Do You Remember: When Avril Lavigne Married the Dude From Nickelback

Two of Canada’s most mocked musicians put a ring on it.

A couple of years ago, I was at the Toronto International Film Festival and I saw the premiere of a documentary about the band Nickelback. It was positioned as a grand welcome home for the Canadian rockers and a chance for them to reclaim the spotlight on their own terms after being so universally hated for close to two decades. Hate to Love: Nickelback was sold in press releases and pre-festival buzz as an exploration of the rock foursome's evolution from worldwide giants to reviled joke. The film didn't do any of that, not really. It's a standard glossed-over music documentary that refuses to delve beneath the surface. It's middlebrow to the nth degree. In short, it's the Nickelback of music documentaries, a joke that almost every critic who saw it at TIFF made in their reviews. As far as I’ve been able to tell, the film has yet to be distributed, locally or otherwise.

(Image via TIFF.)

It was a frustrating watch for me since I was really intrigued by the idea of a deep-dive into the “love to hate” phenomenon and how it applied to a band that I didn’t particularly like but was otherwise nonplussed about. Sure, I hated “Rockstar” (my mum had it as her ringtone for a while, which didn’t help), but “Hero” is fun and I can probably bellow “How You Remind Me” half-decently after a few drinks. But it’s also undeniable that Nickelback were, for quite some time, hated in a way that few famous figures are. It wasn’t just that people didn’t like their music: it’s that they viewed them as the personification of everything that was wrong with popular music. The band was blamed for killing rock radio in the 2000s. Every comedian joked about how they should disappear from the face of the planet. People threw rocks at them during gigs. And, in the middle of this barrage of fury, the band’s lead singer married another popular Canadian of eager cultural mockery.