Nü-Metal Will Never Die But You Will

Fuck the emo revival.

I guess it hit me the other night, when I realized the sound of my toilet flushing sounds exactly like a watery version of the lyricless opening vocal riff from “Down with the Sickness” by Disturbed. We’re in the rising tide of a Nü-Metal revival. But in a culture that collapses faster than it constructs, where cultural cannibalism moves so fast we're actually looking at a form of extinction as survival, it’s not fair to suggest Nü-Metal ever really died.

When Korn decided to re-re-reinvent dubstep in 2011, they literally announced they were “dubstep before dubstep existed.” Despite this making no sense, you can’t say that they’re wrong. The build-ups and crashing breakdowns of Skrillex and his ilk certainly can find their genesis in both metalcore and the Nü-Metal that Korn repped with the pride of a drunken redneck with an American flag on Veteran’s Day. Sure, Korn’s dubstep album was produced in part by Skrillex. And yeah it was in December of the year after Skrillex’s debut. But there it was, 2011’s Path of Totality, a time-travelling dubstep record by the band Korn. Korn Frontman Jonathan Davis reached out even further, debuting a solo electronic project called Killbot, proving he was more than a Korn.

Back at Korn HQ, they haven’t won a Grammy since 2003, but they’re clearly over it. They returned in 2013 with an album confidently titled The Paradigm Shift. It featured heavier, angrier sections reminiscent of their older work. It seems their very marginalization helped fuel their return to form. Because why wouldn’t Korn be annoyed, at the very least? They’ve clearly watched their success diminish, glued to the television, as their peers (Skrillex) overachieve. And if you saw the nü Korn video a couple weeks ago, you’ll know that Jonathan Davis is back on a media conspiracy-theory trip.

If you missed it, it features a lot of clips of Miley Cyrus, Justin Bieber, Barack Obama, and other media magnates, alongside a dark portrayal of the NSA data-mining operation. There’s not much information here, but it’s easy to tell these things are bad. That’s about as much as one can get from it. Davis, in 2011, called Obama an "Illuminati puppet." So Korn has never exactly been a politically articulate, as far as I can tell. As a result, the music has become a political void, a straight refusal, a black hole of denser and denser thought. We've seen this turn into proto-libertarianism, an Occupy or, even better, a Tea Party lacking oculus—Korn literally threw a tour for years, most recently in October 2013, called Family Values. Think of the Gathering of the Juggalos. Is it really little more than a midwestern Burning Man that takes people on the margins and empowers them through what, at its core, is ideology? The Gathering is the ultimate in fraternity. It is purely political. The Family Values Tour postures by name as entirely moral. God bless Korn, every one.

Let’s look at it on a technical level: There was a span of time when you couldn’t flip through rock radio without hearing the incredibly pronounced click of an overmixed kick drum. Listen to this dead thwump on Mudvayne’s “Dig” or Korn’s “Got the Life.” When I heard the album that song is from, Follow the Leader—1998, I was in sixth grade—the sound was so distinct I went as far as taping a quarter to the plastic bass drum beater I got to use at the time to replicate it. It’s not really possible for a garage rocker and there’s virtually no tone to the recorded drum in these bass-click situations. It’s pure production. Thankfully, by the time System of a Down hit the scene with “Chop Suey” in 2001, that band’s drummer, John Dolmayan, used not only a rounder-sounding bass drum, but very melodic toms as well. His beats were musical and technical enough that they’d eventually be transcribed in Modern Drummer magazine.

Note: The most intense crowd moment I witnessed at the final 285 shows was when the DJ played System of a Down's "Toxicity" #notjudging

— Brandon Stosuy (@brandonstosuy) January 24, 2014

Drum magazines have long favored metal and other technical music because there is just plain more shit to write about: more drums, more notes, more techniques, more numbers, more money. Dolmayan stood out for actually having an ear for tone—he’s one of the few during the hard rock late-nineties post-grunge thing that opted for a more natural-sounding drumkit. Maybe that’s why System of a Down was never labeled full-on Nü-Metal, retaining an aura of Ye Aulde Metal that the heads craved. His beats moved beyond that bass click, that over pronouncement of the actual kick, that feeling of actually being kicked by a kick drum (as opposed to the drum’s being kicked, from where it gets its name). It’s a natural sound bent (and perhaps meant) to sound artificial, which to me represents forced, unnecessary mutation. But that’s sort of the condition of metal and heavy music as a whole. (Listen to the latest Oozing Wound record!)

So despite Dolmayan’s musicality, the hooks of this sound had sunk in, like a backroom piercing-parlor suspension, even as Nü-Metal waned on the charts. This particular aberration became a hallmark of splintered subgenres of metal for years to come. You can hear it in the opening strains from the 2003 album by A Life Once Lost, A Great Artist. This was the band’s sole LP on Jacob Bannon’s Deathwish label. Hell, even Bannon’s own Converge tinkered with Nü-Metal drum sounds around 1998 and 1999. Listen to When Forever Comes Crashing for a hint of it; scour the band’s amazing, patchwork documentary The Long Road Home for their short-lived, longhaired drummer John DiGiorgio.

More pronouncedly in The Scene, mosh-metal bands used this bass drum sound as an all-out assault of knock-wind force. Bleeding Through and Remembering Never come to mind pretty quickly. Every Time I Die took it a step farther when they straight-up used an 808 kick at the top of the breakdown on “Godspeed Us To Sea” off the 2003 album Hot Damn! The production technique went so far that, to duplicate the effect, drummers would use triggers on their kick drums—both live and in the studio!—to regulate the tone. This wasn’t because they weren’t lightning-fast enough on their double pedals. This was because they played so fast there was no discernible acoustic tone whatsoever. As I Lay Dying was one band in the post-hardcore/metalcore circles that, without dispute, used triggers.

Nowadays I recognize this sound in well-produced contemporary groove-inclined metal bands like Gojira or Meshugga. Or, for the fully synthetic route, take a drum-machine driven act like Genghis Tron or Agoraphobic Nosebleed. Point being, metal drums have gotten faster (closer together) and more blatantly synthetic (more regulated waves) to ensure the maximum, inhumane effect with every single impact. This seems to be a phenomenon of Nü-Metal and beyond. Though articulated, the bass drum in, say, a Slayer song, is far from the over-pronounced thwack of, like, Staind. Even drenched rock bands like Pearl Jam can scarcely be relevant in this conversation—you can almost sing a harmony with the drums on “Jeremy.”

So here we have Sonny Moore, aka Skrillex, seven years departed from his post-hardcore/emo outfit, From First to Last. And guess what? That flat, dry, overly articulate kick sound is there, particularly during his six years in the band, where kick breakdowns abounded. Not to the band’s discredit. This was a fine group with long black hair, and Skrillex is a fine electronic artist with long black hair. From First to Last had little choice, as a technically adept band on the increasingly surfeit Epitaph roster, to play to that mix. They had to help keep the Warped Tour alive. It was a rite of passage. And just imagine after all those years playing to mammoth amphitheater stages, Sonny could almost see the sound waves charging from those 12-foot subwoofers, knocking all the “tattooed, pierced, gum-chewing freaks” flat on their heinys. I assume Skrillex’s current expertise with using maximum-impact, minimal bass is, in part, from his years watching the effects of too much of the energy in the wrong direction.

So by the time Skrillex candidly introduced himself in 2010, he wubbed-wubbed blown-out beats and sculpted his bass specifically into some of the hardest-hitting of all time. Now he’s won six Grammys, two of them in 2013. This very development has caused Korn to step out of their dubstep time machine and reinvent their signature sound.

The emo revival is a lie. Nü-Metal 4evar, y’all.

Dale Eisinger is ready to get beat up for this opinion. He's on Twitter — @daleweisinger

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