Nickelback
While Coldplay might claim they’ve made peace with being an “easy, safe target” for widespread disdain, James Blake has issued a public plea for music-lovers to stop criticizing the band just for the sake of it.
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Blake made his public appeal in a recent discussion with Nick Grimshaw and Annie Macmanus on the BBC Sounds podcast Sidetracked with Annie and Nick. The focus of the conversation turned to a recent Instagram post from The Pretenders’ Chrissie Hynde, in which she spoke about what she feels is and isn’t cool.
As Blake, Grimshaw, and Macmanus continued, they began to ruminate on the definition of cool, how its “hard to be a successful touring cool band,” and the recent comments from Brit Awards host Jack Whitehall, in which he referred to Coldplay as a “public school Nickelback.”
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“Coldplay bashing has got to stop,” Blake chimed in. “It’s not cool anymore! It’s not cool anymore to just be like ‘Coldplay’s not cool.’ Just f–k off,” he said. “There are so many amazing Coldplay songs. And Chris Martin is clearly a melodic genius.”
“[If] you don’t like the sound of their last few records, OK. When you go and see them at Glastonbury, did you like a lot of the songs? Probably,” he continued. “Maybe the band changed the way they dressed? Are we not allowed to change the way we dress? Are we not allowed to bloody write songs in a different genre? Like, who cares, man? I get really a bit irate about this!”
While bands such as Coldplay and Nickelback have indeed become something of a lightning rod for public scorn over the years (the were themselves the subject of a 2023 documentary Hate to Love: Nickelback), Martin indicated to Rolling Stone in 2024 that he’s at peace with where the band find themselves in terms of public opinion and expectations.
“There’ve been times where we [were like], ‘Well, we should probably try and look a bit like this or talk a bit like that,’” Martin explained. “And now, it’s just like, ‘No.’ Just follow whatever’s being sent. And that’s a very liberating place to be.
“If you want a puppet to sing a bit of a song, well, some people might not like this — my mum being one of them, for example. But my point is, that’s part of my journey to be like, ‘Well, I love you, and this is what we’re doing.’”
Despite any of the criticism that Coldplay attracts, their successes seem to tell a different story about what the public think of them. In January, their Indian debut broke the record for the largest-ever stadium shows of the 21st century. A two-night stint at the Narendra Modi Stadium in Ahmedabad, Gujarat saw them perform for 111,581 fans at the first show and 111,989 fans per night at the second, totaling more than 223,000 fans across the two nights.
As of mid-December, Coldplay had sold more than 100,000 tickets on over half the stops of their Music of the Spheres World Tour and grossed a total of $1.14 billion.
A federal judge on Thursday dismissed a copyright lawsuit claiming Nickelback ripped off its 2006 hit “Rockstar” from an earlier song called “Rock Star.”
Adopting recommendations from a lower judge, U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman ruled that there was zero evidence that Chad Kroeger and the other members of the 2000s rock band ever heard Kirk Johnston’s earlier song – and that the two songs also just didn’t share much overlap.
“Stated simply, they do not sound alike,” the judge wrote in the order adopted Thursday. “Where both songs evoke similar themes, they are rendered dissimilar through the vivid detail of the original expression in Nickelback’s lyrics.”
Johnston, the lead singer of a Texas band called Snowblind Revival, claimed the two songs shared many closely-related lyrics, about rock star lifestyles, making huge amounts of money, and having famous friends. But Thursday’s ruling said that after a review of the lyrics, that accusation at times “borders on the absurd.”
“This includes, for example, any suggestion that the two baseball analogies in Nickelback’s work are evidence that the band copied Johnston’s lyric ‘might buy the Cowboys’ professional football team simply because both are ‘references to sports’,” Judge Pitman wrote.
The only real similarities between the two songs, the judge wrote, were basic cliches — “outlandish stereotypes and images associated with being a huge, famous, rock star” – that cannot be monopolized by any one songwriter.
The judge specifically pointed to a study that reported 17 other popular songs that had shared similar themes about rock stars, ranging from “So You Want To Be A Rock And Roll Star” by The Byrds in 1966 to “Rockstar” by Poison in 2001.
Attorneys for both sides did not immediately return requests for comment on the decision.
Released on Nickelback’s 2005 album All the Right Reasons, “Rockstar” has not aged well with critics. In 2008, the Guardian said the song “makes literally no sense and is the worst thing of all time.” In 2012, Buzzfeed listed it as the second-worst song ever written, citing it as an example of “why everyone hates Nickelback so much.” But the song was a commercial hit, eventually reaching No. 6 on the Hot 100 in September 2007 and ultimately spending nearly a year on the chart.
Johnston sued in May 2020, claiming the hit song had stolen “substantial portions” of his own “Rock Star,” including the “tempo, song form, melodic structure, harmonic structures, and lyrical themes.”
But in Thursday’s ruling, Judge Pitman said Johnson had failed to show that Nickelback had “access” to his song in order to copy it – a key requirement in any copyright lawsuit. He argued that his band Snowblind Revival had performed at the same venue as Nickelback, but the judge said that was not enough.
“Johnston has presented no probative evidence that defendants had a reasonable opportunity to hear plaintiff’s work.
Without proof that Kroeger or anyone else heard the song, Johnston would have needed to prove that the songs were almost identical – “strikingly similar” in copyright law parlance. And Judge Pitman said he fell very far short of that.
“The Court has conducted a side-by-side examination of the works, carefully listening to and considering all versions of the songs of record,” the judge wrote. “As an ‘ordinary listener,’ the court concludes that a layman would not consider the songs or even their ‘hooks’ to be strikingly similar.”
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