Canadian rockers Nickelback aren't universally popular. Some 55,000 American football fans once signed a petition to attempt to stop them playing at half time. A dating website has voted their music the No 1 "musical turn-off". In a particularly low moment, Nickelback haters set up a Facebook page to demonstrate that a pickled cucumber could get more fans.

None of this has prevented the band selling 50m albums and packing arenas across the world, combining grunge and soft metal with breathtaking cynicism. Chisel-jawed blond frontman Chad Kroeger – who reveals that he speaks to his own mother in the same eardrum-splitting yell – once explained how he studied the songs that he heard on the radio and copied the formula: songs about relationships and memorable hooks. Thus, Photograph sounds weirdly like fellow Canadian Bryan Adams' Summer of '69. The 2008 hit Rockstar – a not-so distant relative of 4 Non Blondes' 1993 world dominator What's Up, about a wannabe rocker's desire for a life where "the girls come easy and the drugs come cheap" – would be satire if it didn't eerily reflect their own career.

Their lyrics flirt with misogyny, and women are routinely depicted as "naughty" or strippers. You become thankful for small mercies, like when Kroeger tells a "dirty little lady with the pretty pink thong" that she "looks much cuter with something in your mouth", it turns out he's referring to her thumb.

And yet, the more derivative, dunderheaded, dated and downright troubling they are, the more people love them. Kroeger requests that everyone jump with devil's horns in the air, and they do. "I like your pants around your feet," he wails, amid more musical cliches. If they didn't have such disturbingly straight faces, they could almost be a giant prank to prove that 50 million people can be wrong.