Korn

A sun-drenched park. A little girl, alone on a swing, stares in terror at a man standing before her, of whom only a long, menacing shadow can be seen, as if foreshadowing violence or murder. Chills run down your spine at the mere thought of what might have happened the moment after. A disturbing memory, a nightmare, or the image of a purity about to be destroyed. Perhaps the symbol of an endless inner ordeal that Jonathan Davis, vocalist and frontman of Korn, is forced to reckon with. The word "singer" might be too small a term for someone like Davis: his way of singing, with its thicket of masks of pain, terror and despair, belongs more to acting than to music. The sound of "Korn" is all right there, in that cover, in those masks.

Davis explores every emotional manifestation of the human voice; his expressionism knows no limits: whispers, grunts, moans, screams and shrieks (including the growl, the guttural vocal style typical of death metal), whimpers, weeping. This chilling repertoire even swallows up so-called nursery rhymes, the old folk rhymes told to children in kindergartens, their innocent spirit defiled by the abominable sonic carnage delivered by Brian Welch and James "Munky" Shaffer (guitars), David Silveria (drums) and Reginald Arvizu (bass).

It's easy to take potshots at the band that gave, willingly or not, its artistic seed to such dreadful offshoots as Limp Bizkit, Linkin Park or Staind. It's even easier when that band has achieved, and keeps achieving, enormous success among young people worldwide. Music for depressed teenagers? Far from it. Korn, in fact, are victims of the same prejudice that also struck another major band of the Nineties: Nirvana. Kurt Cobain screamed his pain to the world, but he did it for himself, without expecting or even imagining that his voice would become a mouthpiece for his generation. In the same way, Jonathan Davis poured his personal hell into music, a hell that belonged solely to his own soul.

The record industry, promotion, heavy media exposure and the idolatry of teenagers did the rest. Rock sociology often spawns useless myths, if not outright harmful ones, for the pure appreciation of music. And there is plenty of music to appreciate on Korn's debut, music that at the time felt new, rich with original stylistic solutions, later filed away under the often misleading label of nu-metal.

Korn, in fact, arrived at a moment when "chart-topping" heavy metal was, from a qualitative standpoint, drifting off course, weighed down by often self-indulgent output (see the prog-metal of Dream Theater, already repetitive and pompous by then) or by the heavy loss of inspiration suffered by the genre's sacred monsters (Iron Maiden and Metallica, right in the first half of the Nineties, began a downward spiral they would never climb out of).

It was inevitable, then, that "Korn" would strike a chord with those looking for a modern path into metal that wasn't holed up in niches too hard to track down. The crossover of Rage Against The Machine and Red Hot Chili Peppers was fed with stylistic devices lifted from the thrash metal of Sepultura, the industrial of Ministry, the grunge of Mudhoney, Screaming Trees and Soundgarden, and the dark-wave of Virgin Prunes.

It's pointless, then, to go through every track on the record: the stylistic formula never changes, and the album, solid and cohesive, plays like a one-way trip into the depths of a restless soul.

The twelve songs on "Korn" are very simple in terms of musical construction: at their core are elementary melodies that get torn apart by primitive harmonies and rhythms. It's like the musical equivalent of a Willem de Kooning painting: a stylized figure is sketched out (in Korn's case, a melodic figure) and then tormented with violent, clotted smears of color (a flourish of psychotic screams, apocalyptic rhythms and hair-raising riffs).

Still, some of the album's most representative tracks can be singled out. For instance: the descent into darkness of "Blind", opened by jagged guitar riffs and Davis's strangled scream; "Ball Tongue", a kind of feral, gothic-tinged hip-hop; the desecration of childhood in "Shoots And Ladders", introduced by a funereal drone of Scottish bagpipes.

"Daddy", the album's closing track, is one of the masterpieces of Nineties rock; a psychological drama with Conradian overtones: the heart of darkness of a boy forced to grow up too fast, swallowed up by the cruelty of events beyond his own shadow line. "Daddy" opens with a prayer (a liturgical choir intones "Mother please forgive me"), and ends in the darkest recesses of the psyche, with Davis in tears cursing the "piece of shit" who had raped him years before (the final line is damning: "I hate you"). In between: the obsessive slap of the bass, the harmonic wreckage of the guitars, the beat of a sick heart in the ominous drumming, and the suffering, the immense suffering of a child.

The pain remains, even for someone who became a rock star, but ghosts can be exorcised, and having done so with "Korn", Davis and his bandmates probably should have walked away from the music scene right then: the exorcism had worked, the miracle had happened, and miracles don't repeat themselves.

Starting with the following album, "Life Is Peachy" - a good record in its own right - Korn's communicative power would slowly begin to fade, replaced by a desire as pedantic as it was childish to recreate that mental and sonic hell which, by then, had already been processed and extinguished.

The music had done its job, had become therapy, the ultimate healing act, giving Davis an unexpected sense of lightness and leaving Korn stranded in an inexplicable artistic void, one they would keep scraping the bottom of, until they became pale caricatures of themselves.

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26/10/2008