<div style='font: 11pt arial; text-align: left; '>Because their songs are bland, uninteresting, and unoriginal. Their lyrics are cliche, predictable, and unmoving. Their music is far from influential and in time they will amount to little more than a blip in the history of rock. They are just so much white noise on the radio along with all the other faux-neo-grunge crap like Staind, 3 Days' Grace, 3 Doors Down, etc., etc., etc. They are mediocre, Q.E.D. And, like I said, I don't hate them. They're legitimate argists doing the best they can to make it and they've gained some popular appeal (though they've done this mainly by riding on the wave of the neo-grunge trend), but it doesn't make them a great band by any means.
What you are refusing to understand (and you have to be refusing to understand it, because it's such an obvious concept that I feel like a fucking idiot just having to point it out) is that popularity (and especially marketable success) doesn't make greatness in art. In fact, it's often the opposite. The fact that Jimi Hendrix is one of the founding father's of modern rock, yet the only time he ever hit the pop charts was with a Bob Dylan cover should be more than enough to illustrate that. Truly great art challenges the listener, it creates elements that are surprising and unpredictable, and it often forces us to redefine the way we think about music.
These aspects aren't <I>necessarily</i> mutually exclusive with popular appeal, of course (see Modest Mouse's latest), and I think some of the greatest musical accomplishments are when a band can make complex and challenging music that is still highly accessible to a large audience. However, what record companies are usually looking for is stuff that isn't challenging or complex, but rather, what they can turn into an easily marketable commodity. Songs that people can get into without thinking too much about what makes them "good" songs. Music that reinforces current trends and common conceptions rather than attempting to challenge or transcend them. You don't need to be Freud to understand this concept. The popularity of a band like Nickleback is based on the fact that their songs are easy to "get into" and don't require any further contemplation or appreciation. They sound like the other bands that people nowadays are into. If you give people a choice between something that's easy and that doesn't require much thought, versus something challenging that forces them to question long held beliefs, generally more people are going to choose the former than the latter. It's not because people are "stupid" or anything like that, it's just the path of least resistance. Mediocrity thrives in the path of least resistance, but great art has nothing to do with it.</div>
[b]Sorry, it looks like I'm going to have to kill you in an instant.[/b]
