How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Korn

Tabs currently open: a random King Diamond-related Wikipedia article, Grooveshark, petition for a third Alice game (SIGN IT BITCHES: http://www.thepetitionsite.com/372/809/248/make-american-mcgees-alice-in-otherland-a-reality/?cid=FB_TAF_CIT), OKCupid, this, porn, and a writing blog that isn't mine.  I've been alternately checking the slowly-increasing amount of signatures, pecking away at a reply message to a sweet young lady from my dad's hometown, trying to figure out what the FUCK this post is gonna be about, yearning for my pre-bed fap, and reading that other thing.

For you prudes weirded out by the fact that I've touched my wiener a couple times during the writing of this post, I posit to ye: calm thy tits, it's the 21st century.

KIDDING.  No sperms were harmed during the making of this post.

But at last I decided to stop being a bum and pull up my list o' ideas.  Lo, at the top of the list, was the title above.  Simply cuz I'm proud of that title, even if I may not be able to provide a real ending (again), I feel I owe it to myself to turn it into a real thing.

Suggested by the above title, I used to freaking hate Korn.

I can't imagine why.

A lot of it I'm guessing had to do with Jonathan Davis' voice.  I realized a few years ago, some years after first being exposed to them, that I liked everything else besides the general tones of his caterwauling.  The rhythm section, the riffing, the imagery, their use of electronics and studio tricks, how unique their sound was/is/whatever, the fact that Todd McFarlane animated multiple music videos for them, even most of their lyrics.  You know, when they weren't cobbling together various nursery rhymes and calling them songs.  Seriously Jonathan, what the fuck?

It was just the dude's voice that sometimes ground my gears.  To me, it sounded like someone doing a bad Marilyn Manson impression.  Over the years, I've come to terms with this, realizing I've gotten over even less accessible vocal stylings in the past, so why should I let something like that hamper me from listening to something I otherwise truly enjoy?  Sorry, what's that?  Because music typically has lots of vocals and they can make or break a band?

Hm.  Point taken.

In any case, I eventually came to "get" Davis' unorthodox take on the human voice.  It just wouldn't be Korn without the closet monster trying his absolute hardest to sing your angsty self to sleep.

More dreads, less adorable.

All the bonus points in the world if you know what this is from.

What's that?  Time for another Self-Deprecating Disclaimer?!!?!  Yeah, yeah it is.  *Sigh*

So I realized, coming to the "end" of this thang, that there's no real story here.  No one thing that Kornlightened me, no epiphakorn...  Oh dear god, I should've just stopped at "Kornlightened".  Point being, the entire "arc" was this:

1) Disliked Korn.

2) Got over myself.

3) Liked Korn.

Holy rig-ma-roley, there's not even a point to this.  Have a creepy drawing.

Weird that I think this is awesome?

richardakirk.com

Dead-Trend Friends

Well, this is probably gonna be a pretty short one, at least compared to the other posts so far, just some observations on the people I know on a more personal level in the Chicago area music scene (Chicago area I say ah say because a bunch of them are from the Summit/Stickney area, but play shows throughout Chicagoland).

Long story made short, I just recently joined a band.  They're called Lian Paranoia.  Probably about a year ago this time, a friend of mine joined these peeps as main guitarist.  I tagged along to some (a lot of) practices, went to many of their shows, became friends with them, they broke up a while later, stuff happened, I ended up joining as bassist when they got back together like three weeks ago.

I noticed recently that this band I'm now a part of, along with the other bands we're friends with, all represent a different facet of 90s-ish music, certain scenes you don't really see anymore.

Lian Paranoia, I'm not sure what to call besides "nu metal" without mashing together a bunch of terms to try to invent a genre.  Yeah it's not metal per se, but it's too heavy to be just "rock" or "alternative" (sorry, I think those terms are pretty outdated; the music world's just grown too large), and I'm personally against the term "alternative metal" existing, simply because just about every single band under that unfortunate label can be considered either nu metal or post-grunge, which are actual things.  To paint a better picture, I'd describe them (I still have trouble referring to LP as "us", as I've yet to write any material with them) as Alice Cooper meets Tool.  The theatricality, personality, subject matter, and heavy metaphor of the former with the raw emotion (thanks to our singer, Rob), heaviness, progressitivity (made up a word, deal with it), and time-changey polyrhythmic goodness of the latter.

Second band of this wee scene I befriended are a group called Short Story Inc.  They're a bit harder to define in a sense of where they fit into my bring-back-the-90s fever-vision, but they give me a distinctly out-of-time feel even if I could technically see their music thriving in today's day and age (which good God, just like the rest of the bands on here, I hope it does).  Think the thrashy skate-punk that only the 90s could properly deliver meets emo (bear with me a second here) back when it was still a type of hardcore.  And I mean REAL hardcore, not Warped-Tour-core.  Uber-personal lyrics, hard-edged yet strangely melodic guitars, heavy emphasis on vocal play.

Third would be Adisent, from Stickney.  Less hard to define but no less awesome, Adisent are a post-grunge WHERE THE FUCK YOU THINK YOU'RE GOING.  You will sit the fuck back down and read about my friends' bands.  Okay, they're post-grunge, but not in the way you might first think of.  They have catchy riffs instead of four-guitar-thick Howard-Bensoned power chord progressions, a tight three-piece dynamic, and, get this: good, intelligent lyrics.  Seriously, this guy sings me gravelly poetry.

Lastly and not leastly, unless by "least" you mean "youngest", we have the high-school-age heavy-hitters, Uptown Mayhem.  Pop-punk before it all sounded THE GODDAMN SAME.  Healthy blend of early, non-suck Green Day and Blink-182 with a hearty dose of All-American Rejects.

So there you have it, the Dead-Trend Friends.  Hopefully they'll read this (hmm... should probably start actually telling people about this blog), and it'll catch on and it'll be the name of an awesome tour.  Am I totally plugging the band I just joined plus the other local acts I like?  Totally.  Should you check them the fuck out?  Abso-tota-lutely.

TL;DR:
Listen to Lian Paranoia, Short Story Inc., Adisent, and Uptown Mayhem.  Like now.
Or I might cut you.

Did Linkin Park Kill Nu-Metal?

This is an entry I've been meaning to do for a while, alternately pecking at it and letting it sit because I really, really, really want to do right by what's in my head, not just write the usual drivel like "Uhhhhhh yeahhhh maannn totally, like, stuff, opinion".

But short answer: yes.  They did.

Admittedly, yeah, a lot of nu metal's either silly (Limp Bizkit) or alienating (Korn).  However, we did get some seriously legit music out of the movement, whether it be rife with hooks and poetic lyrics (SOAD and Deftones), some stuff that, despite its harshness, has an artistic and proggy color to its sallow cheeks (Mudvayne, Soulfly).  By the end of the 90s and early 2000s, we're getting some crossover; bands like Disturbed on the radio, Deftones wins a Grammy, little victories like that.  It seems like this stuff could be a lot less niche, like if more artistic minds dabbled into the grungy, oily ore that is the sound I've come to love, then it could be a more appreciated, more established... I don't know, thing.

So we come to the genre's apex, the tipping point before it could be re-upped for the next decade, it's making or breaking point, right before half the bands watered themselves down into post-grunge and the other half flat-out disappeared or stopped caring about gaining new fans.  Hybrid Theory hits it big.

I should've made an outline for this stupid article... argh.  Anyways, soldier on!

So Hybrid Theory does a couple things.  One, it does arguably give the genre a little jolt of life.  By dominating the alternative airwaves, they allowed other such bands (like some of the ones I named above) to stay the "cool thing" for a couple years longer.  Two, it takes the Promethean fire of nu metal and gives it to the Future Scene Kids of America, a big chunk of America's youth that really doesn't get the zeitgeist that this music comes from, something I'm not sure how to feel about, being part of the sub-generation born only a couple short years before Cobain ate gunsmoke, a totally separate chunk of youth that may not be able to call themselves 90s kids, but certainly aren't 2000s kids.  Three, they broadened the definition of "nu metal" (which, in itself, was a broadening of metal), perhaps a bit too much.  What do I mean by that?  Well... I honestly have a really hard time calling them any kind of metal, let alone nu metal.  They're certainly not anymore, but even then...  I mean, you had the attitude, the imagery, harsh + clean vocals, the heavyish guitar, but...  I don't know, I can't quite put my finger on it.  Maybe it's the fact that in place of aggression, they whine and blame, maybe it's the lack of emphasis on riff that their contemporaries have.  Woah now, think about it!  Pretty much all their hooks lie in either Chester's vocals or some electronic trick.  Both are things they do well, but the guitar, more specifically the riff, has always been an integral part of the genre that people associate Linkin Park with, and honestly with them it just sounds a little... thin.  Where the hell was I?

Right, nu metal, dead.  Got it.  So how exactly did Linkin Park derail this once-proud musical mutation?  Not exactly sure...  Shit, maybe it was a death of natural causes and perhaps I'm just blaming LP cuz they're the last and most popular act of a scene they were arguably part of; maybe I'm blaming them because they had the ball and they dropped it, showing everyone that "hey, if Linkin Park can't even (or don't want to) keep this up then why should/could anyone else?"  Maybe they paved the way for half the post-nineties aggro acts to undergo the horrible transformation into post-grunge.  Well, whatever it was, that tipping point I was talking about earlier?  I can't help but feel like they pushed it back the other way.

A Wild Serj Appears... It's Pretty Fucking Effective

I couldn't tell you when I first became interested in nineties music and, more importantly, what it represents to me.  First nineties band I really listened to consistently was System of a Down, which all started with, of course, Chop Suey.  I was at an "Eighth Grade Lock-In".  In case you, dear reader, don't know what that is, it's exactly what it sounds like.  Unless it sounds like a bunch of eighth-graders being locked in somewhere and hunted down one by one, which would have been awesome, but that's not what happened to us.  Unless it sounds like an eighth-grader with locked-in syndrome, which is not very awesome, and is actually tragic and horrible.  That also didn't happen, thankfully.  Unless you think it sounds like being locked into the body of an eighth-grader, which would also be fucking terrible, especially if you couldn't control what the eighth-grader was doing and you were forced to just watch through their eyes as they ran around being retarded eighth-graders.  The "Eighth Grade Lock-In" was not this either.  What it was, and what I'm pretty sure it sounds like, is the eighth grade gets to stay at the school overnight and there's a fuckton of sweet activities.  Actually, a couple of them were pretty lame, but they were fun because everybody was there, friends or otherwise.  It was... a really surreal night, because of this.  Not so much because everyone was there, but because everyone was there AND, for once in our eighth grade lives, no one was a dick to anyone else.  For that reason alone, what was basically a guided activities fair was made awesome.  Or, shit, maybe I'm just looking at this all through rose-colored glasses and it was actually pretty abominable.  I really can't remember.  Relating to the first sentence of this obnoxiously long paragraph, my memory has more holes than... than uh... something with a lot of holes in it.

So when the hell did I hear Chop Suey in any of this?  I'm glad you asked!  One of the activities, which took place in the band room, was drumming!  Not on a real drum set though.  We all got these different sorts of tribal drums, which was pretty cool.  We were seated in I think three semi-rings around the front of the band room, where there was a real drum set.  Seated behind this real drum set was an alum of our middle school, who was now in high school.  Oooooooooo.  Some dude who I think taught at her music school introduced the activity, told us who she was (I don't remember her name at all; not like I'd put it up here if I did), and allowed her a demonstration.  Then this random chick drummed to Chop Suey.  And it was fucking awesome, and I probably got a boner, cuz that girl, who I'm pretty sure was like a solid 6.5 in my eighth-grade eyes (my standards were ridiculously high back then for no good reason) rocketed up to a 9 because, let's be real, playing an instrument alone, no matter the kind of music, gives you a one-point-minimum bonus.

Unfortunately, we didn't get to drum along to Chop Suey, even on our silly tribal drums (like we could have).

So the night wore on and we dicked around there was a dance and shit and stuff happened, I don't really remember/care.  That's a lie, I do, it's a good memory, it's just important to the general thingus of this entry.  I slept through the next day, since I hadn't caught a wink the night before (not that I'd wanted to).  All through this, through the way-too-much soda, through the bouncehouses in the gym and the dance and the next day's power-nap, I remembered one phrase in particular: "my self-righteous suicide".  Soon as I woke up, I was googling it.

And holy fuck was I confused.  I kept getting results for "Chop Suey".  What the fuck?  Bitch, I'm trying to look up the title to a world-thrash masterpiece.  I am clearly not interested in Chinese food.  Not at the moment.  That's how powerful this song was to me (well, still is).  My constant interest in a heaping, steaming plate of General Tso's was temporarily put on the backburner by this one goddamned song that I needed to find the name of.  Seriously, it was starting to get to me.  The links I was clicking on kept talking about putting on makeup and putting keys up on tables and I knew for a fact that the song I'd heard had no mention of Chinese food, nor could it be about that.  Actually, knowing System of a Down, that could very well be the case.  They're quite sneaky.  Like a song about pizza called Chic 'N' Stu.  Who thinks of that shit?

So I must not have been reading the full lyrics it showed online, because for whatever reason, I didn't see/notice the "self-righteous suicide" that all the kids were talking about.  Finally, I relented and plugged this "Chop Suey System of a Down" into the YouTubes.  And lo, it was the first taste of nu-metal and ergo the nineties that my pubescing angry mind had been secretly searching for this whole time.  After listening to Chop Suey at least a dozen times, I wiled away the rest of the day listening to whatever else YouTube had to offer me in the way of these four Armenian gentlemen that wrote what is, to this day, some of the most arresting and ball-grabbing music I've heard on more levels than just "Hey, this is pretty heavy".  I wasn't a happy kid in middle school.  But for once, I'd managed to have two great days in a row.  And that was a wonderful feeling.