Band's halftime performance at Lions' annual Thanksgiving game 'is completely unfair' to the team's fans, online petition says.By James Montgomery
Nickelback's Chad Kroeger
Photo: Getty Images
It's not exactly breaking news that Nickelback tend to elicit a certain level of, uh, acrimony from music fans (perhaps they've never heard "Bottoms Up"?), but up until now, we thought they were pretty cool with fans of the Detroit Lions.
Apparently not. Or at least not with Lions backer Dennis Guttman, who has started an online petition asking the team to scrap a planned Nickelback performance during halftime of their annual Thanksgiving game — mostly because, for the first time since the Barry Sanders heyday, the Lions are not abysmally awful (they're 6-2), and their Turkey Day tilt against the undefeated, Super Bowl champion Green Bay Packers will have the eyes of the nation firmly fixed on the Motor City.
"This game is nationally televised; do we really want the rest of the U.S. to associate Detroit with Nickelback?" Guttman wrote. "Detroit is home to so many great musicians and they chose Nickelback?!? ... This is completely unfair to those of us who purchased tickets to the game. At least the people watching at home can mute their TVs. The Lions ought to think about their fans before choosing such an awful band to play at halftime."
To be fair, maybe Aretha Franklin, Bob Seger, Kid Rock, Jack White and/or Ted Nugent passed on the Lions' offer. It's not exactly clear if the team will actually listen to Guttman's plea (a spokesperson for the Lions did not respond to MTV News' request for comment on the matter), though, at press time, more than 35,000 disgruntled fans have signed the petition.
Reps for Nickelback did not respond to MTV News' emails about the petition, though last week, when the band stopped by the newsroom to talk about their upcoming Here and Now album (before the Thanksgiving performance had been announced), they spoke about ignoring the jabs from their detractors and focusing squarely on servicing the fans that have made them one of the biggest rock acts on the planet — online petitions be damned.
"When you play a Nickelback show, I mean, there is every range of person that you could possibly imagine on the face of the earth [in the audience], and you couldn't peg one on the street to save your life," frontman Chad Kroeger said. "I think we can all pick out a Slipknot fan, but it's tough to pick out a Nickelback fan, because they're all so different."
What do you think about the anti-Nickelback petition? Let us know in the comments!
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