Nickelback is band that is a victim of the internet's habit of taking easy jokes and magnifying them to a ridiculous degree. In my mind, Dave Matthews Band should have been the big punchline band of the 00s, but for some reason Nickelback became the group that morning zoo hosts and similar people globbed onto for easy jokes. Actually, could you imagine if DMB was that band? Oh wow, I'm getting excited just thinking about it. But I digress.
I don't know a lot about Nickelback, but the one thing I do know is "Photograph", their 2005 song that has spawned many memes and parodies. So let's take a look at the video, directed by Nigel Dick.
A little background is necessary for this video - Nickelback are from Hanna, Alberta, Canada. It's a very small town very (very) far away from any major centers of Canada, but closest city to it is Calgary. Nickelback definitely has some small town credentials. Here's a map for reference.
The song itself is about remembering things via a photograph and then saying very specific things about that photograph, so the song already seems to have some sort of visuals in mind. For instance, at one point Chad Kroeger sings "this is where I went to school", and in the video we see Chad Kroeger and the rest of Nickelback walking into Hanna High School. The list of alternative concepts for this video is not very long - it's a very specific song and so is the video. They then play an impromtu performance in the high school gym before the rest of the video rolls out some more memories and places in Hanna.
The most famous shot in this music video is definitely the first one, where Chad Kroeger holds up an actual photograph of him and their producer Joey Moi (with something on his head, no less). This image was practically begging to be messed with, and sure enough, there used to be a website (look-at-this-photograph.com) where you could put an image of your own in the frame Kroeger is holding and get a little video of him singing "look at this photograph" to share. Here's one with a cat:
The funny thing is, that website sprang up in 2012 - 7 years after the video initially came out. It's the same deal with CollegeHumor's "Look at this Instagram" parody, which came out in 2012 as well:
While a lot of the second half of this video is nowhere near as memorable as the first few shots, Nickelback and Nigel Dick managed to create something that continues to be prime parody fodder, and that's not really something that happens with terrible, forgettable music videos. Something about Nickelback (and espcially this song and video) compels people to revisit it.
One thing I do like about this video is that it manages to feature a band revisiting their old high school and still stay away from the extremely tired theme of someone who turned out cool dumping on their school in a bitter way. The song is partially responsible for this as it never enters into that territory, but in the video they treat their old town with a sort of reverence that is a lot more interesting than them coming back to Hanna, Alberta to scoff at it because they became a big time band.
While I have your attention, though, if we could start replacing Nickelback hate with Dave Matthews Band hate, I think that would work out a lot better for everyone.
