Nickelback — How You Remind Me
The opening growl — 'Never made it as a wise man' — that became the sound of 2001, and the song that proved Nickelback were simultaneously the internet's favorite punching bag and the actual soundtrack to the decade. Mathematically the most-played song of the 2000s on US radio, and everyone hated it, and everyone still knows every word.
Chad Kroeger said he fleshed out 'How You Remind Me' — lyrics, melody, chords, the whole nine yards — in somewhere between 45 minutes and an hour. Released July 17, 2001, as the lead single from Silver Side Up, it took a band of Canadian bar-rock journeymen and made them, almost overnight, the biggest rock act on American radio.
And everywhere they were. The song reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 (the band's only chart-topper), got nominated for Record of the Year at the 2003 Grammys, and then proceeded to be played 1.2 million times on US radio by 2010 — making it the most-played song of the entire decade. Billboard ranked it No. 4 on their decade-end Hot 100 chart. By the numbers, 'How You Remind Me' didn't just dominate the 2000s; it *defined* the 2000s.
Except the culture had decided, somewhere along the way, that liking it was not allowed. Nickelback became the butt of a joke that never quite ended — the internet's designated worst band, the name you invoked to end an argument about music. Critics called the song's grunge moves recycled and its heartbreak formulaic, engineered for maximum radio play. And maybe it was — but that opening growl of 'Never made it as a wise man' is instant 2001, and the chorus lives rent-free in a hundred million heads that never once chose to put it there.
And yet it *was* the sound of the 2000s, whether anyone wanted to admit it or not. Mocked and massive at once — that's what 'How You Remind Me' was. It's the perfect emblem of the decade: hugely successful, widely despised, and impossible to escape.
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