The 19th Best Album of the 90s: Korn - "S/t" (1994)

It would be easy rag on Korn in general and this album in particular for all the lame imitations it spawned. Countless terrible bands formed because of it, and formerly good bands like Machine Head and Sepultura re-shaped their sound after it, even going as far as hiring the same producers and engineers to recreate Korn's sound. And of course losing their way entirely in the process. Machine Head snapped back into shape after a couple of albums, whereas Sepultura got lost in the haze where they remain to this day.

Even someone like grunge wannabe Daniel Johns of Silverchair dropped his baby faced Kurt Cobain image and adopted Jonathan Davis' look for a while in 1996/97 with the long, straggly hair (although he could never quite pull off the dreadlocks) and the double eyebrow piercing. He even started banging his head the same way.

This abomination is known today as "nu metal", a bastard genre of funk and hiphop beats filtered through thick walls of (solo-less) guitars and angsty vocals.

But back in 1993 when the album was recorded, none of that baggage existed. There was no "scene", there was no trend in running around in enormous Adidas tracksuits and wailing about how your stepmother treated you like shit, that a friend of the family raped you as a kid and how everyone in school bullied you.

Metal was a lot of things, but emotional was not one of them. Personal and heartfelt? Yes, many a sappy love ballad would be proof of that. But to express pure, raw emotions, even to the point of breaking down crying while recording your vocals (the final track Daddy), was unheard of. Metal was, and largely still is, 100% machismo, cro-magnon posturing with mean looks, tattoos and chestbeating. Only the strong survive, whoever drinks more beer, beats up more queers and bangs more chicks win. Pussies and faggots need not apply.

Sure, they might write a song or two about how badly their parents treated them, but those would be angry songs. Attitude ridden pieces about how much they wanna fuck people up, because they're so fucking fucked up anyway, they don't fucking give a fuck. But to write songs about the actual hurt the childhood abuse caused? To get right down to the core of the pain and rip it right open for everyone to see? Naming a song "Faget" and screaming "I'm just a faggot" over and over?

Unthinkable. Until Korn's debut album in 1994.

This tiny little snowball of honesty soon became a huge avalanche. Suddenly more and more bands stopped singing about how they didn't care about anything and instead turned to how terrible they were feeling, how everything sucked. The scars of the soul and all that. It wasn't a sign of weakness to express feelings anymore, in fact it was kinda cool.

Of course there's only so much honesty and raw emotion people can take, and soon enough the whole "woe is me" trip grew old. Or "stock", as Lars Ulrich would put it (as a sidenote, I'd even go so far as to say Metallica's Some Kind Of Monster and all their therapy sessions were an extension of Korn loosening metal up a bit).

All the bands crying and weeping and "oh how my life fucking sucks" became generic sooner than you can say "pass the hankies". It became something that was expected of you, if you were in the nu metal genre it was downright mandatory. Not to mention goths and emos took a few cues from this new feeling-shitty trend. Apart from this album and Slipknot's 1999 selftitled debut, nu metal was and still is an entirely useless genre.

Even Korn themselves ran out of steam by their third album Follow The Leader in 1998. Jonathan Davis still sang about the same stuff, but it had all become a pose. Lyrical angst had become synomous with the band and he did his best to maintain that image, but anyone with half a brain could tell he had exorcised his demons on the first two albums and it wasn't real anymore.

But on Korn, it felt really friggin' real.

I first came in contact with Korn in 1995 when I saw the Blind video on ZTV, and it blew me away, I had never heard anything like it. The weird sound of the kickdrum (which I later learned was actually the bass), the contrast between the tightened, high pitched drums and the ridiculously downtuned the guitars (which I later learned was an attempt to mimic Carcass' guitar sound), the intro that seemed to go on forever (which I later learned was copied from Primus' Too Many Puppies), the overall strange vibe, everything single thing appealed to me.

This "Korn" band soon grew into a big mystery. There was no information at all on the TV screen, just the name of the band and the name of the song. I didn't even know the name of the album. I went to every record store I could think of. No one had heard of the band. I mentioned the band in school, but nope. No one had seen the video, they had no idea what I was talking about.

There was no internet to speak of, and even if you were one of the lucky few who had access to it, there was no information about obscure metal bands anyway. A few months later ZTV aired a video called Shoots & Ladders which made me freak out even more. "Is that a BAGPIPE?! Is he hanging upside down in a corn field? What the fuck IS this?! Who ARE these people?!"

Finally later that same year the album was distributed in Europe, and I bought a copy via mail order. Cost me a fortune, but it was worth it. I ogled over the creepy photos of dolls, porno mags and bugs in the booklet and stared at the ominous cover of the girl on the swing looking up towards an unknown predator.

I now knew a little more, such as the name of the band members, but I still knew nothing about them. These were a bunch of inbred delinquents recording their demons as part of their therapy at the loonie bin for all I knew. Everything about Korn was dark and creepy and unsettling and murky and claustrophobic and just plain verboten.

I even used to rush to the CD player and turn it off after track 11, Helmet In The Bush, because I didn't want to hear Daddy, it just freaked me out too much. Hey, I was 13 and impressionable, gimme a break.

But as time went on and Korn got more attention, more info would seep out and it turned out they were pretty normal people after all. What a bummer.

We all know what happened next, Freak On A Leash, Grammies, millions of records sold and all that. These days they're barely a band, they lost one guitar player to Jesus and both the drummer and the other guitar player went on "hiatus" for long periods of time.

They became rockstars and although they continued to make decent records, nothing ever topped this one and even today all that blingy MTV crap is washed away every time I put this record on, it's like nothing after about 1996 ever happened. I am instantly transported back in time to that dweeby 13-year old that was almost too scared to play the CD because it might be haunted.

Ah yes, those were the days.

(mp3) Korn - Blind
(mp3) Korn - Clown (recommended!)
(mp3) Korn - Lies

Buy S/t @ Amazon.com.

The video for Blind:


Daniel Johns in his Jonathan Davis phase: