Rough week for Nickelback fans: First the Canadian rockers were deemed sex repellent in a poll of dating turnoffs, and now fans of the Detroit Lions are trying to prevent the group from playing during the halftime show of the team’s big Thanksgiving game against the Green Bay Packers. According to Yahoo!’s Shutdown Corner, a group of Lions loyalists led by Dennis Guttman have started a petition that argues, “Detroit is home to so many great musicians and they chose Nickelback?!?!?! Does anyone even like Nickelback?” (The answer is yes. Several million people.)
Shutdown Corner informs us this isn’t the first time Nickelback have been shunned at a sporting event. Two Canadian sportswriters protested the band’s appearance at an NHL event in late August, writing, “Please do not sully the celebration with the presence of a band whose existence is antithetical to the very concept of celebration.”
As of press time, the “Replace Nickelback” petition has 23,403 signatures. While some have tried to argue their opposition to Nickelback isn’t taste-related, but a matter of patriotism (why hire a Canadian band to play on a major American holiday?) or local pride (Detroit is the birthplace of Motown), based on the majority of comments associated with the petition, this is indeed mostly a matter of Nickel-hate. As Guttman himself posted three days ago, “Nickelback sucks.”
