33 rebellions per minute
"Something takes a bite of me"
1998
Korn, FOLLOW THE LEADER
There are days -- today, March 10th 2001, has been one of them, as were the 8th and 9th -- when the concept of "unhappiness" makes no sense to me. The 6th and 7th were blizzard days, city-closed days, nature's hint that five months of winter was not enough for us Bostonians and never would be; but then the temperature soared around 30 degrees F. with no wind, and the sky has been beautiful. I've been careening around Brighton and Allston at full-speed, galumphing through quick snowbank detours to bypass pedestrians, singing Meat Puppets choruses with every spare bit of breath. On the subway last night i caught a window view of myself -- my sweaty overgrown hair flopping into my eyes as i leaned back in my homeless-chic grey overcoat, eyeballed the unrolled lyric sheet to GOLDEN LIES, and jutted my face into absurd macho postures while trying to rap the shifting vocals of "Take Off Your Clothes" -- and a moment of revelation hit: "Ohhhhh! So _that's_ why i haven't been on a second date since November!". But why would i need to? There is music, there is freedom, there are acres of puddles to stomp the middles of with both feet. It's not exactly not snowing, but it's a pathetic little dusting that disintegrates on impact. Life is obviously, incontovertibly good, and i was feeling that even before i got Jim's Big Ego to work three repetitions of "On registration day at taxidermy school/ i distinctly saw the eyes of a stuffed moose move" into their poetry slam tonight.
Then i got home and saw a message that my friend A. had called around 9:00, and the part of my brain in charge of blanching wondered "Did i miss the kind of call where she's calling me because i'm fun to talk to, or the kind where i begged her to call me next time she's staring at her wrist and a razor and thinking 'Let's play'?". I'm still in a great mood, since it's much too warm to not assume the best, but then she often is in great moods too. We're both in the nice healthy middle of the grand happiness scale, i think, except that i don't stumble into unprovoked moments where generalized normal-sized pressures overwhelm me to the point of opening a major artery and watching the pain distract me. No, all i do is (for example) spend the first 54 minutes of two mornings ago, when the blizzard still felt present, explaining to myself with mounting impatience and anger all the fine things i could do if i could just bring myself out of five blankets worth of hibernation; which notably failed to make me emerge.
Eighty percent of all depression has proven to be usefully treatable as Seasonal Affective Disorder, and if that produced only minimal results for A., hers doesn't seem to amount to much more than a timebomb in her head. Thomas Wehr, former chief of psychobiology at the National Institute For Mental Health, once had a patient who, without ever having noticed the pattern, became seriously depressed every 35.5 days (never 35 days, never 36). She always found reasons in the events of her work life or dating life for being depressed, just as Halley's Comet used to have explanations of purpose and mood attached when it passed. Knowledge is progress, but it can be disconcerting to realize that progress comes in the form of trivial-looking questions, like "How much would a nice space heater cost, or do you think you could persuade Disc Diggers and Jim's Big Ego to follow you somewhere warmer?" Or, "How about switching to electric razors and trashing the acoustic ones?".
I know that such progress is disconcerting, because when i've offered the data on Seasonal Affective Disorder to two friends who show clear signs of it, they both replied in essence "You're probably right, but i probably won't do anything about it because i hate to think my brain is being pushed around by something as dumb as weather". Of course it's not as simple as just the weather. There's also decisions about lighting (did we decide to make everyone spend the daylight hours indoors? no, it never occurred to us that careers and schools had such a too-large-to-see byproduct). There's also decisions about our chemical environment (did Edison or the Rural Electrification Administration do stress studies about the magnetic alterations caused by power lines, which bring 60-Hz currents into a world generally functioning at well under 10 Hz? no more than we test every byproduct of every smokestack against the reactions of each of our glands; they couldn't possibly, had they even imagined). There's the replacement of instinctively pleasing visual environments, or at least the playful chaotic jumbles of half-maligned nature, by efficient assemblies of straight lines, solid colors, and enclosure. There's the dizzyingly complex effects of our information environment (i have at least four female friends who have at some point been in the habit of cutting themselves to savor the pain; would they without the modern therapeutic environment in which "cutting" is a known concept with known practitioners? if so are they lucky, since female suicide rates have gone down while female "cutting" seems to have increased, yet male suicide rates head upward? how many school shootings would never happen without media reports of prior school shootings?).
It's easy, because we have no stake in the matter, to feel a pinge of tragedy thinking about how whales spent millions of years communicating whalesongs across tens of thousands of miles, only to be muted forever by the interference from motorboats and submarines. It's a lot more disconcerting to wonder if we've done similar things to ourselves, because if so we've done it in the process of doing absolutely wonderful things. How could i believe the existence of recorded music and cheap 4-tracks isn't a great thing? Impossible; of _course_ it justifies the entire 20th century. But how can i measure something as untested as the effect of sonic sensory overload on developing human brains? Only by pointing out all the young brains that have, in fact, survived to produce an annually increasing amount of stunning music, and asserting the supreme importance of Art and creative rebellion. If those minds seem disproportiantely miserable these days, faith can have me blame some of those _other_ unknowns.
Korn have emerged, especially since their third and best-liked album FOLLOW THE LEADER, as movement leaders in a quarter-century trend in popular music towards depressiveness, self-hatred, and blame. Korn do not sing about lack of sunlight and warped magnetic fields; they sing about provocations. Mom and Dad: "If you want me to be a good son/ why do make me feel like no one?". Peer pressure: "So i look around/ all these stupid little faces/ i can never slap/ so i embrace". Genetic, preprogrammed mismatch with the world around: "Like some goddamn fucking freak/ i'm so pressured, i'm so weak/ something takes ahold of me/ something i can't believe". And if all logical explanations fail, cry "What the fuck? What the fuck? What the fuck? What the fuck?!? What the fuck?!?!?". There were socially awkward children of woefully unprepared age-17-and-ignorant-of-condoms parents in the 1960's, too, and those kids had "Monster Mash" and "Sugar Sugar" and the hokey, jolly dementia of "Timothy" and "They're Coming To Take Me Away"; somewhere we went through the marginality of Iggy Pop and the Germs to reach the well-off alternativity of Alice In Chains, and then, via Korn, the mass acceptance of the Disturbed, of Godsmack, of Incubus. It's extremely unlikely that Korn's lyrics explain the causes their own new resonance; we just know, by the following, that they resonate. FOLLOW THE LEADER's cover is a lovingly detailed line drawing of dozens of adorable tykes (with thousands hinted at beyond) skipping along behind a pigtailed girl who's hopscotching off a cliff; 2 million buyers have volunteered to be in the picture, and they can't possibly hear this music without knowing their role.
One thing i'll tell you by way of explanation, though: this is an extremely well-made CD. Korn's basic sound is, unsuprisingly, harsh. The basslines chug with Metallica or Anthrax's relentlessness, but deeper, slower, springier and more resonant. The synthesizers and guitars often assemble in attack layers like Nine Inch Nails dance tracks, but the synths also flutter and wow, squeal like theremins or whir like hovercraft or ring like doorbells built for the ears of poltergeists. The drum tracks can be bouncy enough for JAGGED LITTLE PILL, can shudder along in kick/snare echoey enough for a goth band, or even (see "Cameltosis") play as if jazz drumming was a slow variant of techno. Bagpipes and sitar and music-box appear just often enough to lend variety.
The main variety, though, and Korn's most distinctive virtue, comes from the vocals. Jonathan Davis's favorite voice is, to be sure, his growl/roar, Cookie Monster as redesigned to crush Tokyo. His most impressive alternative is his hyperkinetic Tasmanian Devil yelping. But he also sings: Korn are melodic. He has his clear, melodically angular, echo-processed voice like Voivod's old Denis Belanger; he has his strained voice that overlaps Trent Reznor; best of all, there's his soft prissy voice, like a schoolboy being mocked as a faggot.
Korn have been labeled "homophobic", on such evidence as their first album's "Faget", on which Davis rants so harshly against the evils of gays that a lot of people dismissed his final line "I'm one too!". He's married to a woman, so that's not literal, and i can't imagine his detractors being more pleased by FOLLOW's "All In The Family", where Limp Biskit's Fred Durst trades insults in his flowing taunting white-homeboy voice with Davis's best monster stomp; insults that, while versatile in demi-clever schoolyard bravado style, revolve around homosexuality and settle (again) into Davis's embrace of the label. Perhaps it is a bad thing for self-hatred to still center, so closely, around conformity to traditional male roles, including sexual roles that can be quite callous.
But what i see is this: i see Ice Cube, Durst, and the Pharcyde's Tre Hardson dropping by the studio from their macho public roles to embrace a preeningly unhappy loser. I see Korn, for all the knowing sarcasm of their album cover, making a steady series of albums that encourage people by singing along to reject unwanted roles and declare, in deeply UNmasculine fashion, that they can be hurt. The music is aggressive, but it peels away sometimes to sound as vulnerable as the words, like Nine Inch Nails and perhaps unlike Korn's less successful peers. I don't know why there's such a market for self-disgust as a form of male bonding. I doubt parents have become much worse on average, i'm sure school curricula haven't, i'm sure peer pressure hasn't because i've read more than enough novels and memoirs set forty or seventy years ago. Perhaps the chemical environment has messed millions of kids up. Perhaps the media environment has, and perhaps Korn are part of that media environment. But perhaps we always had as many losers, silent ones. It terrifies me to see a friend cut a wrist, ever so slightly, to feel cleansed by the pain. The unanswerable question is, would the results if she refused to be even scarier?
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