Korn - Korn (1994) Reviews
A Little Too Personal
I was able to miss the Nu-Metal train by a few years, with the original trendsetters like KoRn and Slipknot being replaced by the likes of Linkin Park, Disturbed, and System of a Down by the time I started to care about music past Classic Rock. Looking back this early Nu-Metal does have its place with the crowd that I grew up with, the edginess and raw emotion fueling a general, shared anger among teenagers and young adults around the turn of the century in the United States. This sort of crude and new style of music that gained a popular cult following with only a certain crowd of a certain age group was a breath of fresh air that annoyed the older crowds and sounded ridiculous to the likes of me who missed the movement. KoRn's debut self-titled, which began all this ruckus, shows all of the good and the awful aspects that Nu-Metal thrives on.
Although KoRn began the Nu-Metal trend with all the things people love or hate about the genre with the disgustingly drop-tuned guitars and messy but industrial drumming coupled with the shouting rapping vocals there are a lot of aspects of this album that just seem like unfinished ideas. Although it's heavy and aggressive there isn't much to the instrumentation, with each track sounding like a slight variation of the last due to Nu-Metal's tendency to just play different syncopated rhythms rather than having a fully fleshed out riff with scales and accents. It nails the primal aggression rather well, but any nuance or interesting flairs are hidden behind metallic banging and muddy blasting distortion that never is able to create an interesting groove or atmosphere like other Metal genres.
What makes KoRn's debut so special for the genre of Nu-Metal, though, comes down to lead vocalist Jonathan Davis' performance and lyrics. The overall theme of the album revolves around Davis' personal problems and demons which he outlines in sometimes excruciating detail like in the closing track "Daddy". From bullying to self doubt and lousy parents Davis seems to have been through the ringer quite a bit, so it's no surprise that using KoRn as his outlet would give rise to an emotionally tinged product. However this is where KoRn really breaks down for me since at the end of the day I can only think of this album as someone just throwing a tantrum rather than the general anger and despair that other metal genres have offered in the past. While raw and earnest it's performed and written in such a way that it just comes across as juvenile, which is why this was such a polarizing genre between the listeners it was able to touch and, well, everyone else.
As much as this album created a genre, it feels like something I never should have listened to, like reading someones memoir that they keep locked in a box in their bedroom dresser. It feels like a personal project of Davis yelling into the creative void that, in my opinion of the quality, could have stayed locked away as part of a healing process of a struggling man. It's extreme to say that music that was written should never be released, and I agree and am not going to act like this an abomination that no one should like, regardless of how much of a temper tantrum I feel like it is. It paved the way for a new and aggressively emotional style of music and lyricism that would shape popular modern metal for years to come, whether I like it or not.
The album that started it all, If it wasnt for this album Nu metal may never have grown at the speed and with the popularity that it did. The opening track Blind sets the tone for the album and it is still one of my favourite korn songs today. Faget, clown and shoots and ladders are some of the other great tracks and are still on many of my playlists. The album may not in my opinion be Korns best album (Follow the leader gets my vote ) but it is still a masterpiece and a must own by all metal fans.
Well, it was only a matter of time until we had to talk about this. That just comes with the nature of the Gateway clan I guess. Last months album challenge for the Gateway was S/T from Rage Against the Machine; the precursor. And today we're talking about the OG. Let's talk about nu-metal.
I spent a lot of time during my adolescence listening to this sub-genre of metal as it was just accessible enough that it did receive quite a bit of radio airplay, and it sounded really heavy in comparison to other mainstream rock of the time. Korn were one of the first groups to really define this new genre and they are still making music to this day. Unfortunately, they were one of the groups that I liked the least. And going back to their self titled album, it all but confirmed what I already knew about this band.
The rattling production is flat out intolerable! It sounds like someone partially loosened one of the screws in either the bass or his amplifier, and then got Fieldy to play. The percussion sounds like trash (literally), as if David is just bashing on some garbage cans. And Jonathan Davis' vocal timbre is... an acquired taste. He would later go on to influence the vocal timbres of early Mudvayne and Skindred (remember them?). At least in Mudvayne's case, Chad Gray updated his vocals on later albums, as well as his work in HELLYEAH.
As an overall sound, I like to think that their are two schools of nu-metal; the dank metal influenced by bands like Korn, and the cleaner stuff that was popularized by bands like Disturbed and Linkin Park. On this record, we are clearly in the former category, as many of the songs here sound like rough drafts. Jonathan Davis is terribly out of tune when he's singing and his screams sound more like whimpers. The guitars are out of time with the drums & bass, assuming you can hear the bass at all beyond the rattling that I mentioned earlier.
From a lyrical standpoint... what is there to even say? This is 20 year old's singing about angsty teenagers who complain about their parents not giving them their allowance money, even though they did nothing to deserve it. This album's worst moments of this happen on "Clown" and "Faget", while "Shoots and Ladders" could have been saved by the bagpipe instrumental, but then Davis start reciting children's nursery rhymes, further confirming my assumption of who this music is for.
Yeah the debut Korn album is bad... like really bad. It isn't melodic in any way, the production is laughable, Jonathan Davis can't hold his own over these instrumentals, and the lyrical content is laughable. The fact that THIS group threw down the supposed first nu-metal album is pretty disappointing. Zach de la Rocha sounding f*cking pissed when he was angry on the self titled RATM album, and he also benefited from having some fat hooks and grooves. This album has none of that. Even Slipknot, for as much as I can't stand them, albums such as Iowa and The Subliminal Verses were more likable than anything Korn has ever made. Their refusal to grow up and given their reputation in the genre, I now see why nu-metal gets an almost universally negative reputation.