Review by Xephyr for Korn - Korn (1994)
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.