Nickelback

It’s a testament to Nickelback’s unshakeable prominence in pop culture that it is commonly seen (along with Entourage and Miller Lite commercials) as a figurehead of lowest-common-denominator douchebaggery. The truth is that there are bands far worse than Nickelback on modern-rock radio right now. (If you’ve never heard Five Finger Death Punch, keep it that way.) But nobody in the past decade has delivered horndog post-grunge anthems with nearly the commercial effectiveness of these pesky Canadians. It’s Nickelback’s popularity—more than its actual music—that puts the haters off. But as the group’s new album Here And Now shows, that popularity is the result of a carefully orchestrated (and, it must be said, canny) effort to court multiple radio formats. Nickelback might be dumb, but it’s not stupid.

Updated 05/16/2012