A Nu Look at Nu-Metal
I think it’s time for me to interrogate the embarrassment I feel over my teenage nu-metal phase.
If you’re not familiar, nu-metal was basically a rock sub-genre that consisted of all the dark viscousness of heavy metal, absent most of the musical ability, plus all the angst of Kurt Cobain, absent most of the charm. It sprouted up from soil freshly tilled by recent music history: A decade earlier, hair metal had given way to grunge, which brought rock and roll from the party to the pouty. Once the grunge wave had broken, its propensity for sadness and pessimism lingered, which, combined with a hard rock power vacuum and the ascendant popularity of hip hop in the suburbs, added up to the perfect recipe for a new genre. With bands whose members came from the swamps and deserts of America — Jacksonville, Florida; Bakersfield, California — this genre flourished from the late nineties to the early 2000s. Some called it rap-rock. Some called it nu-metal. Most, probably, called it shit.
I, however, was not a member of this majority. I was 13 or 14, and I was obsessed with nu-metal. I wrote System of a Down lyrics on my backpack. My first concert had Staind as the opener and Korn as the headliner. I had a Slipknot T-shirt that said “fuck” on it, and I felt like the baddest kid in town when I wore it.
Twenty-odd years later, nu-metal exists largely as a punchline in many social circles. When I see my high school friends, I pray none of them bring up some anecdote that involves my bygone love for the genre. Today, when I occasionally throw on a nu-metal song just for the sake of communing with my past, I subsequently embark on a frantic effort to figure out how to clear my Spotify history.
Nu-metal bands had a curious preoccupation with insanity, mental instability, and sadness that felt overstated and, frankly, a little ridiculous.
The mockery of nu-metal has two primary factors. The first, frankly, is that it’s bad. Most of these people could not sing, play guitar very well, or write a good riff. The second is that nu-metal bands had a curious preoccupation with insanity, mental instability, and sadness that felt overstated and, frankly, a little ridiculous. Take Limp Bizkit guitarist Wes Borland, who would paint his face a ghostly white, put black contact lenses in his eyes, and stare wide-eyed with his head tilted to the side — the kind of evocation of insanity that feels more native to an amusement park haunted house than to a rock concert.
Then there were the lyrics. They chanted things like “nothing wrong with me, something’s got to give, let the bodies hit the floor.” One Slipknot song opens with masked frontman Corey Taylor simply screaming “Insane!” and, later, “I’m hearing voices!” I can’t count how many nu-metal songs feature frontmen beseeching their songs’ subjects, either in a gruff bellow or a meek whimper, to “go away.” Korn frontman Jonathan Davis was known to spontaneously start speaking in tongues; sometimes, he would actually break down and finish the song screaming through tears. Coal Chamber even mounted a clumsy attempt at Spanish-crazy in one of their choruses: Eight repetitions of the phrase “me loco” — a lyric which, in its imitation of someone speaking broken English, would likely come off a bit problematic today.
The irony is that nu-metal — and grunge, for that matter — surged at a time when, on paper at least, things in our society were pretty good. The nineties had their problems and injustices like any other era. But the economy was booming. It was the pre-9/11 era before the U.S. was mired in chronic military conflict in the Middle East, before the state of being at war was constant and essentially a given. A single school shooting in Colorado sparked a months-long national reckoning and reexamination of the culture, however misguided (Was it video games? Was it Marilyn Manson?); now we’re so cynical that these shootings get lost in the news cycle like everything else. While global warming was a thing, most people were still blissfully unaware of the severity of the coming climate catastrophe, and we had a lot more time to avert it. In hindsight, from our current historical perch, I want to grab these nu-metal guys by the shoulders and shake them and scream “What the hell were you so upset about?!”
But that’s the part that needs interrogating. Because whatever the historical context, and however bad the music may have been, I’m starting to think that these bands were doing us a service with all their wallowing. After all, as teenagers, my peers and I were much more open about anxiety and depression than our parents were at that age, and we’ve now grown up to remove much of the stigma around these things. That’s a good thing, and a lot of it might be thanks to nu-metal. Instead of scorning my nu-metal phase, maybe I should be giving these bands credit for helping normalize mental illness at a time when most of their audience hadn’t yet come to fully understand why that matters. Sure, they may have been commodifying angst and teenage depression, but how much does that matter if the end result was to teach kids that it’s okay to be open about those feelings?
Instead of scorning my nu-metal phase, maybe I should be giving these bands credit for helping normalize mental illness at a time when most of their audience hadn’t yet come to fully understand why that matters.
Besides, it wasn’t all bad. Some nu-metal actually holds up. Limp Bizkit’s debut album, Three Dolla Bill, Y’all, has some shit on it that still slaps. Slipknot’s first record still rips, too. I don’t think Deftones and System of a Down put out a single album that doesn’t kick at least a little ass, even to this day. So next time you feel like making a nu-metal joke, I’d encourage you instead to reflect a bit, to give it another chance, an honest listen from today’s historical remove. Hell, really lean into it: cut some thumb holes into your long-sleeve, paint your fingernails black, and throw on a Korn album. You may be surprised at what still resonates.