The first time I interviewed Chad Kroeger was in 1999, when Nickelback were at that point beginning to gain popularity outside Vancouver, and he almost immediately got angry at me.
"I hate being called grunge. Grunge! Grunge! Grunge!," he yelled after I dared to use the genre name to describe their sound. "Because grunge is f---ing dead and if people call your band dead, then you're not going anywhere, right? But you're going to use it even if I ask you not to, it won't matter."
So let's just say that Kroeger has had a hate-hate relationship with music critics since day one. But the singer does love one thing about all the animosity, which most recently reared its head with a crowdfunding effort to prevent the band from performing in London, England.
"All these critics, they're just tireless," Kroeger said to Pulse of the Radio. "They keep ragging on the band. If they had stopped writing all this stuff about us, there would be no controversy left in the band and we probably would have died out years ago.
"They don't know that they're still responsible for us being around today."
And so it seems we only have ourselves to blame for the new Nickelback album coming next month.
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