Washington, D.C.--In an interview this week on CBS This Morning, presidential hopeful Senator Ted Cruz stated that he used to listen to rock music until September 11, 2001, when Nickelback’s album Silver Side Up debuted. “Music is interesting,” he said. “I’ll tell you sort of an odd story,” he told the audience. “My music taste changed on 9/11. And it’s very strange. I actually intellectually find this very curious. But on 9/11, I first heard Nickelback’s single ‘How You Remind Me’. And then I heard it again. And again. It was like a million tiny elves were driving jackhammers into my eardrums.”
“I just couldn’t take it anymore,” he said. “So I switched my radio to the country station, where it’s been ever since.” He then went on to expound about the virtues of country music, from its variety of subjects to the way that it wasn’t Nickelback.
Critics have pointed out that Senator Cruz, like Nickelback, is Canadian. Others note that during his famous more-than-21-hour filibuster speech in 2013, he spent 45 minutes singing the chorus of “Too Bad”, the second single from Silver Side Up.
In a column for The Washington Post, Charles Krauthammer noted that in a recent poll, 93 percent of those who said that they would vote for Ted Cruz in a presidential election also stated that they had been to at least two Nickelback concerts. The fact that they had been to not just one, but two, concerts implied that they were not merely making an isolated mistake, but rather had made a conscious decision to repeatedly pay money to hear Nickelback music. Similarly, he wrote, they were making a conscious decision to vote for Ted Cruz.
