You find the weirdest things when doing house cleaning…

This was found behind my night stand. For ten years, TEN horrid years, this abomination was hidden from the world, but now it has come to light.

As a tween, I was your typical nu-metal mall goth who loved Korn (and Limp Bizkit, and Orgy, and Slipknot, and…you get the idea). I drew the Korn logo on everything (and I mean EVERYTHING), I bought Adidas track pants to look like Jonathan Davis, and I even incorporated Korn into many of my school assignments, to the dismay of my teachers. For God’s sakes, I even painted a golf ball with black nail polish and then painted the Korn logo on it with white nail polish. They should have put me in charge of their marketing department.

One night, me mummy made some vegetable soup and I ate it with her. Because Korn just mattered that fucking much, I dug out a noodly K, a noodly O, a noodly R, and a noodly N from the soup and placed it on a napkin, making sure the R was backwards and all that dope shit.

There we go. Korn in vegetable soup.

As time went on (and I found other bands to obsess over), I forgot all about ever doing something this silly. Last week, ten years later, I got the nerve to finally clean up some things around the house. Out of nowhere, this fell out from behind my night stand.

A brown brittle K, and brown brittle O, a brown brittle BACKWARDS R, and a brown brittle N.

KORN AFTER AAAALLLLL THESE YEARS.

Now excuse me while I go carve the Mastodon logo onto my vibrator.

11 Notes   Comment

People can say whatever they want about Korn, but their body of work from the ’90s is still some of my favorite music. Issues was a fantastic album, produced by Brendom O’Brien, who also produced Mastodon’s Crack the Skye. Dude brings out the best in every band he works with.

154 Notes   herzdiebSource   fuckyeahkornReblogged   Comment

THE DEVOLUTION OF KORN

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Let’s face it - everyone reading this article has at least one band or artist from their pre-teen years that still holds a special place in their hearts. Whatever band was the hot thing when you were a Middle Schooler is likely to be the one that shapes your entire outlook on music. Since I came of age in the TRL generation, which was essentially the late ’90s and early ’00s, I’ve grown accustomed to many in my age group describing their 12-year-old selves as either “preps” or “Goths”. The preps get misty-eyed recalling that Backstreet Boys show where Nick looked right into their eyes, while the Goths yearn for the days when Marilyn Manson still scared the shit out of their parents. Sadly, both preps and Goths look back and laugh at their collective obsession with Fred Durst (You still have a red Yankees cap in your closet somewhere. ADMIT IT).

However, things were mostly divided between the Quinns and Darias of yesteryear. I was somewhere between the two until I found a band that spoke to me more clearly than anything I could ever imagine. Before Metallica, before System of a Down, and waaaayyy before Mastodon, my first real obsession was with “Nu-Metal” pioneers Korn. One summer afternoon in 1995, a 7-year-old me discovered Korn in a very unconventional way (I’ll elaborate in a future post), and by the time Follow the Leader came out in 1998, I was a total Korn junkie. The drop-tuned guitars, the weird nicknames, and the ADIDAS tracksuits intrigued me. The video for “Freak on a Leash” blew my mind along with the minds of countless others. Korn was officially the shit.

With the release of the band’s 4th album Issues, what started as an obsession began morphing into a powerful anti-depressant. Shortly before the turn of the millennium, my mother left my father for good and took me with her. At age 11, my whole life had been stripped from me. My father had inflicted a number of emotional wounds that still haven’t healed properly, and I had virtually no friends. I was living in a nightmare of a world with a mother who drowned her pain in Jesus Christ and expected me to do the same. For about six months of my life, Issues was the only thing that matched the pent-up anger I felt inside, not just towards my father, but towards my whole family. It’s safe to say that Jonathan Davis’ confessional lyrics kept me from killing myself.

If only I knew that the future had in store for my rock star heroes. As the “party the pain away” sentiment of the Bush-era music industry slowly replaced the rap-rock P.O.D.’s with the “crunk” Lil Johns, even well-established acts were left wounded in the wake. In order for hard rock and metal to gain any kind of exposure, it had to be dumbed down. Bands like Breaking Benjamin and Three Days Grace filled a niche for radio-friendly rock that severely diluted Korn’s Nu Metal formula. With so many bakery-fresh rock confections placed on the airwaves, how could a band like Korn compete? Simple - they had to devolve. And that’s exactly what Davis and company did. Today’s incarnation of Korn is a crippled race horse that’s long overdue for being shot down. Korn’s previous effort, 2007’s Untitled, was an atrocious clusterfuck of overproduction and undercomposition. It was also their worst-selling album of all-time.

Perhaps this is why Korn decided to “get back to basics” with their latest effort, Remember Who You Are. Everything about the album sounds like a destitute attempt to re-create the raw energy that their classic 1994 self-titled debut embodied. Like said debut, Remember Who You Are is produced by Ross Robinson. Also like said debut, each song is a stripped-down screaming match between Davis and his demons. Even Remember Who You Are’s album art is a throwback - the girl on the cover could very well be a grown-up version of the child that graced the cover of, you guessed it, Korn’s self-titled debut. So what’s the difference? The “raw” energy in Davis’s lyrics and vocals, luke-warm at best, feels contrived.

Many old-school fans like me cite the departure of founding member Brian “Head” Welch in 2005 as the beginning of Korn’s devolving process. Losing Head was quite a heavy blow to the band’s stamina, but there was already trouble in paradise as early as 2002, when Untouchables was released. For starters, there was a 2 1/2 year gap between the release of Issues and Untouchables, which left Korn’s core fan base more than anxious. I remember being excited when “Here to Stay” was released - it was classic Korn in every aspect. Too bad the rest of Untouchables wasn’t as solid. It’s the first Korn album that left me feeling uncertain after the first listen.

For starters, Untouchables felt unfocused. The songs didn’t flow together to make one cohesive unit as Issues had, plus the pro-tools and other studio effects made a majority of the music sound over processed. The album was recorded during the time that Davis was scoring the soundtrack for Anne Rice’s Queen of the Damned, and songs like “Hollow Life” feel more like a movie reject than an actual Korn song.  Secondly, the lyrics lacked the brute honesty of those on Korn’s first four albums. Take “Bottled up Inside”, for example - when Davis screams lines like “It’s not Kosher!” and “Sometimes I Wish You’d Die!”, he seems more like a whiny Bar Mitzvah recipient than a 31-year-old man who recently finalized a divorce.

As a matter of fact, in my humble opinion, the main sense in which Korn has devolved is not in musicianship at all - it’s in lyrical content. Jonathan Davis’ appeal to disaffected youth had always been his confrontational writing style. Early Korn songs left nothing to the imagination, exposing Davis’ troubled thoughts for the entire world to see in grizzly detail. “Daddy”, one of the heaviest tearjerkers in the history of music, is about how Davis was molested by a neighbor as a child and his parents’ refusal to believe him. Even though I was never molested, many Korn fans were, and Davis became somewhat of a hero for victims of sexual abuse. The music video for “Falling Away From Me”, in which an abused girl finds an escape through Korn’s music, generated proceeds for various Child Abuse organizations. Those words and images that Korn projected onto me and so many others possessed a tenacity that few other bands could hope to generate.

Perhaps this is why I was so shocked by Korn’s first post-Head album, 2005’s See You on the Other Side. There were a couple of good songs, like “Coming Undone” and “Throw Me Away”, but content-wise the album was two steps removed from sounding like Top 40 schlock. Music videos featuring Korn members replaced by hip-hop artists were bad enough, but the worst of it came in the discovery that Jonathan Davis had enlisted professional songwriting teams to contribute material. Korn’s new songwriting partners included The Matrix. Yeah, the Matrix. The team behind many of Avril Lavigne’s hits (not to mention Britney Spears and Hilary Duff as well). I was repulsed…absolutely repulsed! Jonathan Davis, this same guy who had penned staples like “Freak on a Leash” and “Falling Away From Me” completely on his own, had to rely on the writers of “Sk8er Boi” to score a hit single? Isn’t this the same guy who wrote “Y’All Want a Single”, which ridiculed record labels for pulling the same bullshit stunts? The lyrics The Matrix was helping Davis write weren’t even that good!  “See some geranium/
Cracked to the craninum”? What the fuck does that even mean?

In his 2007 autobiography, Save Me from Myself, Head mentioned that Korn wanted to work with outside songwriters before he left the band, re-affirming my theory that Korn as a whole set their sights on devolution in order to keep up with the radio rock crowd. The irony is that many of these radio rock hacks were simple clones that Korn had unfortunately spawned. Perhaps an Emo kid or two latched onto Korn’s new aesthetics, but most long-time fans of the band were seriously alienated. On a personal note, I had to face the fact that the Korn I once knew and loved so well was gone forever. I had to let them go. It hurt, but it was the best thing for me to do. Besides, I still love everything Korn did in the ’90s, and that was good enough for me.

Every once in a while, when I’m listening to Sirius XM or a local radio station, “Olidale” will start playing. It’s a battle in my head as to whether I want to keep listening. Sure, it’s not nearly as bad as “Twisted Transistor”, but it’s not “Blind” either. In the course of Korn’s nearly 20-year career, they went from being trailblazers to mundane hit-makers in a seven-year span, only to come back in 2010 with a “New and Improved” formula aimed at appeasing its original fan base. The cold, hard reality is that Korn will never be as good as they were in 1994, 1998, or even 2002. Down two original members and the innovative tenacity that catapulted them to legend status, Korn are permanently damaged goods. They might remember who they are, but my generation remembers a few things, too. Like Britney Spears’ innocence and Jesse Camp’s relevance, all things must pass.

SOURCES:

Various lyric websites for re-affirming Davis’ words (since Davis has always refused to include Korn’s lyrics in CD jackets).

July 2010 issue of Revolver, interview with Jonathan Davis and Ross Robinson

Brian “Head” Welch, Save me from Myself, 2007

2 Notes   Comment

This one’s for the ladieeeees.

You might be wondering why you are looking at a picture of former Korn drummer, David Silveria. (Especially since I’m not much of a Korn fan, myself.) Well, it’s because he came up in a recent conversation I was having. Back in my junior high days, this man was…

I remember this picture from when I was in Middle School…frankly I’d love to see Matt Pike in a Calvin Klein ad XD

11 Notes   reigninblondeSource   reigninblondeReblogged   Comment