Follow the Leader - Nu-Metal and Me

by editor Michele Catalano

I’ve been through phases before. When I was a teen I had a southern rock phase where I wore a suede cowboy hat and fringed suede vest and went to Marshall Tucker concerts. There was my new wave phase, replete with spiked hair and ripped stockings and, much later, a regrettable Harry Connick style crooner phase. These were mostly harmless phases, maybe even wholesome. Nobody bothered me about it.

It wasn’t until much later that I entered a new phase in my life that people questioned me about. I had kickstarted a nu-metal phase, much to the chagrin of every single person in my life save for my youngest sister, who absolutely encouraged me every step of the way.

Nu-metal was kind of a niche genre in early 1997. You’d mostly hear that style of music on college radio stations or you’d see the videos on MuchMusic’s Loud program, if you were lucky enough to get that with your cable package. I was fortunate I had both, so I got on the nu-metal train early. Something happened that year that made nu-metal blow up. Where before I only had my sister to talk with about bands like Incubus and Korn and Coal Chamber, I was starting to hear more and more people mention it.

Suddenly the AOL chat rooms I had been visiting to talk about music were all about nu-metal. Radio stations were playing Korn. I still had to work to hear most nu-metal bands. I taped Loud diligently, catching bands like Deftones, whose music blew my mind, and Limp Bizkit, whose frontman Fred Durst captured my interest. I went to Uncle Phil’s record store and asked Phil for nu-metal CDs. I was all in.

1998 was just an incredible year for the genre. While the albums that came out in ‘97 were phenomenal, nu-metal exploded in ‘98. System of a Down blew down the door on the scene with their debut album. Spineshank, Cold, Soulfly, Godsmack, Fear Factory. Oh, how that Fear Factory album (Obsolete) blew my mind. But it was Korn’s Follow the Leader that really invigorated me, made me realize this genre was more than a passing phase.

It was a strange year for me. My divorce was finalized in ‘98 and that milestone filled me with adrenaline born of both anger and relief. And what type of music could be better for anger fueled adrenaline than nu-metal? Most specifically, Korn’s Follow the Leader, which is a dark, angry album with pounding rhythms and screaming lyrics, perfect for my constant mood, as well as Limp Bizkit’s Three Dollar Bill, Y’all which is angry but not nearly a dark as Korn. They were twin albums for me, yin and yang, two parts of a whole. Bizkit’s iffy cover of “Faith” notwithstanding, Three Dollar Bill is a superb album that truly spoke to me at the time. These guys understood me, they got me. Sure, I was older than most of the fans. Who cares? Angst is wasted on the young.

I was living my life on a very fine edge, straddling between heavy drinking and problem drinking, seething on a regular basis, not eating, not sleeping and being wholly unbothered by any of that. I lived for the adrenaline surges. I was manic, invigorated. I wanted to kick someone’s ass and have a good time doing it.

I spent a lot of time on AOL and that is where I met Justin, a guy half my age who found my AOL profile by searching the string “incubus korn limp bizkit.” Justin was the epitome of nu-metal fan. Young, white, angry, bitter. He wore Jnco jeans and band t-shirts and had a wallet chain hanging from his pocket. His hair was swept off to the side and fell down on his face at an angle, a deranged sort of devil lock. It is objectively funny now that I dated this guy, a little less funny that I briefly was married to him. That’s another story.

Justin came to Long Island from Pennsylvania and brought few possessions with him. Mostly just clothes and some records and CDs. Among them was Follow the Leader, his absolute favorite album. We listened to it constantly together, taking some songs as anthems, some as just good fucking tunes. We had different favorites and one of us would always annoy the other by repeating a favorite.

The first Korn song I ever heard was “A.D.I.D.A.S.” I had dismissed them after that but came around on their second album. Hearing “Blind” for the first time with that “ARE YOU READY?” putting you in the passenger seat for a wild ride. In much the same way, Follow the Leader opens with a slow burn and a cathartic yell of “It’s on” and is just relentless from that point. “It’s On” segues into “Freak on a Leash” and you’re off to the races. The album never really lets up on you, feeding you imagery that is sometimes upsetting and uncomfortable, sometimes loaded up with all the energy one derives from a coke bender.

There were great albums in ‘98. We were listening to Kilgore and Orgy and even some Kid Rock. We were tuned into WSOU out of New Jersey, but sometimes we had a hard time tuning in and we’d have to put tinfoil on the antenna of the portable stereo, put it in a precarious position on the windowsill, and fool around with the dial until we could hear Fear Factory’s “Replica” without it breaking up. We drove around in my car on the weekends, taking day trips out east, and we’d blast nu-metal the whole time, me and this too-young-for-me product of his time. Once on one of these trips we stopped a gas station to put air in my front tires; as he bent over to put the valve in the tire, his Jncos fell down to his ankles. I was mortified and amused at the same time. “Dead Bodies Everywhere” was playing in the car. We never said a word to each other about the Jncos Incident.

In the latter half of ‘98 came the Family Values concert. Korn, Bizkit, Rammstein, Orgy, Ice Cube (replaced by Incubus at some point). We saw the show twice, once in Jersey, and once at the Nassau Coliseum on Long Island. Each time I sat in awe as I watched the kids around me going crazy for music I thought was going to be a quick, underground phase. It was phenomenal and inspiring and very, very loud. My love of nu-metal grew.

Later, Justin got a job in the Roadrunner Records art department. He brought home records; albums that hadn’t been heard yet and albums that were being played everywhere. Life of Agony, Machine Head, Slipknot, thing of that nature. We devoured everything he brought home. We were nu-metal experts. Imagine being in a couple where the strongest bond you have is the music listened to by 15 year olds everywhere. Nu-metal truly held us together when we should have fallen apart. This was a relationship not destined to work. But we made it work for a few years because we had this shared love of something that was greater than the both of us.

Through it all, Follow the Leader and Three Dollar Bill were our constants. They weren’t our favorites singularly; mine was Incubus’s S.C.I.E.N.C.E., his was Fear Factory’s Demanufacture. But Korn and Limp Bizkit were our center in the Venn diagram of our lives.

Eventually as our love of nu-metal started to wane in the early 2000s - I had discovered emo, which was at the time in my life more my speed than nu-metal - so did my desire to keep this relationship going. Like nu-metal, it had served its purpose. It was time to move on.

I still listen to all that music. I have my records and I’ll never let them go, especially the Slipknot debut in snot green vinyl. I kind of laugh that era of my life off now. My time with Jncos and chain wallets and personal rage were replaced with a post 9/11 desire to have less anger in my life. I didn’t always hold up to that, I still don’t. And when I feel a little bit of rage surging, when I need something cathartic to sing along to, I put on Follow the Leader or Three Dollar Bill and get busy purging those feelings.

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