TNL

We Must Stand Together by Nickelback

Nickelback and Maroon 5 each appear to have a contract with the devil of pop.  They have abandoned the authenticity of their rock origins and sold their soul to the bank of easy-pop or the easy bank of pop.  You might even say Chad Kroeger, vocalist of Nickelback, can't sell pop loyalty with his gutteral rock vocals.  But the band adds a few guitar riffs on their songs to seemingly justify their  Kroeger factor.  While Kroeger continues to sport silky blond highlights to justify his pop image.

And now they've come up with another half way pop, half way rock song.  Packed with a lot of pop yeah yeah yeahs, pop drum beat and pop melody, and infused with a rock riff, rock vocals, the band recently released We Must Stand Together, taken off the upcoming album Here and Now.

The song is, as the name suggests, an appeal for solidarity, because, 'That's that's that's when we all win'! Lyricallly the song, is probably a message that we should never tire hearing, as Kroeger sings, 'When we could feed a starving world, with what we throw away, but all we serve are empty words, that always taste the same.'

The song however was easier to write than the follow up party anthem, Bottoms Up.  Bottoms Up is a song that doesnt stray in content from it's title, and will teach you that a Black Tooth Grin is not just Pirates of the Carribean talk.  The reason party messages are apparently harder for Nickelback to write about is because apparently they believe the party songs, just got to make you want to oblige the lyrical content.

In a recent interview Kroeger said, '...it's harder to write those songs than it is to write those social-awareness type songs, it really is,...Because for us, they've got to be good. Some of the stuff's got to be a little tongue-in-cheek, there's got to be some clever stuff there, you know, and you've got to be descriptive. But when you get done listening to it, you need to have the feeling of just wanting to (party). And I think we got there, because we'd bring friends over all the time and it was just like, 'You are now a test subject! Hit play; turn it up nice and loud.' And the song's over and they'd be like, 'I want to...and we were like 'Yes!' "

So does that mean that it's more important to make sure that people feel inclined to party after a song than inclined to change for the better after a song?  Is Nickelback conceding what no one else dared say out aloud before...that if nobody changed for the better after John Lennon's Imagine or Michael Jackson's Man in the Mirror, a radio friendly song will never save the world?