Same essay, Kulak's most unexpected and fascinating observation:
Cast Study 1: “Everybody hates [insert target here]”
The Canadian/Albertan band Nickelback was maybe the biggest Band in the world in the Mid-2000s. Selling more than 50 million albums at the last moment that was really possible. Getting more airplay than a lot of the most famous bands in history… Quite arguably overplayed… But their blend of rock, grunge, metal, and country was inoffensive in basically any market in the world… and wasn’t preaching anything or really trying to offend sensibilities, generate controversy, or grate on anyone (something you can’t say of most genres).
A Band that should have really kind-of disappeared into the background of world music discussion. It had a mall-dad/sports-bar sensibility.
Indeed the origin point of Alberta… The most “Country Music” part of the world that’s not in America was almost certainly part of it’s appeal. A Sub-urban/Ex-Urban/ Rural cultural nowhere that was a bit too obscure to make people arround the world feel it wasn’t their backyard.
And then it became the most hated band in world history.
“Everyone hates Nickleback”. Famously.
There are dozens and dozens of documentaries and video-essays on this specific case study.
Hatred in a way almost no band before or since has ever gotten. And it wasn’t organic.
Legacy Music Magazines, establishment comedians, primetime comedy shows… The Exact same people you now expect to lie about absolutely EVERYTHING. All spontaneously united and in one unanimous voice declared Nickelback the worst thing ever.
This is really weird. This does not happen.
Usually if a band or actor or other entertainment act is hated, it has either had a series of scandals, the core personality has said something about gays or jews, or it actively cultivated the hate as part of it’s brand… like Insane Clown Posse.
That the industry and media would just suddenly turn on a multi-billion-dollar entertainment property organically out of “taste” or “preference”… is basically unheard of for the same reason we’d never expect all the entertainment magazines and media companies to suddenly all speak out in hatred of the Marvel Cinematic Universe with one voice, or all suddenly decide that liking Taylor Swift made you a fat ugly loser.
These are some of the industry’s biggest ticket items, the revenues for the companies are insane, and rocking that boat too hard is going to get your career torpedoed by corporate who probably has relationships with the property you’re damaging.
Someone had to decide this messaging press was going to happen. That someone had to be pretty high up. They had to have more influence than a multibillion dollar entertainment property.
And as soon as you start thinking that big and that influential you have to think political, or national.
But why Nickelback? They aren’t political?
No they’re not. They were merely inoffensively popular. Indeed they didn’t even really have scandals.
The only thing that was going against them was that they were white men. They were heterosexual. And they were Canadian.
This made them perfect for a Psyop weapons test… A sort-of benchmarking exercise for the amount of media messaging and social control that could be effected against the public’s own revealed natural market preference.
Every band is from somewhere, and if you had targeted say The Dropkick Murphys of Boston, or Jimmy Buffet of Florida, you might have stirred up a big hornet’s nest really fast... People are really attached to their hit local bands. It could have political implications. But all of American media targeting Alberta’s biggest success story? Who cares?
Any potential political fallout is contained.
Indeed, when you put it that way, this is one of the few really big bands or properties of any scale you could ever do this to… Do this to Taylor Swift and it might start a gender war. Do this to Jennifer Lopez or Oprah and it might start a race war. Going after Jimmy Buffet might anger Florida enough to swing a presidential election.
But if you needed to test how much buy-in you could get from a Democratic public for pure compliance, off of messaging alone… how easily you could make them hate white men who had done nothing and were otherwise popular, attractive, and embodied a tough rustic spirit… without being attached to any specific region or location.
Nickelback was the perfect contained test target. They had even avoided politicizing themselves.
Indeed reading the Wikipedia page… The big years for Nickelback hate starting were 2010 to 2013… The exact years that SlutWalk, Anita Sarkeesian, and all the early 2010s 4th wave political correctness culture-war maneuvers were being tested in Toronto.