually decent. Their new songs are absolute generic bullshit.
You are my universe and I just want to put you first
It sounds like it was written for the parody boy band from Bob’s Burgers, Boyz 4 Now.
Coldplay was an adult contemporary with top 40 cross over appeal, while Nickelback was a hard rock act with top 40 cross over appeal.
Coldplay and Maroon 5 are closer comparisons here.
“Hard Rock” means corporate Pearl Jam ripoff now.
I feel like people who don’t have memories of the 90s miss this. Rock music in the late 80s and into the late 90s was in a Renaissance, and then Clearchannel killed Kurt Kobain, bought out the Chili Peppers and rammed a dozen Nickelback clones down our throats instead.
While I’m not a fan, i think some people actually like Nickelback which is a step up from imagine dragons.
I might regret admitting this, but I like Nickelback and Imagine Dragons. Maybe it helps that I don’t listen much to the radio anymore.
I also liked Smash Mouth until they played at that biker event during covid, the one after which cases exploded all over the US. Though in hindsight, it was probably inevitable that it would happen at some point anyways, so I don’t feel as strongly about it now as I did back then because I still do like a lot of their songs, including All Star.
And I’ve come to realize that it’s better to define your music tastes by what you like rather than what you hate. Having strong feelings of hatred just means you’ll have a bad time if you randomly hear a song. I try to let me music tastes bottom out at mild disdain these days, like “I’d rather hear something else but it’s no big deal.”
Though some of the songs on Beat Saber are difficult to tolerate. I forget which collection it is, but one of them seems to have a theme of using unpleasant noises to make music. I don’t enjoy it but also wonder if that’s exactly how previous generations felt about some music I enjoy that they called noise. Out of curiosity, is there anyone who knows the songs I’m talking about that does enjoy listening to them?
I genuinely like Imagine Dragons. I know just one song by Nickelback and I like it a lot.
Coldplay was one of the big popular bands back in the 2000’s, and like any popular band, there were plenty of people eager to prove how cool they were by telling everyone that they hate their music. Social media was starting to get popular at the time, so people would take to Facebook to make their “Coldplay sucks” proclamations. As social media took off, the sentiment kinda got swept up with it, and so now even as Coldplay isn’t anywhere near as relevant as they were back then, it’s still a pretty common thing to see people say they suck online. From what I saw, Nickelback’s wave came afterward, and while that sentiment reached higher popularity in its heyday, it hasn’t stuck around as well.
No, Coldplay was incredibly well liked for close to a decade. The backlash against them really didn’t develop until 2007/2008 when it was discovered they straight up stole a song.
Viva LA Vida was already sort of their abandonment of adult contemporary for a top 40 sound, and of course, it was released when I heart (then clear channel) was shutting down all the adult contemporary stations, so the pivot was going to happen regardless of whether they got caught or not, but it is interesting to note that their top hits since that happened have largely been written by others.
Nowadays, maroon 5 and coldplay are essentially the same band, its just a matter of who pays Max Martin more for the better song at album roll out time.
The public hate definitely got worse in the later 2000’s, but it was definitely still popular among middle/high schoolers to tell everyone they hated songs like Yellow and Fix You to show how “sophisticated” their tastes were. It was the same for any band that got too popular, but I remember that when Facebook opened up to people without .edu emails in 2006 I saw the Coldplay hate all over the place. One of the first online arguments I ever had was because someone said that the song The Scientist sucked, and I was really into it at the time. It’s part of why I chose my username, along with my love of biology.
I feel like this is revisionist. To elder millennials and gen X, basically that entire generation of radio felt like it was formulated to pour salt in our post-grunge wounds, and Coldplay was a particularly visible example of that sanitized, focus grouped corporate influence.
