NÜ Metal and the last 25 years of American Politics
Hi Everyone!
Sorry for the extended absence there—turns out that introducing A Roomful Of Freshman to the glories of The Gilded Age and Progressive Era takes a lot of time. Lecturing. Who knew?
As always—anything you can do to spread the good word about Money4Nothing is greatly appreciated. Tell a friend! Harangue a passersby! And, of course, you can also upgrade to the paid version of this newsletter, which helps support the work that we do.
Ok—now that that’s out of the way.
I wanted to write today about our recent episode about Nu Metal—the much scorned style that ran through heavy rock during the ‘90s and early aughts, dominating both it AND the mainstream charts around the turn of the Millennium. You know the bands: Linkin Park, Slipknot, Limp Bizkit, Korn, System of a Down, current-critical-favorite Deftones, etc.
For most of the past 20 years, it is music that’s been almost entirely beyond the critical pale within both music journalism and the listening public among which it still has sway. Put it this way: Pitchfork—a solid proxy for the collective taste of “a very passionate audience of millennial males” (in the immortal words of Conde Nast)—published exactly TWO reviews of those 6 bands during their commercial prime.
One is half-hearted praise for the SOAD double album. The other is a 4.7 takedown of the Deftones’ self-titled that is either made up of poorly written fake readers letters OR has been entirely scrubbed from the internet. And honestly, that refusal to engage is probably kinder than much of the critical and cultural response. It’s 2024 and they still have never reviewed a Korn record. Not even for their Sunday review section.
What makes this rejection more interesting is the sheer number of records these bands moved. Compare, for example, garage-revival titans The Strokes to Slipknot. Who do you think sold more? And by how much? It’s Slipknot—roughly 30 million to the Strokes 5 and change. A 600% difference. And if Slipknot were…I dunno…Staind, maybe the discussion could end there. But instead, they were mask-wearing, percussion-heavy, drum’n’bass sampling weirdos that roared out of Des Moines with a style that somehow mixed of industrial, post-hardcore, faith no more style density, noise-rock, and turntabilism.
And they’re not alone! Think about Korn, inventing whatever their sound is in Bakersfield. Or Linkin Park, basing their entire multi-platinum aesthetic around anime decades before that was culturally mainstream.
And in a moment when other acts (looking at you, Beck) were getting critically lauded for producing precisely this kind of post-modern, post-genre kaleidoscope, these bands and their fans were dismissed, pretty-much out of hand. According to “CEO of Nu Metal” Holiday Kirk, the process was fundamentally about taste. Nu Metal bands, he argues, simply weren’t cool. They sold out too readily. They were too loud. Too eager, and too dumb, even in their (frequent) brilliance. The style is fundamentally imperfect, he argues, fundamentally gauche, and has therefore been invisible to the aesthetic guardians of modern rock culture.
I think he’s onto something. But I’d also like to push it a bit further. Because taste, and how it’s understood, is frequently about class. And the low critical status of Nu Metal, despite its clear relationship to many of the characteristics that are frequently understood/positioned as providing aesthetic value in contemporary society, suggests that something deeper is going on. Why isn’t Nu Metal respected? What did that lack of respect mean? And what were the consequences? Or to put it another way: Why is Slipknot “for goth kids at hot topic” and not “ugly music post-industrial society” the way… I dunno… Future or DJ Screw or other equally radical stylists are sometimes positioned.
To get a better perspective, let’s go to the belly of the beast, shall we? Limp Bizkit, Woodstock ‘99. Absolutely peak pre-millenial tension.
And to be clear—a lot of this is toxic. It’s white male rage, directed at the world in general. The concert was, notoriously, a disaster—full of violence and rampant sexual assault. And the vibe onstage echoes the crowd. It’s not a good scene.
However, it’s possible to look at this, knowing everything that we know about what happens next in American history, and get a faint sense of why these kids might have been so angry.
We know that real incomes had been dropping since the ‘80s, that unionization had plummeted, that NAFTA was around the corner. We know that the dotcom bubble was about to pop, and that the technology-based corrosion of social stability was already well under way. There was a meth epidemic (hitting smaller, post-industrial towns particularly heavy at first), then the opioid epidemic.
Of course, that doesn’t explain it all—culture doesn’t map neatly onto economic fundamentals. But I also have a hard time dismissing this outpouring of often-violent angst as just people being dumb and gross and bad. Dumb and gross and bad are part of it, for sure. But they simply can’t be the whole of a cultural form, I don’t think. Certainly not one that occupies the scale of commercial space that Nu Metal held. Poptimism, remember?
And then there’s a moment, at about 2 minutes, when the band hits a vamp, and Fred Durst talks to the crowd— “You got girl problems? You got boy problems? You got parent problems? You got job problems? You got a problem with me? You got a problem with yourself? It’s time to take that negative energy, and put it the fuck out.” It’s Chad-catharsis—ugly, but also potentially transformative. “Give me something to break,” he almost pleads. “Give me something to break.”
It’s weird music! Fred whining over stolen hip hop beats, pants sagging, Wes Borland in a painted mask, freaking out. The band lurching from hit to hit, ending with their cover of George Michael’s Faith. Problematic, but also…clearly and directly and self-consciously linked to the wellsprings of American popular music—the sonic innovations of Black styles like Rap and the cross-racial possibilities of Rock’n’Roll.
Yes, the band is absolutely drenched in appropriation. But I think there’s an argument to be made that it’s a music with potential for connection—unlike, say, all too-much of the recent hip-hop influence country music that has ultimately replaced it.
And really, it feels like that’s where this ended up. Rock—popular rock, populist rock, the last genre of rock with real chart appeal—got more or less written out of the critical cannon. And at least partially as a result, the music split. A lot of people (organized by taste or class or adjacency to college radio) went and listened to Grizzly Bear. A different set of bands continued to produce music for the dwindling mainstream of “Modern Rock Radio.” And the genre, probably already doomed to eventual obsolescence, collapsed as a genuine popular force, the space it once held occupied by Rap and EDM and (to what I would guess is a sociologically significant extent) Country.
I keep thinking here of a remarkable statistic about professional wrestling (a not unrelated audience). In 1999, their viewers “leaned democratic.” Today, the Trump/Wrestling connection is well established. It’s emblematic of a broader political shift in American society—the extensively documented move of white, non-colleged-educated voters towards the political right, and the culture of grievance. Looking at images of the Woodstock ‘99 crowd, it’s hard not to see a connection between the rejection of Nu Metal and the cultural splits that have remade our nation in the last decade and a half. And it’s hard to worry about the possibilities—however tenuous—that feel like they were lost.
You can listen to that episode hear.
Department of Actual Music:
Sam: It’s fully and officially fall, which means…folk-rock. A perfect song that I cannot believe is played by a single guitarist.
Saxon: Klaus Krüger also known as Klaus Krieger played in Tangerine Dream and used to drum for Iggy Pop. Also, rumor has it he’s an Art History PhD in Berlin now. If that wasn’t cool enough, check out this vibe-y spoken word improvisational free jazz ambient number directing you to participate in a performance piece.
Saxon & Sam