Bands critics love to hate keep cashing in

Advertisements, music reviews and fashion trends tell us that “cool” is an edgy rapper, an up-and-coming hipster band or a British chanteuse like Amy Winehouse. Cool is not Nickelback or the Black Eyed Peas. They’re not so uncool that they’re cool, like Fountains of Wayne.

They’re just, in a word, uncool.

Chris St. Peter, 26, of New York, witnessed this hatred years ago at a concert in Boston, where Nickelback was opening for another band in front of an indie-rock crowd.

“They threw batteries at them, which is also terrible but also really funny,” St. Peter said. “Nickelback represented everything I think they hated.”

Though he didn’t hurl any batteries, St. Peter gives the band a thumbs-down. “I hope they go the same way as, like, Creed, and they just sort of disappear.”

But for every hater there’s a lover like Jaclyn Hafenstein, 30, from Madison, Wis. “Don’t they trash them because their music is considered simple, not unique?” she wrote in an e-mail to The Associated Press. “Why is that bad? Whatever it (is) they’re doing, it makes me bob my head and sing along! I can’t say that for every band, whether I like them or not.”

Often, bands that are popular in places like Wisconsin get dissed by snobs on the coasts. “There’s a real danger with ... writers being in their kind of music-critic clique, you know, in either New York or L.A. or San Francisco, and kind of ignoring these bands just because all the critics they know and all the kind of so-called cool kids are ignoring these bands,” Brackett said.

He points out that classic acts like Led Zeppelin, the Doors and Billy Joel were at first ignored by critics. Then again, he said, “there are a lot of times when music critics are right.”

Acts hoping to collect both money and respect would do well to study an It band like Fall Out Boy, which sells heaps of records to teen girls while delighting the critics too. They don’t take themselves too seriously, unlike, say, the Killers in their latest incarnation or — again — Nickelback.

It all comes back to Nickelback, doesn’t it? At least they’re now big enough to headline their own shows, and that means no batteries will be hurled.

Only verbal ones, from outside the venue.

“You know, you have to be really popular in order to corral that sort of hatred,” Marks said. “It’s the best ballplayer on the visiting team who gets booed during the introductions. No one boos the guy off the bench, but you always boo the star of the other team. You know, it is a tribute to their success.”

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