It doesn’t matter what I say to defend a band like Korn. I can—and often do—make the claim that they are the most influential rock group of the last 30 years, shaping an arc of experimentation with funk, jazz, rap, and hip-hop that pushed the genre into new territory. I can say that they have presented a radical portrait of manliness, one that acknowledges the woundedness and pathos that masculinity so often entails while still celebrating that masculinity. I can say that there have been few other artists to reflect sexuality in the same way. I can say that they’re in on the joke, that they know when they look stupid, that they were never trying to sound “good” by a conventional standard.
None of that makes a difference. Korn, and the subgenre called nu metal that they were key in creating, will never be cool. Thank God for that.
I myself wasn’t yet born when nu metal first came to be in the early ’90s. And as a teenager, having heard it in the background in the car or in horror movie soundtracks my whole life, I didn’t even think I liked it. I once recall telling my mother that I believed Korn was the worst band in existence. I would now say, unequivocally, that they are my favorite.
I made that leap a good few years before nu metal recently resurfaced in youth culture. Sometime during my freshman year of college, I began compulsively consuming Korn music videos. Their abject horniness, brazen machismo, even their downright idiocy: The music and the attitude struck me as some sort of cultural missing link, an underappreciated piece of our social artistic puzzle. Everything I’d thought was “bad” about nu metal was exactly what made it brilliant.
As a younger generation discovered the genre on TikTok and elsewhere, older writers like myself have pondered its legacy. Crazy Ass Moments in Nu Metal History launched on X in 2022, and in 2023, the Gen Z–savvy clothing line Heaven by Marc Jacobs booked Deftones as part of a viral campaign that featured internet creators and students from the starmaking Laguardia High School as well as Sandy Liang and Mel Ottenberg. Nu metal was suddenly fashionable, and some wondered if the genre at large was finally going to be given its flowers and cemented as an art form that has stood the test of time.
But Deftones—with their wall of guitars that evoke the stalwart rock genre most beloved of Gen Z, shoegaze—has always been the nu metal exception, the band on the margin of the genre, not really nu metal. Deftones are cool, and for that reason, they do not count.
For a brief moment in mid-2024, people on TikTok were dressing up like Korn’s Jonathan Davis and Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst, lip-synching Korn’s “All in the Family” featuring Durst. People were listening to Deftones, not spoofing their songs. Just last week, “Planet of the Bass” creator Kyle Gordon went viral with an over-the-top, distinctly Durstian parody of “every nu metal song in 1999.” Korn and Limp Bizkit remain a joke—just as they often presented themselves.