I feel a bit like a jerk about ending this contest so prematurely. I mean, we can't possibly get more nominations for the worst band of all time if my pick is so incontrovertibly right as to end all debate (and it is.) But I'd rather risk ruining the contest than have us run the whole thing and never get the right answer.

It's Nickelback. "Oh, snap. This guy's so right he doesn't even need to make a case for himself," you're saying right now. I mean, what else could you say?

So that's why I'm going to take the hard way out. Sure, Nickelback is indisputably lame, but that's what makes them so great.

It's not the "so bad it's good" route. I'll leave that to the late, great Wesley Willis. (Hey, call it condescending but it was the guy's only escape from schizophrenia.) Nickelback is more the "so bad I have to admire the tremendous pair it must take to be seen in public afterward" style.

It's not like there was some moment of spontaneous, terrible creation. These guys have had like six years and there's no evidence that even once, they thought "hey guys, is there anything lame about a 30-something Canadian Jesus look-alike pretending to be a teenager doing the nasty in the back seat on a chart-topping radio hit?" Never once did they say "hey maybe starting a song with the line 'I like your pants around your feet' is a little too over the top."

They never needed to. They knew exactly what they were doing and they've got to have the world's biggest pairs of balls to do it. Or maybe one even larger pair shared collectively among the group - we don't need to spend too much of our time worrying about Nickelback's balls, okay?

What I like about this is that they've provided us with a cosmic measuring tape with which to compare all other awful things born of man. The Franco-Prussian War, for example, might be equivalent to the song "Leader of Men." Bad, but not memorably so. Cancer, on the other hand, might rank up there with the line "I've got both hands on the wheel while you've got both hands on my gear." We're talking possibly the all-time low water mark of human existence. It's the kind of representative work that if alien civilizations stumbled upon, they'd vaporize our puny planet and - let's be honest - for just cause.

And that's what this ultimately boils down to. Nickelback represents the indominability of the human spirit. They represent our triumph over things like morality, logic and good taste in pursuit of the dollar, and it's that kind of mercenary ethic that put us at the top of the food chain. They're the musical equivalent of the foam #1 finger, bumper stickers of Calvin peeing on things and "Ayatollah Assahollah" t-shirts all rolled into one. And God bless 'em for it.