Unfortunately, however, for the general listening public, Hinder's definition of "real rock music" is misogynistic music featuring all swagger and no substance. And rather than develop a signature sound of their own, the band's members seem perfectly comfortable cloning Nickelback. Which is depressing considering even Nickelback has resorted recently to cloning Nickelback. It's hardly an artform.

It's refreshing to see that a band can sell records without help from music television and the traditional hype machine. I've been watching Hinder's Extreme Behavior rise on the Billboard charts for a year now, and finally hunted a copy down when the album blasted into the top ten this month. It's depressing, however, to learn that the band's music is mediocre at best, which suggests that even without the hype machine, crap rises to the top.

Just listen once to "Lips of an Angel," the horrendous lead single, which features this God-awful gem:

Honey, why you calling me so late?
It's kind of hard to talk right now
Honey, why you crying? Is everything okay?
I gotta whisper 'cause I can't be too loud
See, my girl's in the next room
Sometimes I wish she was you
I guess we never really moved on
It's really good to hear your voice saying my name
It sounds so sweet coming from the lips of an angel
Hearing those words it makes me weak ...

Less than eighty words, and it sums up the entire attitude of this band. This is rock taken to the lowest denominator, embarassingly bad lyrics coupled with a few loud chords of guitar and a vocalist who screams more than he sings. One has to wonder why this era of MySpace pages selling bands from obscurity to success couldn't propel a few to the top who actually have talent.

It gets worse from there. "Nothin' Good About Goodbye" tries to blend in some alt-rock a la the Wallflowers, but then dissolves into another hard rock cliche chorus before we're forty seconds in. "Homecoming Queen" blatantly rips off Guns 'n' Roses, inverting a few chord progressions to avoid outright plagarism. And "Better Than Me," likely the next single, is a lame acoustic ballad in the vein of Staind, all which adds up to nothing ... until it dissolves into a screaming chorus that, like every other track on the album, sounds like Chad Kroeger. Hell, the song almost dissolves into the same progression as their own "Lips of an Angel." Isn't self plagiarism a bitch?

It's horrible to think that Extreme Behavior has gone gold, but it's worse that their success is being summed up as "Red State pride" by the likes of Rolling Stone, implying that those of us in the midwest happen to be so brain-dead and deluded that we'll swallow any tripe handed to us, even if it's a band as bland as Hinder. They're saying we're crazy enough to say this is what rock should be. But if this copy of a copy of a copy of a rock stereotype is what passes as rock these days, I'll have no part of it.