My favorite adaptation of the Faust legend is Nickelback’s 2005 song “Rockstar.” In the German legend, Faust is unsatisfied with his scholarly life. He makes a deal with Mephistopheles, the devil’s ambassador, and trades his soul for unlimited knowledge and pleasure. In the Nickelback version, lead singer Chad Kroeger (whose tires-on-gravel voice perfectly matches the name Chad Kroeger) complains that his life has turned out to be disappointing, mostly because he isn’t cool enough to get into certain clubs. A Mephistophelean character (voiced by Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top) bellows, “Tell me what you want,” inviting Chad to start listing things: “I want a brand new house on an episode of Cribs / And a bathroom I can play baseball in / And a king-size tub, big enough for ten plus me.” This goes on for eleven more verses. The gist is that Chad really wants to be a rockstar. “I’d even cut my hair and change my name,” he insists, just for a life of sex, fame, and fast cars.
One minute and forty-seven seconds in, Chad fantasizes about how, as a big rockstar, he’d “sign a couple autographs, so I can eat my meals for free.” After this line, the Mephistopheles voice booms: “I’ll have the quesadilla! Ha ha!” It’s important to note that I am not a Nickelback fan. I own no posters, no t-shirts, no logoed keychains. I was not eagerly awaiting The Best of Nickelback VOLUME 1, their optimistically-titled 2013 album. Nevertheless, last week, I was innocently walking to class—not listening to music, not thinking about quesadillas, not fantasizing about being a rockstar—when I suddenly heard the voice in my head go: “I’ll have the quesadilla! Ha ha!”
This got me thinking critically about “Rockstar.” Unlike in other Faustian stories, Nickelback’s Mephistopheles is not above certain bodily pleasures, such as eating quesadillas and having sex on airplanes. (When Chad dreams that he’ll “join the Mile-High Club,” Mephistopheles says: “Been there, done that.”) The casting of Billy Gibbons suggests that in this deal-with-the-devil story, the devil is himself a rockstar, one who has gotten too old for the velocity of his lifestyle and is passing the baton to a young striver.
Chad Kroeger is now fifty years old; drummer Daniel Adair is fifty; backing vocalist Ryan Peake is fifty-two—they’re roughly the same age as Billy Gibbons when he recorded his Mephistophelean lines.
On YouTube, you can find a recent stripped-down version of “Rockstar.” Under the purple-blue lights of a Sirius XM studio, Chad and Ryan play guitar as Daniel timidly bongo-taps a piece of wood plugged into an amp. When you see middle-aged Chad Kroeger going through the motions, strumming, perched on the edge of his stool like a weathered gargoyle, you realize that “Rockstar” has always been a song about how you can say something and both mean and not-mean it. “Rockstar” is an ironic masterpiece: when past-his-prime Chad Kroeger sings, “I’ll get washed-up singers writing all my songs / Lip sync ’em every night so I don’t get ’em wrong,” it’s clear that he’s in on the joke.
At the same time, this acoustic version—with no Mephistopheles to work miracles—exposes the sad earnestness of Nickelback. Here are three men living under a curse: their ambitions are so beyond their talents that the only way to cope with the unbridgeable distance is to sing about the chasm that cannot be crossed.
