Forgotten Art

25/04/2020

You know Nickelback.

I've had a passing relationship with the band, only really hearing one song of theirs, but I know them best for the countless pop culture references about them where they're noted to be just the worst. Every time they're mentioned they're dragged through the mud, their ridiculed, their made fun of, and they're usually declared as one of the worst bands ever. Think Justin Beiber a la early 2010s or anything that becomes extremely popular. Nickelback is that kind of band that only seems to stay relevant because they are hated.

I was wondering the other day why this is. Why is this band still relevant, especially among the people who hate it? Sure, they're still making songs, and sure, they have a loyal following, but there's many artists and shows and other things that aren't so good that still continue with their base intact, but they aren't discussed beyond that base. I share the belief with many others that Supernatural was pretty good for the first five seasons but the following ten seasons were consistently getting worse, but we didn't need to mention it because it wasn't that important.

Somehow, regardless of importance, Nickelback is always relevant and always vehemently hated.

Last week, I made a vlog. Looking back, there's a lot I don't like about it. The editing can be janky. I rarely took a second take of anything. I look a mess. I have no grace. The problem of my massive tongue impeding my ability to talk rears it's ugly head. And the good stuff only comes in for the last ten minutes or so which means most people have tuned out by then, deciding to stop during all the mindless rabble and boring typical vlog stuff. I regret a lot and I don't think it will be good. But I hope it's remembered as one of the worst things in my career.

As I thought about Nickelback, I realised I only knew one of their songs, and then I realised that said song wasn't awful, it wasn't bad, in fact, that shit slapped hard. "Rockstar" by Nickelback is one of the best clearly American songs out there, and there's not a single person I know who heard the start of that song and didn't react in some loving way towards it. That song slaps. How come a band so reviled created such a good song?

That's when I realised the truth about art... I realised the truth about art through Nickelback.

If everything I make from now on is better than that one vlog, then I'm doing good and getting better.

Imagine if the first thing you ever created was the best thing you ever created. You could never make a career out of that. You'd never be able to top it and you'd never improve. It would be much worse if the best thing you did was pretty bad too.

I hope that when people look back on my career, and they rank all my works, that the one vlog I did during lockdown would be considered the worst of them all, because that means everything else would be better.

I don't need to hear the rest of the songs by Nickelback. From what I've heard about them, the other songs are truly hard to listen to and that may be the case, or it may be untrue. Remember, this is down to taste, but I'm going with popular culture and consensus to make this point. If Nickelback truly makes god-awful songs, and yet made one good song, then it makes sense why they're so hated and so relevant all the time.

People, in love with "Rockstar", would rock out when they hear it and would enjoy the hell out of it. Then, they might decide to check out their other songs. Upon this investigation they too would find out how bad the other songs are. From then onward, whenever someone mentions Nickelback, they would recall how awful most of their songs were, and therefore cite them as the worst. It would be consistently on their mind because "Rockstar" is never more than a few months away. Nickelback is always relevant again when their one good, great song is played.

As time goes on, we will always remember Nickelback through "Rockstar", and since we have the internet, and since they are still making songs to this day, we can always simply search them up and discover their other songs. They are remembered because of their good art.

Now think back to all the great artists of the past; Leonardo da Vinci, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Orson Welles, Pablo Picasso. They are remembered for their good art, but due to their time periods, saving the bad art, or allowing them to have enough freedom and funding to create bad art, would have been a terrible idea, and so they are only remembered for the noteworthy things they've done. Nowadays when we create something, it's there for everyone to see and anyone can find it in an instant, and so we become almost inseparable from our less favourable moments.

Let's not forget the tools afforded to us. In Orson Welles time, you couldn't just make a movie if you wanted to. You would have to prove that what you could make would be good. You had to have experience and respect and talent the luck of being a white man, and then you would be afforded the opportunity to make your own movie.

Cut to a few decades later when getting a camera was far easier, there was the boom in schlock B-movies that sucked ass. In the fifties and sixties people said that the standard for movies were getting worse but it was actually just the fact that more people could make movies and so you didn't have to be the best there is to be afforded the opportunity.

Cut to more decades later and most movies from the nineties through to even today are awful and yet had massive budgets and that's because it has become so much easier to make them. Not only that, but the techniques that were groundbreaking in Orson Welles time and that could only be done by the best of the best were now extremely easy and cheap, and so these movies are seen more often because they employ better tricks, despite being much worse. More people these days have probably seen a terrible Adam Sandler movie than Citizen Kane.

So nowadays we have people commenting on how low the standards of art has become, when, in fact, everyone has the opportunity to make art and the field is so wide that you can never narrow it down. There's probably more amazing TikToks out there that there have been good films in the past century, but that's because it's easier to make TikToks and for every one good TikTok there's likely a thousand terrible ones.

Art is a fickle thing.

It's so over saturated that it's extremely easy to find the bad and quite difficult to find the good, and that can tarnish our views on it. For every one "Rockstar", there's the rest of Nickelback's discography. So don't worry about making bad art.

If history proves right then all the less notable or poorer quality things will fade away into obscurity.

If Nickelback proves right then all it takes is one good thing that'll make you live in infamy.

There's probably a more succinct or more wholesome message in here, I swear I had one. I likely expanded more than I should have, I keep doing that. Anyways, "Rockstar" kicks ass and I will fight anyone who says otherwise.

Love you all xX