Lyrics
Korn
Life Is Peachy
Follow The Leader
Issues
Untouchables
Jonathan Davis :
vocals, bagpipes
Fieldy : bass
David Silveria : drums, percussion
James "Munky" Shaffer : guitars
Brian "Head" Welch : guitars
Musical revolutions can foment in the oddest places: Athens, Georgia.
Aberdeen, Washington. Bakersfield, California.
That's right, Bakersfield; a bleak, arid little town just west of Death
Valley that could double as a David Lynch movie set-if there were anything
going on, that is. As a kid Fieldy spent much of his adolescence
"standing around in dirt fields, drinking beer, watching other kids
fight." At some point, Fieldy and some friends decided their time would
be better spent taking out their frustrations on musical instruments
instead. And rock music would never be the same.
So Fieldy, James "Munky" Shaffer, David Silveria, Brian
"Head" Welch, and eventually, an assistant coroner with a troubled
past named Jonathan Davis left Bakersfield for Los Angeles and collectively
became known as KORN. It helped that they all had common influences-the
angry, urban stylings of hip-hop, the heavy, riff-driven angst of death
metal. But the sounds emanating from this band's Huntington Beach rehearsal
space would soon set an entirely fresh musical precedent-and set off a wave
of imitators that eventually threatened to engulf the band itself.
After touring for nearly two years, KORN was signed by Immortal and released
their now-classic eponymous 1994 debut. KORN opened with the prophetic,
gravel-throated challenge "Are you ready?!" before kicking into
the heaviest guitar sound yet heard in rock thanks to the team of Shaffer
and Welch, who tuned their already-low 7-string guitars even lower and
played with no regard for traditional harmonic consonance. The sound was
metallic sludge, but tempered oddly by bassist Fieldy and drummer Silveria,
who added a mix of porn-soundtrack funk and hip-hop rhythms that was
puzzlingly aggressive and chill. Next, nursery-rhyme-like melodies were
woven into the dark mix, helping make KORN the creepiest, heaviest debut
since Black Sabbath. But Davis had no desire to sing about devils and
witches; he was busy exorcising real-life demons. Songs such as "Faget"
and "Shoots and Ladders" were discomfortingly personal
confessionals of shattered childhood, and by album's end Davis was literally
in tears in the harrowing "Daddy."
"Are you ready?!" Well, commercial radio sure wasn't. And neither
was MTV. Not yet, anyway. So KORN took their grisly show on the road
someplace they knew it'd get noticed: back to the tour circuit, and a stint
on Ozzfest. The band's unique sound may have been unfamiliar, but the kids
knew it rocked mightily-and many of them could directly relate to Davis'
grim lyrical obsessions. At that point in time, there was quite simply no
band on earth like KORN.
And so they began to amass a following that would send their next album,
1996's brutal yet cheekily titled Life is Peachy, into platinum sales. And
this time at least the press was ready. "...Perverts, psychopaths and
paranoiacs" gushed the Chicago Tribune. "An ingeniously twisted
piece of personal hell" raved Cleveland's Plain Dealer. And while
Peachy served more to reinforce the band's core sound rather than innovate
in the manner of the debut, it did introduce to the world to a side of the
band no one ever suspected existed: humor. The bagpipe-driven cover version
of War's "Lowrider" was just one example. An A-Z dictionary of
vulgarity called "K@#%!" was another-though some critics and
self-appointed moral guardians were put off by the language. One Zeeland,
Michigan high school administrator told the press that KORN was
"indecent, vulgar, and obscene" shortly after suspending a student
for wearing a T-shirt that merely said "KORN." After the band
filed a cease-and-desist order against the school on behalf of the student,
he was reinstated. But the episode marks yet another milestone for the band:
it was the first of many times the band would go to bat for its fans.
Years of touring followed again as the band fortified its fan-base to the
degree that their next album, 1998's Follow the Leader, would debut at No. 1
on Billboard's Top 200. The band charted two bona fide singles with
"Got the Life" and "Freak on a Leash," while the album's
actual "rap-metal" tracks ("Children of the KORN" with
guest rapper Ice Cube, and "All in the Family" with guest abuser
Fred Durst) were some of the band's hardest-hitting to date, and reaffirmed
their status as the band by which others would be judged in this genre.
Others seemed to agree. Rolling Stone christened Follow the Leader one of
the best alternative albums of the '90s, praising KORN's ability to channel
"their disgust with the state of the nation-and the generation doomed
to inherit it-into booming, articulate violence."
Booming, articulate violence aside, Follow the Leader exposed yet another
side of KORN. When a 14-year-old boy suffering from terminal intestinal
cancer requested to meet the band for a few minutes through the Make-A-Wish
foundation, the band was stunned. And nervous. But they hit it off, and the
few minutes turned into a day, and that turned into a few more days, and
then a song-"Justin."
Reaffirming KORN's populist roots were their weekly live Internet video
broadcasts from the studio during the album's making. These "after
school specials" kept fans up on the progress of the record, offered
them live, call-in Q&A sessions with the band themselves, and introduced
them to guests running the gamut from members of 311, the Deftones, and Limp
Bizkit to porn stars like Ron Jeremy and Randi Rage.
In yet another populist move, the band launched "KORN Kampaign
'98," a political campaign-style American tour to promote their album
that featured "fan conferences" in major cities throughout the
country. KORN also put together a heavy-rock-and-rap arena circus, mockingly
called the Family Values Tour, which featured everyone from Ice Cube to Limp
Bizkit to Rammstein, and proved to be one of 1998's most successful tours. A
live compilation CD, The Family Values Tour '98, was certified gold the
following summer, when KORN performed an explosive set at Woodstock '99.
Meanwhile, KORN's record label Elementree
was up and running just fine as its first signed act, Orgy, scored a
platinum record for them with Candyass. By now, almost every heavy band on
the planet was playing down-tuned 7-string guitars (which were virtually
extinct before KORN). The proliferation of sound-alike bands ironically
placed the band in a tenuous position: Not only was KORN in danger of
seeming "played out" in the very genre they spearheaded, the
beginnings of a backlash to "rap-metal" chart domination were
cropping up in the media. KORN knew that another Peachy or Leader, however
great, however welcome by fans, and however commercially successful, would
not do. It was time to reinvent themselves and break from the pack-a risky
move given the band's traditionally loyal following. KORN took some time off
to work on what would be one of the most important records of their career.
"We knew when we wrote this album that we were going to have to do
something really great," Shaffer said at the time. "...We had to
move forward, push the boundaries, and create something very personal."
In yet another nod to their audience, KORN allowed the fans to design the
cover. Fans submitted their work, and one fan painting was chosen for the
record's striking cover art. Several runners-up got limited-edition album
covers of their own work. Musically, Issues turned out to be the best album
since the group's debut release, and eclipsed even that record in strength
of songwriting. When Issues was finally released, all the band's efforts
paid off wildly. For the second time in their career, they debuted at No. 1.
They had yet another high-charting single with the eerie, crushing
"Falling Away From Me." And the record went quadruple platinum.
This was followed by yet another massively successful tour, which kicked off
on Halloween 1999 at Harlem's historic Apollo Theater. If Issues represented
an artistic, critical, and commercial triumph at a crucial moment for the
band, how would KORN respond to the inevitable pressure of its follow-up?
By making a better one: Untouchables. Using a 24-BIT sampling rate-twice the
highest rate normally used for recording-KORN and producer Michael Beinhorn
have created a rich sonic panorama. Unfathomably heavy, uncompromisingly
introspective, and startlingly unique, Untouchables catapults KORN to yet
another level.
But what should we expect? After all, this is a band marked by an
insatiable desire to push the rock envelope. It's what makes them KORN.