MONTREAL - Nickelback has suffered its share of insults in the past but now the Canadian band is being accused of actually helping to kill rock 'n' roll.
The latest, perhaps deepest slight comes from none other than the Black Keys.
"Rock 'n' roll is dying because people became OK with Nickelback being the biggest band in the world," Black Keys drummer Patrick Carney says in the new edition of Rolling Stone magazine.
"Rock 'n' roll is the music I feel most passionate about," he says in an expletitive-peppered crie de coeur where he rants he doesn't like to see it "ruined and spoon-fed down our throats in this watered-down, post-grunge crap."
Nickelback seemed to take the comments in stride.
"Thanks to the drummer in the Black Keys calling us the Biggest Band in the World in Rolling Stone. Hehe," the group said on its Twitter feed.
The Black Keys, formed in Ohio in 2001, consist of Carney and vocalist-guitarist Dan Auerbach. The band had sold more than 2 million albums in the United States as of last October.
Long a popular target for derision, Nickelback has nonetheless sold nearly 50 million albums worldwide and scooped up 12 Juno Awards.
Carney's comments are the most recent slagging for the divisive Canadian band.
In November, Detroit Lions fans got thousands of names on a petition to prevent them from performing at halftime of Detroit's Nov. 24 showdown against the Green Bay Packers.
The petition slammed the Lions for choosing "such an awful band."
In August, two Winnipeg Free Press critics wrote an open letter to the NHL requesting that Nickelback be excluded from the splashy ceremony surrounding the return of the city's Jets franchise.
