Aspirational Living

It's Thanksgiving. You are in your home town. You are at a bar. Every time you have been to this bar it feels like karaoke night, though the bar does not bill itself as a karaoke bar. You are impressed by a woman in her 50s who rocks "Take Another Little Piece of My Heart" in a sort of Aretha/Janis hybrid. She looks like the secretary who worked in your middle school principal's office.

Then, this next one drops and it's impossible to tell who's supposed to the official karaoke champ because the whole place loses it. Everyone is singing every word. You see one couple actually mouth the chorus to each other in a manner that suggests they have done it many, many times before. You are baffled because you consider yourself a lover of pop music, but you have never heard this song before...



"That's curious," you think, and make some joke about not knowing that Saliva or Puddle of Mudd or whoever was still making music. You go back to your aluminum Bud Light bottle and the story about your friend and the cute Spanish teacher that one summer after graduation.

A few months later, you're spending more time in the '97 Volvo than you have in a while (what with the MetroCard and oil crisis and all) and you cannot escape this song on the FM dial. One morning, on the way to cop your grande Yukon Blend, it hits you. This thing stands at the perfect intersection of, like, 18 different genres of very popular, very American music. You realize that Nickelback is Canadian. You press on, undaunted.

Conversational Nashville tone? Check. Pull myself up out of the hood luxury living speak? Check. Classic rock sound? Check. An inexplicable reference to quesadillas spoken by what sounds like Satan? Check.

What hath you wrought, MuzikMafia?

For a moment there, you think you are brilliant. Only when you get home and fire up GooTube, you discover that Nickelback and their video direction team totally knew what they were doing. The video for the song says it pretty well: lots of people spanning lots of different demographics -- from the Great One to noted high school fantasy Eliza Dushku -- seem to like Nickelback a lot.

Only, wait. You're not sure you get it. The song seems to be snidely acknowledging the absurdity of the lifestyle that it speaks of. But the video sort of celebrates it:

"You're fine by us, Dale Jr.; you got rich but you keep it real."

"Stars, yo, they're just like us."

Is this the new populism?

You begin to see why it is, exactly, that Big John Edwards has been having a rough go of it so far in 2008.