Day 2: "Follow the Leader" - Korn (1998)

I've spent about an hour now trying to figure out how to approach talking about this album.  The cheap, easy, populist approach might be to spend some time making fun of my younger self for listening to the kind of music which has become the cliche for the angsty teen.  But maybe the better, healthier approach is to look back at that version of me and embrace what it was - a phase, but not one to feel any particular shame about.

My name is Rich, and I was a Rap Metal fan.

listen to me here

There's some interesting stuff to talk about relating to this CD which aren't about the music.  The first is something which Spotify and the general availability of information on the internet in general have denied us, but I loved at the time.

See how the first track is labelled as track 13 on the track list?  As well as that being so Metal a choice that it hurts me just to think about it, it's actually an indication to people that when the CD starts, if you jam the "skip back" button a bunch of times, you get to a hidden track, in this case a weird cover of an old Cheech & Chong song.  Not particularly sonically pleasing, but I like the idea perhaps more than the execution in this case...

The other thing worth noting before I talk about what brought me to buy this in the first place is that the cover art here is drawn by another edgy 90's luminary, Todd McFarlane, who at the time was the creator and artist for a comic company who was railing against the 'safe' and 'childish' world of superhero comics by making comics about impossibly proportioned, nearly naked women killing people and demons.  I can only assume that Todd McFarlane has a Being John Malcovich style door which leads to the Realm Of The 15 Year Old White American Male to draw inspiration from.

Todd McFarlane, showing the subtle touch he's known for.

However, the cover of the album is actually a pretty subdued and certainly more interesting image than we had any right to expect, so that's something at least.

I don't remember specifically going out to buy "Follow the Leader" - no doubt it happened during the period in the mid to late nineties where I was throwing all my disposable income at £20-30 of cut price CDs per weekend, and it was included in one of those many ill-advised Saturday shopping sprees.  I remember having "Life is Peachy", the album before this one, on cassette, so picking this up probably made sense to me at some point.  I also have distinct memories of "Freak on a Leash" from this album getting heavy rotation both in Chesterfield's only terrible metal dive bar, and on our by-then-monthly trips to the Corporation nightclub in Sheffield.

Listening back to it now is excruciating.  Every song starts with the same growl into Jonathan Davis shouting some variation of "Fuck", it's all the same grindy bass and guitar which sounds like someone put half a bag of ball bearings in a washing machine and set it on its highest spin cycle.  It's also massively obvious and self-indulgent - there's an entire song of John Davis and Fred Durst throwing playground insults at each other in a wink-wink ironic way that makes my head spin.

And talking of things which make my head spin, this album might be ranked amongst the most awful White Boy Nonsense that the late 90's ever produced, but goddamn ICE CUBE and Slimkid from The Pharcyde guest on tracks on this album.  Two of the most respected voices in West Coast Rap looked at this Korn album and went "yes, that is what I want to be associated with."  Did Korn really have that much cache or crossover appeal in the US?  Was it some kind of calculated marketing approach to try and ease white metalheads into listening to Rap?  

More importantly, did it...work on me?  Is Korn the reason I have Wu Tang and Dr Dre and Pharcyde and Jurrasic 5 and Snoop Dogg in my CD collection now?  I refuse to accept that is the case, despite what might be at least strong circumstantial evidence to the contrary.

I will say one thing on the more general subject of Korn though - their music may not be to my taste now, but the fact that Johnathan Davis sang so much about being gay, growing up with that making him an outcast in his school and amongst his family, definitely helped me question a lot of the heteronormative stuff that was part of early adolescence.  In my experience, the rock and metal scene was always a place where people's sexuality didn't seem to matter (with some genre-related exceptions I guess) and everyone just got along.  Korn's music (or at least their early stuff, I haven't listened to any of the NINE FURTHER ALBUMS, including a new release last year!) may not have stood the test of time, but the issues in their songs are probably still as relevant now as they were 20 years ago.

Tomorrow - from late 90's Rap Metal to post 2000's....nu-Metal.  It gets better, I promise.