Korn

The sobs are real. About five minutes into “Daddy,” the finale of Korn’s self-titled 1994 debut, the band slams back in after a brief rumbling lull. This last chorus is intended to be the climax, one more chance for Jonathan Davis to recount not only the brutal circumstances of his boyhood rape but also the barbaric way his parents ignored the wounds, even insisting he was making it all up. By the time the song ends, though, that parting salvo feels only like an afterthought, a recent memory whose shape has already started to blur.

For the last hour, the 23-year-old Davis has offered himself as a new breed of heavy-metal singer, able to chain the melodic finesse of Rob Zombie to the guttural power of death metal to these strange, savage glossolalia spurts that suggest he’s turned hell’s waiting room into a Charismatic Christian outpost. But as Davis shouts the parting question of his parental jeremiad—“My god, saw you watch/Mommy, why your own child?”—his voice suddenly frays, a strong rope under immense strain for two decades finally giving way. He’s lost it by the time he reaches his last words, gulping so much air that it’s hard to tell if he’s laughing at adolescence’s cruel absurdity or crying because of it. And then, he bawls—four minutes of muffled, strangling sobs interrupted only by a spontaneous tirade about hating the people who had done that to him, the people who made him want to die. As Davis wallows on the studio floor, his band plays on, improvising against injury. He slams a door, and the song ends.

Especially if you’re hearing it for the first time, that passage can feel gratuitous or even gross, a little bit of California theatrics meant to give a band named Korn a bump of gravitas. Davis, after all, had toyed with tears during “Daddy” a year earlier, half-laughing as he seemed to fake them while cutting the band’s Neidermeyer’s Mind demo with Ross Robinson, the pal who was becoming their producer. But this time, when Robinson noticed that Davis was actually losing it, he motioned for the band to keep going, to let this play out. The tape never stopped rolling. The result is gratuitous, but it is also uncomfortable, affecting, and true—a vivid reminder that art can at times simply mean an unapologetic release of all the pain that helped shape the person making it.

That is an end-to-end encapsulation of Korn, a 66-minute emotional expulsion during which a damaged man who had given up his beloved job as a coroner’s assistant turns himself inside out, exposing the most wounded parts of his body and brain to the rest of the world because he doesn’t know what else to do with them. There is so much to say about these dozen songs—the way they pulled the seven-string guitar from the annals of obscurity, the way they reimagined bass tones and drum placement in the context of modern heavy metal, the way they stitched an adoration of extreme music writ large into the unruly chimera that became nu metal. Sure, its predecessors are clear, from the collected early works of Mike Patton to the unrepentant rabble-rousing of N.W.A. and Body Count, from Florida’s death metal glower to Los Angeles’ hair metal glow and Seattle’s grunge insurgency. Still, Korn is the rare record that sounds like a new thought, a breakthrough dispatch from a frontier that others had only thought might exist.

The real spirit of Korn, though, is how completely Davis splits himself open, how candid he allows himself to be about the pains of being an ostensibly permanent pariah. The crying is only the culmination of everything that happens before it, the dam breaking after the waters have pushed against it for too long. He clowns the tough guy who took a swing at him during a show as a hypermasculine poser. He asks for deliverance from a speed addiction so severe that his penis is disappearing beneath his pubic hair. And, in one of the mightiest songs about bullying ever put to tape, he repeatedly calls himself by his teenage nickname, “HIV,” and hurls the endless string of homophobic insults he’s heard all his life and that have made him question his own identity back at whatever abusers happen to be listening.

Korn would soon be rightfully associated with a big, dumb, macho scene that broke stuff at Woodstock ’99 and, while we’re being real, a scene whose lingering big, dumb, macho energy is still helping to break notions of American progress a quarter-century later. But Korn is the opposite of that—a musically weaponized expression of total vulnerability. Kurt Cobain had been dead for only seven months when Korn released their debut, and Davis represented a sudden frameshift for singers who saw songs as a sort of bloodletting for misery. He stripped away any grand sense of writerly ambition to tell you exactly what he’d witnessed and how awful it still made him feel, rendering himself and his past completely naked in the present. His words were as direct as his tears. It is not surprising that, two decades later, it is still Davis’ favorite Korn album. Yes, it’s by far the best one, but it’s also where he becomes his own exorcist, getting beyond his dreadful history by screaming about it in ways that still sound like a personal reinvention.

Korn came from Bakersfield, the mid-sized Southern California city often overlooked in favor of much bigger neighbors in every direction. Bakersfield helped crystallize the classic country version of masculinity. A decade after the singer Buck Owens settled there, at the edge of the San Joaquin Valley, in the early ’50s, Bakersfield steadily emerged as a West Coast counterpart to the country music hubs in Texas and Tennessee. It was an oil-and-farming town that seemed the antithesis of Hollywood, a couple hours or so south.

The Bakersfield Sound that Owens established and Merle Haggard soon epitomized was defined not only by its musical atavism but also its emotional conformity, with the man as a domestic bedrock. During an admittedly great 1969 breakup song that became a massive hit, he asked, “Who’s going to be your puppy dog when I’m a thing of the past?/Hey, who’s going to mow your grass?” Haggard, meanwhile, was offering to kick some Unamerican ass, and hippies became his most popular punchline. Bakersfield wasn’t some cornerstone of the Summer of Love or a California idyll; it was hard, hot, dry. “Either you were a drug addict, or you got someone pregnant and had to get a job,” as Davis later put it.” “There was no place to go.” So crying on tape? Singing about daddy issues? Not so much.

But Jonathan’s dad, Rick, offered an unexpected link between that Bakersfield past and his son’s future. In the early ’90s, Rick leased Owens’ once-palatial Bakersfield studio, dubbing it Fat Tracks. He’d toured in bands himself, with the hair flowing down his back earning him homophobic insults and hippy ignominy, too. Still, as you might have intuited from “Daddy,” father and son were not exactly simpatico. After his parents divorced when he was 3, Davis became a shuttlecock for broken homes, living with his mother and stepfather until the man busted the drum kit he got at 13. He retreated to his dad’s place, where his stepmother would pour homemade hot sauce down his mouth just for laughs. She kicked him out at 18. “She was a twisted, sadistic shit. She was a fucking wicked witch,” Davis once told Melody Maker. “I hate her for taking my teenage years.”

The year Davis turned 18, five young Bakersfield musicians who called themselves Love and Peace Dude, or L.A.P.D., realized they had no future there, maybe aside from day jobs at the world’s largest ice cream factory in town. In Hollywood and then Huntington Beach, they shared a rehearsal space with their heroes in the Red Hot Chili Peppers, sold weed, and signed a record contract so parsimonious they had to portion out Del Taco burritos just to subsist during sessions. They bailed on the deal, broke up the band, and started another one, Creep. When their new singer turned out to be, well, a creep, they cracked that one open, too. They—a nameless quartet of two guitarists dubbed Munky and Head, a bassist called Fieldy, and the drummer David Silveria—went looking for yet another singer.

Munky and Head found him back in Bakersfield, during a night out at a local dive while visiting family. Davis had become a Duran Duran obsessive, and he wanted to be as beautiful as his New Romantic heroes. A championship bagpipe player accustomed to sporting kilts in competitions, Davis now stalked through Bakersfield wearing makeup, frilly shirts, and even dresses, being lampooned as gay seemingly everywhere he turned, even being sent to a “gay counselor” at one point.

He was in drag with his band Sexart the night that his voice stunned the two guitarists, who went home and told the rest of the band about the find. Fieldy’s dad had been in a group long ago with Davis’ dad, and his mom had been Jonathan’s babysitter. He called Davis, lied about a record deal this new act didn’t actually have, and offered to buy him a bus ticket if he would try out. Davis relented, though it meant leaving behind a job that had become an outlet for all his lingering rage—a coroner, or, as Fieldy once put it, “the guy who literally picked up bodies off the streets” and even brandished a dead fetus in a jar to impress his friends.

It did not take long for Korn—which, I regret to inform you, possibly took its name from an anecdote Davis heard about eating ass—to actually land that record deal. After cultivating an audience in Huntington Beach by playing parties in their rented rehearsal space there, they began chartering buses of fans and friends for the hour ride north to gigs on the Sunset Strip. In a matter of months, those shows—and a demo tape—earned them multiple major-label offers. They opted, instead, for Immortal, an upstart label that was barely older than their band but that was tapping into the same hybridized energy as Korn with the Judgement Night soundtrack, where Cypress Hill met Sonic Youth, where Helmet met House of Pain.

The band soon took the party with them. A few years their elder, Ross Robinson, the producer, led them to Indigo Ranch, a secluded studio above Malibu dotted with stands of cactus but also filled with the kind of pristine vintage gear that his dad had fantasized about for his Bakersfield space. That’s where Neil Young had made his most mystic acoustic music ever in the mid-’70s, where Megadeth had built a sizable chunk of thrash metal’s foundation a decade later with Killing Is My Business...And Business Is Good!. The outcast had arrived.

Some members would stay up for days on end, high on meth or drunk on entire cases of beer or bottles of Jägermeister. They partied so hard that Indigo Ranch’s owner, Richard Kaplan, frequently threatened to kick them out. Still, Robinson—a health obsessive and wheatgrass devotee who pushed his habits onto the band—would drag them out of the studio for canyon hikes each morning, trying to sober the band up before they started the cycle again.

Toward the end of the sessions, Robinson and the band decamped to Bakersfield, in part so Davis could score “a big ol’ fat rock of meth” from his dealer, and so that they could track vocals, incidentally, at Fat Tracks, his dad’s place. Rick had encouraged his son not to be a musician, yet here was his kid and his strung-out friends in their much-hyped Los Angeles band, cutting their big-deal debut in his space. (A year later, the local news called Rick Davis a “proud father,” and he suddenly sounded like his kid’s self-help coach: “Chase your dreams … and if you don’t have dreams, you don’t have anything.”) For all the people that had called Davis “faggot” and smashed his childhood instruments, he was now lashing back out from one of the city’s truly sacred spaces—the old empire of Buck Owens.

That’s the way I hear nu metal’s most famous opening line, too: “Are you ready?” This is what Davis growls at the end of a minute-long intro to “Blind,” where Munky and Head pull a razorwire riff until the tension feels like a musical garrote. It is a question as much for Davis as for an audience that he doesn’t really have yet. For the first two decades of his life, Davis had been told by his parents and by Bakersfield generally that he wasn’t enough, that he didn’t belong. So was he finally ready to step into this potentially better act?

Korn toggles between what has been and what could be for much of its hour. As “Blind” settles in after that opening eruption, Davis tries his best to croon about rare places of sanctuary, where he can hide away from the rest of his threatening world. “I dream to live a life that seems to be a lost reality” he barks on the bridge, his staccato voice a wide-awake introduction to his mutated death metal growl. That sound would prompt a generation or three to reconsider how heavy music might sound.

Davis needs us to know that the odds against his success and sanity have always been long. It’s tempting to hear “Shoots and Ladders,” for instance, as some weirdo variety show for the bagpipes that open it, the nonsense vocal paroxysms that shape the climax, and the patchwork of nursery rhymes that frames the entire song. But if Davis’ bagpipes sound especially elegiac, it’s because this is a mourning song for innocence lost so early it barely existed at all. “Hidden violence revealed darkness that seems real,” he sings to end the chorus, his voice somehow stuck between lullaby and tantrum. “Look at the pages that cause all this evil.” I’ve always wondered if this song netted Korn its only Grammy nomination because the voters spotted this literary criticism of nursery rhymes, or because they could simply recognize the nursery rhymes. I’ve always assumed the latter.

The neuroses run as deep as the desire to overcome them. Davis’ “need” in “Need To,” after all, is about finding someone to support and love him, about looking for a relationship that, for the first time, won’t make him feel exploited. He worries he doesn’t have the tools to let anyone be close to him, the skills to be more than just another broken person. “Fake” is a tantrum directed at an authority figure (presumably one of his four parents or stepparents) whose power is just a pose. Davis breathlessly interrogates ideas of manhood, authenticity, and fear, resenting being told to do something by someone who doesn’t know themselves. “I think being a person relies on one thing/Be yourself, let you come through,” he sings a little like Scott Walker, the guitars warping so as to suggest a soaring string section. It is one of the most plainly moralizing moments in Korn’s 30-year discography, a moment of total lucidity that feels like an essential mission statement: You can be better than your abusers and detractors by simply being not full of shit.

The rest of Korn had his back. That quiet moment during “Fake” is a rare bit of respite amid these 12 tracks. They are, for the most part, like the militia at his side and rear, ready to defend Davis as he lambastes the people who have hurt and harassed him. That ability owes, at least in part, to the band’s idiosyncratic setup.

In the early ’90s, Munky had fallen for the strange sounds of Steve Vai’s athletic guitar, always moving like an elite gymnast who had unlocked an extra limb. When he learned that Vai was playing a seven-string Ibanez, he not only got one for himself but also convinced his bandmate Head to try one, too. The tandem tweaked the instruments, adjusting the strings and springs so that the sound was deeper and thicker, covering bits of the spectrum a bass would ordinarily manage. That allowed the band’s actual bassist, Fieldy, to approach his instrument differently, channeling an early love of funk-rock into distinct lead lines. With five strings instead of four, Fieldy could slide upward into some space normally reserved for guitars, adding licks and even taking stunted solos in the room abdicated by Head and Munky. All these tonal shifts meant the bass wasn’t always tied to the drums, too, so that Silveria could move more freely. He responded to the rest of the band in real time, his hits sometimes landing, crucially, like Davis’ fists.

To wit, on “Ball Tongue,” a break-up song with an old friend, Davis recounts all the ways he’s been disappointed until he just runs out of words. He repeatedly hurls himself into inscrutable scat outbursts, his annoyance beyond ordinary expression. (He was, mind you, also freaking out on meth in his dad’s studio during this take.) Especially at the start, Silveria’s drums are enormous, each hit lasting longer than it needs. Head and Munky’s guitars sound like sirens or a mind spinning out, while Fieldy seems to be slapping at Silveria’s every beat, a mountain lion pawing at a house cat’s toy. It is intentionally mean, the four old friends telling their new pal’s old friend to fuck off forever. And during “Helmet in the Bush,” a song about trying to overcome an addiction that is breaking Davis’ body, they become his backbone, forever trying to pull him back toward the center as he spirals.

Nowhere is this more apparent and important than on Korn’s centerpiece and longest song (outros excepted), “Faget.” For the next four years, and perhaps even for the next 30, it would stand as Korn’s most totemic and persuasive number, though Immortal dared not serve it as a single for all the obvious reasons, from clear FCC violations to how absolutely homophobic it initially seems. At this point, Davis had endured so many homophobic insults that he tried “be[-ing] with a guy,” as he later put it, to see if he might actually be gay. That didn’t stop their name-calling or his self-doubt.

The band is devastatingly heavy as Davis relays all this, Fieldy and Silveria pulverizing every beat and Head and Munky flipping between one riff that suggests a buzzsaw and another that conjures an anxiety attack. Davis often sounds small beside his bandmates in the first half, as if they are a street gang brandishing their clubs while hiding him from an enemy. But he steps into the fore during the back half, repeatedly screaming “All my life/Who am I?” while the band rises around him. Korn would never sound tougher or more unified than they did by song’s end, when Davis takes back the thing everyone’s always called him and wields it now like a weapon of his own creation. “I’m just a faggot,” he yells. It is an astonishing moment—of power, of solidarity, of saying you shouldn’t bully me, my friends, or anyone else who’s different ever again, you asshole.

When Immortal was courting Korn, the label promised tours with L.A. hip-hop bros House of Pain and New York hardcore lugs Biohazard—“an insane dream come true,” as Fieldy later wrote. Even those bands’ edgiest material felt like simplistic goofs compared to Davis’ trauma exposés, clad in his band’s hyper-flexible armor. Biohazard and House of Pain were mean to Korn on those runs, as the members later remembered. Perhaps they saw the future arriving in real time and realized there was no space for themselves there? It took nearly a year for Korn to land on the Billboard 200, finally debuting in August 1995 but never rising very high. The record, though, stuck around like some unshakeable cold, remaining on the chart for well over a year.

When its follow-up, Life is Peachy, debuted at No. 3 in November 1996, Korn still shared space on the index. Two months later, they were playing arenas while opening for Metallica, a band they’d publicly dissed; a little more than a year later, after releasing their titanic Follow the Leader, they were leading their own Family Values Tour into arenas, parading Limp Bizkit and Ice Cube around orgiastic extravaganzas that made Korn feel like the world’s wildest party. Within four years, they’d gone from tracking methed-up vocals in Bakersfield to headlining the homes of NBA teams, a true insurgency of misfits clad in Adidas tracksuits.

Perhaps they banged their heads into the walls of fame too hard. By the time he was 30, Davis was telling stories about doing coke off the Bible, smashing glass tables with beer bottles in strip clubs, and being sandwiched inside many threesomes with sisters, all with the retrospective romantic gloss of a wounded war veteran. (It is little surprise that both Fieldy and Head would eventually write memoirs about their Christian conversions.) Or perhaps Davis had emptied so much of himself with Korn that there was very little lift to give, too few unexamined scars to turn into song. Robinson, after all, remembered basically bullying Davis into that earlier confessional mode for subsequent records, bringing up the stepmother who had forced capsaicin down his gullet to elicit the kind of visceral reaction that made Korn so compelling.

It didn’t really work. Korn got dumb—and quickly. In the same timeframe that Korn found overwhelming fame, Davis morphed from the guy calling himself “HIV” and attempting to own every homophobic slur that had hit him to calling Fred Durst a “little faggot ho” in a lazy schoolyard taunt that included a Hanson joke. The hits off that same album, Follow the Leader, were a string of stylized nothings and a litany of grievances against his record label. Sure, that second one, “Freak on a Leash,” is maybe the perfect encapsulation of Korn’s musical dynamic. Still, complaining about corporate overlords makes for light reading compared to the turmoil of Korn.

I am not going to tell you that Korn remains some great American rock band or apologize for the very worst of the music they have since made. (During the last 25 years, I concede, they have sounded sporadically revelatory.) But I will forever say that Korn does not belong in the conversations about school shootings, toxic masculinity, and incel culture into which Korn itself has sometimes been placed. It is an album about getting fucked over by the world and trying to find a safe space for yourself in spite of it all. Almost all the violent things happen to Davis here. “Should I pray/For all the hate to go away?” he offers in response, the rhythm beneath him brooding but calm as he tries to figure out his own way forward.

Nu metal built its own funeral pyre at Woodstock ’99, where the inglorious excesses of the ’90s gathered for one final summer shindig before the ostensible death march toward Y2K. A teenage boy still sequestered at home with strict parents, I wasn’t there, but I did watch it on pay-per-view via satellite TV. I was 16, and it was all thrilling until it wasn’t, until the whole thing collapsed into some topless Mad Max clusterfuck. To me, the energy of that weekend still drifts into American public life like the smoke from the bonfires that burned on the last night. It was a moment of unchecked American arrogance, of community being subsumed by the need for a good time for me and mine only.

As the album that helped launch nu metal, Korn can arguably be seen as one match that helped light that weekend. MTV, after all, reported an alleged gang rape during their Friday night set, a performance that has often been cited as a catalyst for the chaos that soon followed. I recently rewatched their hour onstage, however, and I was struck mostly by its frailty and vulnerability. Davis tries to remain upright and find the high notes at the edge of heat exhaustion; the other members (the glistening and shirtless Silveria excepted) seem perplexed by their tough-guy decisions to wear sweatsuits and khakis. Davis bounds across the stage in a reflective black kilt, studded with silver and wearing a traditional Scottish sporran. At one point, he plays bagpipes for nearly two minutes.

But the moment that reminds me who Korn had been, how good they could be, and how different they still were from the Mansons, Bizkits, and Buckcherrys of the day arrives 40 minutes in, when they segue into “Faget” through an ominous drone. With the “HIV” tattoo on his left arm in plain view, he tells a few hundred thousand people about what he endured back in Bakersfield. By the time they hit the song’s existential crux—“All my life/Who am I?”—they sound like an army marching on the path to find out. “I’m just a faggot,” Davis eventually screams, Head repeating the slur like a schoolyard bully. Davis keeps yelling it, anyway, as if he’s trying to beat that word until it breaks in half, until its power leeches out into nothingness.

By and large, nu metal became the domain of angry boys airing their childhood grievances or broadcasting their kinks for megalithic audiences. That era made monsters out of young men simply trying to work through their adolescent shit and often failing. By the time they became TRL favorites, Korn were little different than the peers their popularity had partially enabled—almost as prurient as Manson, almost as puerile as Bizkit, almost as pouty as Eminem. But that moment at Woodstock made it clear how different Korn had temporarily been and how different Korn is, even as the scene it helped render reached its ridiculous zenith. Davis had been born into a fucked-up time and place. For once in his life, he just wanted to answer “All my life/Who am I?” in any way that didn’t make him feel like a failure.