A Canadian match made in bad-music heaven
By Tim Barnum
News Editor | news@ogemawherald.com
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Congratulations Canada! You have a new celebrity power couple with enough juice that even Americans are taking notice.
The only problem is that the couple is Avril Lavigne and Chad Kroeger.
I’m sure most of you are familiar with these two. Lavigne is the overly spunky, perpetually teenaged punk girl who wears ties with tank tops and spits out cookie-cutter lyrics about the difficulties of high school romance. She’s the pretty wannabe reject whose pop-punk songs are just catchy enough for the top 40 but way too poppy, and too bad, for punk rock fans.
To sum it up, she’s unbearable. Almost as bad as her fiancé, Chad Kroeger.
His evolution into horrendicity (word I just made up: the state of being horrendous) is a little less up front.
Kroeger is the lead singer of Nickelback. To be honest, Nickelback hasn’t always been the rock band most likely to induce in-mouth vomiting, but is approaching close to a decade of holding that title. It started happening around 2003 with the release of The Long Road, where the band’s singles started sounding distinctly familiar to their other singles — a trend they embraced and still run with to this day. While I enjoyed some of these songs the first time around, the rebooted versions weren’t as good.
And, ya know, I could always listen to the original song the new single seemed to carbon copy.
Then in 2005, the boys from the Great White North solidly established themselves as the worst band in the world with the release of All the Right Reasons. This album featured the hits “Photograph” and “Rockstar” — two songs that caused many a jukebox to die an early death via baseball bat. They are the type of songs we hear so often we become numb to them. We hate them so much we don’t even react, we just sit there in a catatonic state, staring blankly until the music stops.
So from now until the wedding day, we should all be prepared for one big, oversized dose of Avrad LaKroeger (that’s my weak attempt at a name mash. Think Benifer or Brangelina). The couple’s every move will no doubt be monitored by TMZ, whose “earth-shattering” stories like “Avrad LaKroeger eat Chinese food” will be picked up and regurgitated by online news sources. None of us will read the drivel, yet we will be bombarded by it against our will.
Canada is so big and it seems like it has so much to offer. Yet for some reason this is the most prolific Canadian story I have heard in a long time. I couldn’t even tell you if a Canadian won a gold medal in the Olympics this year. It’s a shame, isn’t it?
But there is hope. Unlike Hollywood romances that are shoved down our throats, this match seems like it might last. Both artists seem either oblivious or unworried about what fans of music think about them, so they have that in common. It seems this is a power couple that can make it.
Let’s hope so. I’ve heard enough about the engagement. A year’s worth of breakup stories might be too much to handle.