101 Reasons to Stop Writing

"Songwriting is the spoiled, simpleminded cousin of poetry — which, let’s face it, is just overwritten prose without a plot."

There is a moment in the career of every writer where they realise, however dimly, that they have run out of ideas. Whether their Muse deserts them, their creative wellspring runs dry, they forget to run around the desk three times as part of their writing ritual, or they run out of dusty manuscripts from their dead grandfather’s chest to plagiarise, they find themselves suddenly and incomprehensibly unable to form an original, coherent idea.

Unfortunately far too few writers see this as the moment to stop, either by retiring, or the hard way. Many hope it’s just ‘writer’s block’, and that the block will give way if they throw enough angst at it. Some see it as a sign that their standards are set too high, and once they remove the word ‘original’ they’re able to carry on as if they never doubted themselves. Far too many, it seems, fail to recognise this moment when they experience it, because their standards never included the word ‘original’ in the first place.

There is no shame in admitting that you’ve run out of ideas. The shame comes when you try to charge people to discover for themselves you’ve run out of ideas.

As an illustrative example, I’m going to venture out of this blog’s typical focus on fiction writing, and examine another allegedly creative endeavour: the songwriting of Chad Kroeger of Nickelback.

Songwriting is the spoiled, simpleminded cousin of poetry — which, let’s face it, is just overwritten prose without a plot. Songwriting is to poetry, as letters to Penthouse are to literature. Songwriting is for people who need someone behind them playing drums to keep the meter while they recite. At its best, songwriting is beautiful, affecting poetry you can dance to. At its worst, its Simon-says-put-your-hands-in-the-air, for people too poorly coordinated to play air guitar.

If you’re lucky enough not to live in Canada, your first introduction to Nickelback was probably the bitter relationship power ballad "How You Remind Me", a monster hit from their breakout 2001 album Silver Side Up. If you like your power ballads to sound like one half of a phone breakup conversation overheard in a bar, this is a leading example of the form. The song was so successful for the band that they’ve taken to simply re-releasing it every three to six months, with a new name and modified lyrics, and very occasionally a modified melody.

The aching, monotonous sameness of here’s-your-nickel-back songs is perhaps best exemplified by this video, in which "How You Remind Me" is mixed with the band’s later single "Someday". As well as the blatant structural similarities in the songs, with verses, choruses and even the mezzo-piano bridges coinciding, singer Chad Kroeger’s hoarse delivery sounds the same whether he’s whispering or screaming.

The video’s creator did modify the timing of the original songs to match up more precisely.

Bassist Mike Kroeger (brother of Chad) defended the similarity with this sage opinion:

"I think that’s remarkable for someone to notice that there is a hit quality. If all hits sound the same, then sorry. When you are a band that has a distinct style such as us or AC/DC, that happens. When you have a distinct style, you run the risk of sounding similar." (Source)

Mike, there’s similar, then there’s Chuck Berry not being able to perform "School Days" and "No Particular Place to Go" in the same concert. There’s also a difference between having a ‘distinct style’ and music that is so unremarkable that you can only tell which song you’re listening to by the chorus.

They’ve made millions from selling the same album to the same fans who have exactly the same emotions, musical tastes, relationship problems and job in 2007 as they did in 2001."

To be fair, they have varied the theme over the years, swapping the broken-hearted whinefest for virtually every other cliché in rock: from the anthemic voicebox chorus of "Figured You Out", which celebrates the joys of sexually abusing an emotionally weak partner, to the hollow charity-starts-with-someone-else soft-rock ballad "If Everyone Cared" — which might’ve sounded sincere if it wasn’t preceded and then followed by the release and re-release of "Rockstar", a country-rock ode to how freaking awesome it is to be a rich musician — which itself might’ve sounded satirical if it wasn’t an accurate portrait of the band’s lifestyle, right down to the description of a "new tour bus full of old guitars". These songs would be obnoxious even if it was the first time we’d heard them — but every other group of half-caf venti mochachino college rockers has ripped the same pages out of the Aerosmith songbook.

Nickelback are frequently described as an "alt-rock" band, though with their singles on high rotation on FM stations worldwide, and some twenty-five million album sales, you have to wonder what they are an alternative to. An alternative to musical and creative integrity, perhaps. They’re also labelled "post-grunge", in the same unimaginative way that everything after Modernism is called "postmodernism". But they are "post-grunge" in the sense that they are a throw-the-nickel-back to the same over-produced, misogynistic stadium-rock hair metal that the grunge movement was reacting to. They’ve even been called "Metallica meets Nirvana", a ridiculous comparison taken together or separately, but it sounds cooler than "Goo Goo Dolls meets Matchbox Twenty".

Their appalling success proves, to anyone naïve enough not to already believe this, that you can get rich by finding something people like and selling it to them over and over. Yes, they’ve made millions from their brand of pseudo-earnest angst-rock, selling the same album to the same fans who have exactly the same emotions, musical tastes, relationship problems and job in 2007 as they did in 2001. But along the way, their name has become a synonym for formulaic, by-the-numbers, radio-friendly pop-rock unit-shifters, and they’ve overtaken the now-disbanded Creed to become the most widely-despised mainstream band since Hootie and the Blowfish.

Granted, it’s only been six years since their breakout hit (I’ll count that as Year Zero, rather than the go-nowhere earlier albums and their years spent playing grunge covers on the Canadian bar circuit), but lets compare that timeframe to the careers of other artists:

• In less than five years the Beatles went from their first single, the bubblegum blues-pop "Love Me Do", to Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, arguably the most innovative and most influential album of all time.
• In six years Elvis Presley went from the blues-rock breakout hit "Heartbreak Hotel" (the #1 US single in 1956), to homoerotic ukulele-playing cabana boy in the 90-minute coconut commercial Blue Hawaii. (Two of those years were spent in the US army.)
• In six years the Rolling Stones went from their debut single, the energetic Chuck Berry cover "Come On", to "You Can’t Always Get What You Want", along the way recording "Satisfaction", "Paint it, Black", "Ruby Tuesday", and "Sympathy for the Devil".
• In only four years Jimi Hendrix went from playing club gigs in London to headlining Woodstock, then had the good sense to retire from the music business.
• In six years the Doors went from "Hey Jim, wanna be in a band?" to "Jim’s dead? In a bathtub? In Paris?"
• In less than six years AC/DC went from their debut album High Voltage to their critical and commercial pinnacle with Back in Black, even though their lead singer abruptly quit the band.
• In only three years Nirvana went from the raw, explosive sound of "Smells like Teen Spirit" (the definitive grunge song) to the raw, explosive sound of soft tissue being forcibly evacuated from the skull cavity by a decidedly non-musical instrument.

Chad Kroeger once said in an interview:

"I can play and sing anything I write really well, but I don’t consider myself to be great in either department." (Source)

This is actually a good litmus test: if you truly believe this about your own ability, you have no right to inflict your mediocrity onto a world that isn’t finished enjoying the great artists we already have. You’re just clogging the distribution channels with derivative rubbish, in the hope that it will find an open wallet attached to a mediocre mind, seeking reassurance that their life so far hasn’t been futile and empty by purchasing something new that sounds/looks/reads like everything they already own.

To return to fiction writing for a moment: it’s certainly possible to make a living as a writer producing a consistent stream of derivative rubbish — usually writing novels with Star- in the title. But with incredibly rare exception, it’s virtually impossible to get rich doing it — and by this I mean rockstar rich: new tour bus full of old typewriters, no brown M&Ms on the signing table, snorting coke off the naked asses of book tour groupies rich. Even the drummer from Nickelback who got fired in 2005 makes more money than you.