The Nickelback Effect

WARNING: If you like Nickelback (the Canadian rock band) at all, you should probably stop reading right now. If you can't stand them (like I can't) feel free to rant with me.

I stopped wearing headphones during most outdoor runs almost a year ago, and I have since quite enjoyed the sounds of the various birds, trees, and other random various pre-dawn noises. Even the not-so-graceful scuffle of my running shoes on asphalt somehow helps me to mentally center myself before a day of seemingly incessant CAD drafting and design and trying to learn as much as possible about systems about which I have previously known very little.

Anyway, one of this morning's pre-dawn auditory treats was a classic case of the Doppler effect rendering a quite well-known song absolutely silly with the warbled compaction and expansion of the melody, like seeing your best friend talk in front of a fun house mirror.

Let me whet your auditory palette by asking you to think about the nauseatingly familiar refrain to "How You Remind Me" by our friends Nickelback: This is how, you remind me, of how I really am Blahblahblah he sings the same damn line about a hundred times throughout the song. Now imagine hearing that bleach-haired grunge-guy-wannabe being chased by an angry doberman as he's scurrying to squeeze in one last repetition of the refrain in the studio before he gets his arm chewed off. Then, as suddenly as that doberman appeared, you notice the singer is running knee-deep through molasses, and by the end of the line, his face and words are stretched, slowed, and lowered to an indistinct warble.

This is the sound of a passing motorcyclist with terrible taste in music. Why anyone would want to listen to Nickelback blasted from his Honda touring motorcycle at 5:30am is beyond me, but it was this doberman-chase-into-molasses thought that brightened my mood this morning, despite my intense loathing of this particular song. Or, perhaps, because of it. So, thanks, dorky early-bird motorcycle guy.