Alternative Hard Rock

I just watched the Nickelback Photograph music video again. I like it a lot! It really fits the nostalgic theme of the song. In the genre of hard rock music videos I feel that this one is unique. You don’t often see the vignetting effect of the camera lens, and it adds an artistic effect. I love how the music video shows the guys with the photographs, duh…that’s the name of the song so it makes sense to have it in the video, right?

Being a photographer myself I thought the different artistic effects in the video were pretty appealing. I know there are lots of videos that are similar, but this one just has a little something extra I feel. Nickelback’s choice of locations and settings in the video was well done. They all added to the nostalgic effect pretty well. The cars were all older cars, which make us think of times past. One setting was walking through an older neighborhood. Several times we found ourselves out in the fields by barns and stuff, which has the effect of thinking back. All these just get added together to create a powerful visual experience. That combined with the powerful audio, which is in essence what Nickelback is, an audio maker, make Nickelback Photograph all that much more of an appealing song.

The humor in the song about schools is not left out of the music video of course. Like I already previously mentioned, Nickelback adds humor, maybe unintentionally, to many of their songs. Talking about not being accepted back into the school, and saying that he doesn’t even know if he’d accept himself back is pretty humorous in my book. I love that they show themselves all set up with their entire outfit in a school gym at that part of the song.

I guess the only thing that kind of annoyed me about the whole thing was the angle of the camera. Several times we had an almost birds eye view of Chad Kroeger singing, and it just wasn’t a pleasant view, especially for the number of times that they chose it.  It’s a little thing in my mind, just thought I should mention it.

All in all though I thought that the Nickelback Photograph music video was fantastic. There’s a lot of good to be said about it and not much bad. If you’ve got a couple free minutes to watch it, I recommend it! Here is where I watched the music video of Nickelback Photograph.

Nickelback is a Canadian rock band that was formed in 1995 and is one of the most successful Canadian groups. Nickelback got their name from the band member Mike Kroeger who would tell customers “Here’s your nickel back” at Starbucks, where he worked. If you ask me that’s a pretty unique way of getting a name for a band. Nickelback Photograph is the name of one of their most successful songs, and that song is what this blog is all about. It may seem like a funny topic to run a whole blog around, but I find it to be a rather interesting topic.

Photograph is a single from their 5th studio album, released in 2005. It is hugely popular in Canada, the US and around the world. It made it to the #1 spot on the Canadian charts and stayed there for seven whole weeks. In the US it made it to #2 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. That’s pretty impressive. Photograph was also released in Japan, the UK and other areas of Europe.

So what does the song mean? Well there are a lot of great nostalgic themes in the song, in fact, that’s basically what it’s about. Chad Kroeger is remembering what his life was back in the day, and he has a lot of mixed feelings. There is quite a bit of humor behind the lyrics and we find ourselves chuckling at times. This is quite a feat to pull off – being nostalgic about the past, both missing it and wanting to leave it behind – and also finding humor in everything that has happened. There is room for a lot of interpretation but looking back on the past is the main jist of the song.

The actual music is pretty good too! Some may like Chad’s voice and others may not. In this song it’s not quite as overpowering as it is in other songs from the band. If you like rock this will be a song you definitely want to hear. The chorus especially is a chorus that makes you just want to sing along with them. I suppose if the song wasn’t so good, there’d be no reason to have a blog about it!