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Nirvana’s Krist Novoselic Defends Nickelback’s Honor Against Fox News

Krist Novoselic and Chad Kroeger

Nirvana‘s Krist Novoselic is valiantly defending Nickelback‘s honor in the face of a shameless Fox News hit job.

Novoselic’s spirited defense comes after President Donald Trump tweeted a meme derived from the Nickelback video “Photograph” to justify trying to get the president of Ukraine to dig up dirt on Hunter Biden, the son of political rival Joe Biden. The video has since been pulled due to copyright infringement.

However, the clip Novoselic is reacting to originally aired on Fox News in March, and features Fox News editor Chris Stirewalt doing a strained comedy routine of why the Canadian post-grunge band is like the scourge of socialism. The segment was inspired by a debate over the merits of Nickelback on the House floor when GOP Rep. Rodney Davis erroneously defended them as one of the great bands of the ’90s. The old clip was shared on October 2 by writer Parker Molloy, and was noticed by a decidedly irked Novoselic.

“Nickelback is like socialism,” Stirewalt said in the clip Molloy shared. “Our generation and prior generations fought hard against the scourge of Nickelback and to show what the dangers are of emo-pop ballad ’90s rock.”

It’s impressive how many things Stirewalt got wrong while doing his comedy routine. For example, the butt rock band from the Great White North are neither emo nor pop balladeers. Plus, they didn’t have hits until the aughts. Let’s not even get into the fact that hating on Nickelback is a stale, hack comedy premise.

Novoselic had some thoughts about how Stirewalt classified the much maligned Canadian rockers.

“Who is this jerk? Nickelback is a is power pop rock band & I love them!!!! They are Canadian BTW,” Novoselic tweeted. “The USA can work well because of the uneasy marriage between socialism and capitalism here. There is push and pull—so be weary of those on the fringe advocating one way or another.”

Novoselic used four (!) exclamation points to denote his love of Nickelback. That’s serious business. As for Stirewalt, perhaps he missed the story where Slipknot’s Corey Taylor crowned Imagine Dragons as the new worst band in rock. He might want to update all of his hack comedy bits accordingly.