Why Not Be Nobody
The legacy of nu-metal, amid its revival.
Slipknot in 2005 (Wikimedia Commons)
I was probably 10 or 11 when I first heard “B.Y.O.B.,” the 2005 single and biggest hit by the California metal band System of a Down. This would have been, along with certain songs by the Ramones and Iron Maiden, one of my formative musical experiences of that time period. In retrospect, it may have also been the first song I understood to be explicitly political: As a fifth grader, my consciousness of what was happening in Iraq at the time was limited to the headlines I glimpsed on waterlogged newspapers while I sorted the recycling, but I could sense that sarcasm oil-slicked this song, that “blowing up the sunshine” meant something out of my reach but certainly sinister. “Why don’t presidents fight the war? Why do they always send the poor?” looks hopelessly didactic on paper, but in the song it marks the moment when layers of ironic distance crumble, revealing the hot nuclear core of rage at the center, and it probably helped set the foundation for my nascent understanding of American power dynamics writ large. “B.Y.O.B.” was probably the first time I heard the phrase “Fort Knox” in a song. It was probably the first time I heard the word “fascist” at all.
The songs Serj Tankian and Daron Malakian wrote together now read like something a generation ahead of their time, a collision of millennial-leftist shitposting and sincere pleas for release from the strangleholds of capitalism and militarism. In the attention economy and news-cycle whiplash of 2020, the inscrutable structures of System of a Down’s songs — which careened between bullhorn sermonizing, abstracted balladry, winking provocations, inside jokes and inscrutable raving — make a new sort of sense.
Whenever I think about System of a Down now, I think about how odd it is that they haven’t experienced a major critical reevaluation. This may be because they haven’t released new music in 15 years, or because they were relatively well-received the first time around, at least compared to many of their peers in the nu-metal scene. But it’s all the stranger for the fact that nu-metal is a couple of years into its own resurgence, both overtly (as critics who loved the bands as youngsters move to the top of their profession, and as some of the most beloved heavy bands to emerge in the past few years pull liberally from the turn-of-the-century playbook) and spiritually (as embodied by pop stars and critical darlings who operate both within and without genre).
That is to say, nu-metal never worked so much as a genre tag as it did a broad classification for a group of bands that came to popularity between the mid-90s and early 2000s, a time when loud, angsty bands could still move millions of albums. The opposition research on nu-metal defines it by toxic macho posturing, meathead riffs and clumsy attempts to fuse marketable rock music with rap — all of which were fair accusations to level at many of the era’s bands. But that blanket criticism overlooks the invention and eclecticism endemic to the period. Almost none of these bands seemed to care about the previous quarter-century of popular rock conventions, and many of them came from butt-of-the-joke cities or relative creative wastelands defined in the popular imagination by bland suburban sprawl, drug addiction or crumbling economies: Des Moines, Jacksonville, Bakersfield. Nu-metal was born when Korn stopped playing middling funk, hired a Duran Duran-loving mortician as its singer and started writing frank and harrowing songs about abuse and trauma. Deftones had already been playing together for years by the time they put out their first record, Adrenaline, in 1995, and by the time they followed it up with Around the Fur three years later, they’d started to shed its perfunctory rap-metal for a lush and heavy sound influenced by The Cure, Sade, Drive Like Jehu and Meshuggah; they’d soon be responsible for nu-metal’s creative peak, 2000’s White Pony. All of nu-metal’s leaders had distinct things going for them: System of a Down’s radical politics, Linkin Park’s world-dominating hooks, Slipknot’s commitment to an aesthetic that was perversely welcoming in its vision of monstrous family. And that’s not even getting into the bands — Faith No More, Primus, Tool — that worked from a similar point of view but got the less-controversial “alternative metal” tag, either because they slightly predated nu-metal or because they more self-consciously presented as brainy weirdos.
All of this seems clearer than ever in 2020, as the various facets of nu-metal’s comeback hit new peaks. Deftones, perhaps the only band from that era to totally transcend the genre tag’s negative implications, released their ninth full-length, Ohms, on Friday. I’ve only listened to it once as of this writing, but it’s very good, another worthy set of variations on their distinctive sound and a boon for their reputation as one of the most consistent rock bands of the past 30 years; it’s also got as much critical goodwill around it as any album connected to nu-metal’s prime years has had.
Meanwhile, a whole set of bands has emerged from the American and British hardcore scenes over the past few years while pulling liberally from nu-metal and other unfashionable rock of that era. It’s not really possible for bands like this to become commercially popular like they did 20 years ago, but some of these acts are about as big as young bands can get in the heavy music world, and others seem to be headed in that direction. I have mixed feelings about them. Some successfully push nu-metal’s mosh parts and grimy atmosphere into more extreme territory, such as Vein, the Boston hardcore band that suffuses its love of Slipknot and Korn with the frenetic mathcore Massachusetts birthed in the 90s. Others manage to harness its more populist aspects: See, for example, the English band Higher Power, whose riffy-but-not-too-heavy songwriting and nods to space rock make their song “Lost in Static” a worthy 2020 answer to Incubus’ “Stellar.”
But overt nu-metal worship has rapidly diminishing returns, as a lot of these bands come across as bland 90s cosplay. There’s no better example of this than Code Orange, the most popular of all these bands. They came onto my radar in 2012, when they were still called Code Orange Kids and released Love is Love // Return to Dust, one of the best heavy albums of the last decade, full of songs that wrung surprisingly catchy moments out of atonal metalcore and feedback-laced ambience. Then they dropped the “Kids,” offputtingly branded themselves as something between tough-guy-hardcore and “wake up, sheeple,” released a lot of grainy music videos, performed a pro wrestler’s intro music and assembled a huge and fanatical audience. Along the way, they released a couple of fantastic songs — “Bleeding in the Blur” and “Ugly,” both from 2017’s Forever, would not only fit neatly on a rock radio playlist circa 1998, they’d rank among the most satisfying metal songs on it. But their rehashing of 90s aesthetics has grown old. Their most recent release, Under the Skin, is a live album and accompanying video of acoustic-ish interpretations of their songs that self-consciously recalls MTV Unplugged and includes an Alice in Chains cover to boot.
Nu-metal has also worked its way into today’s indie and popular music in subtler, sometimes intriguing ways. The members of today’s most popular heavy and emotional rock bands were kids at the turn of the millennium, so of course some of them are citing the heavy, emotional music that was popular then — Foxing called Iowa an influence in the leadup to Nearer My God, for example, and Ross Robinson, whose production on Korn and Slipknot records shaped nu-metal, helmed the new record by post-hardcore mainstays Touche Amore (and this is just the stuff I pay attention to — I’m sure plenty of the bands who appear on the cover of Kerrang! or whatever still love Hybrid Theory).
These influences have started to turn up in Best New Music-core, too. Grimes started gesturing at rap-rock on Art Angels, and in 2018, she called nu-metal her favorite genre; from what I’ve heard, it heavily informed this year’s Miss Anthropocene, though I’ve been too put off by her flirtations with techno-fascism to listen to it. I’ve recently enjoyed Motherhood, the new album by No Joy. No Joy started as a fairly straightforward shoegaze band in the late 2000s, but it’s now the solo project of longtime leader Jasamine White-Gluz, who layers the project’s familiar sounds with more unexpected material. On “Dream Rats,” she establishes a motif of clean, reverberated guitars ringing like church bells, before adding screams by her sister, Alissa, who fronts the melodic death-metal band Arch Enemy. “Four,” another highlight, sounds like hitting “seek” on a car radio every minute and coming up lucky, as White-Gluz shifts from distorted guitar swarms to dusky electro to Y2K pop and back. Combining metal and shoegaze isn’t new — Deftones tried to incorporate both elements in the 90s, underground black metal bands realized the genres’ kinship in the 2000s, and after Deafheaven’s Sunbather came out in 2013, that particular musical marriage became something of a 2010s rock cliche. But whereas most bands have tried to smear them into something both radiant and monochromatic (see: Sunbather’s album art, meant to evoke the color you see when you close your eyes and turn toward the sun), listening to the best songs on Motherhood has the effect of staring at a rock face and making out the different layers of sediment, distinct periods of time in a single eyeful.
In looking to pop music, I’d suggest that the (post-)Soundcloud Rap that exploded at the end of the 2010s relied on a sort of inversion of the nu-metal proposition. The emergent stars of the 90s, loathed by older generations and beloved by teenagers for both their aggression and their emotional honesty, played guitars and drum kits but incorporated elements of the rap music dominating suburbia. Lil Peep and Juice WRLD and Lil Uzi Vert and Post Malone, hated and loved for the same reasons, dominated rap playlists while peppering their music and presentations with the rock music they grew up on (Jayson Greene wrote smartly about this connection a few years ago). Even if those stars cited Nirvana or Paramore more than Korn or Slipknot, the parallels are apparent; meanwhile, artists like Ghostemane and City Morgue, who have helped push the direction of popular rap while remaining sub-mainstream, fuse traditions in a way that actually sounds like nu-metal.
The most exciting nu-metal-influenced song I’ve heard in the past year is “STFU!” by Rina Sawayama, who seems poised for, if not pop stardom, at least a Charli XCX-type could-be-a-pop-stardom. “STFU!” sounds like an embodiment of 1999, a year in which Britney Spears, TLC, Limp Bizkit and Korn all had number-one albums. Despite nu-metal’s class origins and the fact that it was pound-for-pound more racially diverse than any other sector of rock at the time, its bands often didn’t reflect on or dismantle the social ills they faced so much as they turned trauma into outward rage, too often directed toward women, who were notably absent from those bands. Sawayama, in adapting the genre for a pop song about enduring a lifetime of microaggressions, subverts that legacy: “This song is the perfect embodiment of pure rage inside, and humour at how ridiculous this all is,” she told Dazed when the song came out last year.
I recently watched Penelope Spheeris’ never-widely-released documentary about Ozzfest 1999, We Sold Our Souls for Rock ‘n’ Roll, and two scenes stuck with me, because I think they have a lot to do with the trajectory of nu metal. One shows Rob Zombie, in a bit of stage banter, mocking Woodstock 1999, which was happening at the same time. While some of the nu-metal bands that would hold up the best, including Deftones and System of a Down, were on Ozzfest that year, Woodstock included Korn and Limp Bizkit, each at or near the height of its popularity. Violence plagued Woodstock all weekend and erupted during Limp Bizkit’s set; in the aftermath, several women reported being raped, and many more were otherwise attacked or injured. Though some of the era’s key music would be released in the following years, critics retrospectively pegged Woodstock as the death knell for nu-metal: This was the moment when nu-metal crossed into pure derision in the public consciousness, where it would remain for more than a decade.
In the other scene, Spheeris interviews the members of Slipknot, all of whom are in their stage costumes — horror-show masks and red jumpsuits. At one point, she cuts to Paul Gray, who co-founded the band in 1995 and played bass for it until his death in 2010, for an explanation of the band’s aesthetic. “Being from Des Moines, the shithole of the U.S., everybody treats us like nobody,” he says from behind his pig mask. “So we decided, you know, hey, why not be nobody? We put on the masks.”
If the corrosion of identity and the bleak prospects of living in the middle of nowhere were fundamental principles of nu-metal, it makes sense that the era has acquired new relevance over the past few years. Now, we all live inside the internet, where you really can be nobody from nowhere until, suddenly, you’re somebody. You can trace aspects of that trajectory with Grimes, who went from your favorite blogger’s favorite producer to cyborg-fairy wannabe-popstar in a decade, or with the rappers who emerged from the Soundcloud muck with a thrilling sound and a clear path to fame but died by violence or drugs in their early 20s, or with the defiant and devotion-inducing music of acts like 100 gecs, who share nu-metal’s lack of reverence for the canon, conventional structures or established “good taste,” but who do it with a sincere grin instead of a scowl.
Nu-metal’s bad reputation wasn’t entirely undeserved, but those who frowned on it for perfecting the sonic equivalent of a middle finger may have been looking at it the wrong way. The reason it has a foothold in 2020 isn’t because of its overt aggression or its misogynistic connotations, and it’s certainly not because of its guitars. It’s because, at a period in history where the only chance at survival might be to question all the power structures and conventional wisdoms that undergird our world, there’s not much so freeing as lighting the rulebook on fire, then taking pieces of things we’ve forgotten, derided or taken for granted and fashioning them into something new — destruction as an act of creation.
* * *
More Thoughts
I’ve got like 600 tabs open, all stuff I want to read but haven’t gotten to, but here are some of my favorite things I read over the last couple of weeks.
The promises and problems of the cop-free housing site set up in a Sheraton by community organizers amid the Minneapolis uprising, by Wes Enzinna, for Harper’s.
A story about the men who died in Ed Buck’s apartment, which reveals how the case is less about the abuses of a Democratic mega-donor (which Buck wasn’t, turns out) than it is a depressingly ordinary parable about privilege and power, by Jesse Barron, for the New York Times Magazine.
An exploration of how MTV came to broadcast almost nothing besides endless blocks of Ridiculousness, by John Gonzalez, for the Ringer.
I haven’t listened to the new Sufjan Stevens album yet, because it seems like a lot, but I’ve quite liked a couple of the reviews of it. There’s this one, by Lindsay Zoladz, for NPR, and this one, by Larry Fitzmaurice for his newsletter Last Donut of the Night, which articulates something I feel a lot: “I don’t know what I believe in except the fact that good lies somewhere in humanity even as it seems to almost constantly be in hiding.”
Robin Givhan’s analysis of the language Kentucky’s attorney general used to announce that police won’t face charges for killing of Breonna Taylor, and Radley Balko’s dismantling of the misinformation around the case — some of which was propagated by the same attorney general — both for the Washington Post.
This bonkers story about a harassment campaign perpetrated by Ebay against some horrified bloggers (it goes all the way to the top!), by David Streitfeld, for the New York Times.
A couple of pieces by my Tampa Bay Times colleagues: Romy Ellenbogen’s story about how federal prison guards admitted to sexually abusing inmates and, instead of getting prosecuted, got pensions; and Leonora LaPeter Anton’s chronicle of what happened when her dad got the coronavirus.
Salem, “Starfall”
Salem is BACK, baby! Sometime in the past few years, references to the witch-house progenitors went from being mostly jokes about their infamous FADER Fort set to being mostly reappraisals of how they predicted everything from post-Soundcloud rap to 100 gecs. I’m not sure if anyone really expected or thought we needed new Salem music in 2020, nearly a decade after their last major work, but I welcome their comeback single, “Starfall” — it’s maybe the best song they’ve ever put out. The synth plays on tail lights streaking into the night, the muddled crooning is plainly gorgeous, and when the lyrics are intelligible, they do a lot with a little, even if they might just be about drugs or something. “I know that we’ve only just met, but I don’t want to see you cry”; “I’ll be leaving you in the night, ‘cause I have no answers for you” — this is a country song, practically, and not just because it reminds me melodically of Sam Hunt’s “Sinning With You.”
Bloodlines
It seems like Wright Thompson, America’s preeminent sportswriter, doesn’t publish as much as he used to (though I quite liked his piece from earlier this year about the land that raised Michael Jordan), so it was wonderful to hear his writerly voice, via his actual voice — gruff, charming, greeting a source with a “Mornin’, sunshine” — in this podcast from ESPN. Thompson uses a spate of controversial 2019 racehorse deaths as a jumping-off point for a story about horse racing’s rich past and hazy future, and how its legacy is connected to shifting ideals of American wealth. If you like your parables of capitalism with a lot of outward criticism, Bloodlines may irk you, though I found its subtext satisfying enough. And though aspects of the three-episode series call out for more time — I could listen to a whole series about the deceptively complex battle between animal rights activists and the horse racing industry, particularly from the points of view of the working-class people whose livelihoods are wrapped up in it — the show’s concision is refreshing amid a glut of over-long serialized podcasts. If anything, it understays its welcome.