RAMBLE ON: "Something in Your Mouth" by Nickelback

Mutt Lange is, with Rick Rubin and Bob Rock the only others even in the conversation, probably the greatest hard rock producer who ever lived. Everything he touches sounds absolutely fantastic; every guitar crunches, every drum smashes. Back in Black alone would mark him as one of the greats, let alone his work on Foreigner’s 4 and every single second of Def Leppard’s good songs. He’s a notoriously reclusive man – even during his high-profile marriage to Shania Twain, he never sought out the spotlight or gave interviews – but he’s one of rock & roll’s most famous producers all the same. Nearly everyone who worked with him says he helped them reached their full potential (especially commercially – he’s a man with the popular touch for sure).

Nickelback, meanwhile, is maybe the worst-sounding successful band in history. Everything about this band, their sound, their look, their attitude, is just aesthetically hideous. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: If the term “butt rock” were ever narrowed down to a distinct sound, that sound should be Nickelback, whose sludgy guitars and terrifying wailing vocals had the unpleasant sonic palette of violent farting and shitting. The fact that they were the most successful rock band of the entire ‘00s with dozens of hits, a hefty portion of them slow acoustic ballads, will never stop being amazing to me. I just don’t understand what about this band was so appealing to the masses.

If I can switch to praise for a moment, one thing I do now appreciate about Nickelback is their willingness to stretch and take risks. I used to say that Creed were the better band but actually trying to listen to a Creed album for its full monotonous hour of runtime quickly changed my mind. No one would ever call Nickelback the most groundbreaking or eclectic of bands, but compared to, say, Theory of a Deadman, they were downright experimental; perhaps it was them reacting to that early mashup of “How You Remind Me” and “Someday” that got them pegged as formulaic, but I think they really did start pushing themselves to try different modes, different topics, different emotions. Already the biggest band in the universe, Nickelback was still aiming for even greater heights when they recruited Lange for their fifth album Dark Horse.

So what happens when you combine them? Can the irresistible force of Mutt Lange’s amazing production move the immovable object that is Chad Kroeger’s angry troll voice? Do they cancel each other out, or do they somehow co-exist as greatness and suck simultaneously? The results are mixed. The first single, “Gotta Be Somebody,” was a decent-sized hit at the time. There’s a scene in an VH1 TV-movie biopic of Def Leppard where Lange pushes Joe Elliott to hit higher more powerful notes; he seems to have done the opposite for Kroeger the Ogre, getting him to smooth out his horrifying voice for mainstream consumption. But at what cost? “Gotta Be Somebody” is no one’s favorite Nickelback song, and despite its success and radio-friendliness, it’s been completely forgotten by radio. I’ve described in detail all I don’t like about Nickelback, but who are they without those things?

But it was the other advance single that really showed the limits of the project for me. “Gotta Be Somebody” was for top 40; the other one, “Something in Your Mouth,” was for the rockers. If you were gonna call in the guy who produced “Back in Black,” this is the song you’d want him for. This one’s a ripper. It kicks harder than anything Nickelback ever made. It shows the band at its most energetic and creative. I still didn’t like it very much.

“Something on Your Mouth” kicks off the album and Mutt Lange’s effect on the band is immediately obvious. They sound more polished, turbo-powered; you can smell the engine fumes coming off of it. The song also features their most unexpected move, a rapid-fire rap in the pre-chorus that sounds like nothing else they’d ever done. I find much to admire about it.

So why is this song so fucking unpleasant to listen to? Unfortunately, despite everything that Nickelback and Lange throw at it, it's still a Nickelback song called "Something in Your Mouth," and while it's better than it has any right to be, it's still bad in the exact way you think it's going to be. Ultimately it comes down to Chad Kroeger’s treatment of women. Like a lot of people, my favorite song by Nickelback is “Figured You Out,” a basically unforgivable and foully sexist song about how much Kroeger hates his girlfriend and likes choking her during sex. It’s a hard song to defend, but it’s also the only time where Chad Kroeger seems like he’s actually hit on an honest emotion, one that matches his ugly band’s ugly sound. This is why their more high-minded philosophical songs like “If Everyone Cared” or “If Today Was Your Last Day” were always their very worst; they sound like violent assholes, and only become credible when singing about it.

“Something in Your Mouth,” in which Kroeger admires a woman rather than fantasizes about killing her, is somehow ickier than “Figured You Out” by miles. I remember reading an article by a feminist writer trying to reconcile her progressive ideals with her love of AC/DC and their “sexist” lyrics, and it kind of took me aback because I don’t find a single thing about AC/DC offensive and I never imagined anyone would. I think of them as a fundamentally innocent band; I mean, they just sound so happy! If Nickelback pulled in Mutt Lange to try and sound more like AC/DC, it did not work at all. Kroeger describes the song as “silly.” No, AC/DC is silly, prancing around in their schoolboy shorts. AC/DC singing about “American thighs” is one of the greatest/dumbest moments in rock history, but the things that Chad Kroeger writes, especially the main lyric that forms the title – “tease them all by sucking on your thumb… ‘cause you look so much cuter with something in your mouth”… it’s just gross, gross, fucking gross, and what’s more, it’s condescendingin a way that AC/DC never was. AC/DC would have known better than to spell out the implication, but drooling lunkhead Chad Kroeger decides to actually say out loud that yes, he’s turned on by her sucking her thumb because it implies oral sex, as if that needed explaining. Maybe he’s going more for Aerosmith than AC/DC; the rapid-fire lyrics -- “dirty little lady with the pretty pink thong,” “the hottie with the million dollar body,” “shake your ass around” -- might be trying to emulate Steven Tyler’s similar cadences on “Walk This Way” or “Sweet Emotion,” but Tyler’s high-pitched rasp isn’t weighed down by Nickelback’s implied aggression. In short, there is just nothing fun about Nickelback; no matter how badly they wanted it, innocent sleaze would always be beyond their grasp.

Dark Horse, like its predcessors, spun off far more hits than it should have -- "Something in Your Mouth," a fair-sized hit, was also maybe the least successful single from it -- but it proved to be the band’s last hurrah, and Lange’s too. I remember hearing “Burn It to the Ground,” “If Today Was Your Last Day,” “Never Gonna Be Alone,” and their ludicrous attempt at a laid-back country-rocker “This Afternoon” countless times between 2008 and 2010, but I don’t think I’ve heard a single one of them in a decade. After that, the backlash overwhelmed them and no matter what they tried (and boy did they try), they never saw much chart action again. It was close to the last hurrah for Lange too; he would make one more album (Maroon 5’s flop third album, whose failure would forever set Adam Levine on the path to selloutery), and one awkwardly received Muse album, then disappeared entirely; lord knows if he will ever return. That Muse record prevents “Something in Your Mouth” from becoming something of a swan song for him, which would have seemed unfair for him; but it would have been an entirely fitting note for Nickelback to go on – arguably even a high point. Despite them not being a thing for years, I have never stopped thinking about Nickelback, much like I think about every artist who becomes an easy target, but despite many critical reevaluations I have never missed them. “Something in Your Mouth” is something like the best possible version of them, working with the best talent, firing on all cylinders, and they’re still just awful. At least now we know it wasn’t circumstances acting against them.