SOUND BITES

Among the throng of nu-metal bands that sprung up in the wake of the alternative era some 20-25 years ago, not many would have pegged Korn as a band to carve out a long career, especially considering they basically started this whole movement way back in 1994; by the time they were on their sixth album in 2003, they were thought of in most circles as washed up and irrelevant, dinosaurs whose sole purpose was passing the torch to the Linkin Parks of the world. For a while, that was pretty much the story: trail blazing band blazes trail, then stumbles and lays helplessly in said trail. Somewhat of an identity crisis ensued, with Korn spending about a decade struggling to break into new sonic areas while being pulled back to their core sound by their most closed-minded fans, then being derided for rehashing their glory days. This is literally what happened to them when they dabbled in dubstep for 2011's The Path of Totality then returned to familiar ground on 2013's The Paradigm ...

To say Korn hasn't changed all that much over their two-plus decades is doing them a disservice; truth be told, they've tried lots of different looks over the course of their career, it's just that their experiments have more often than not been met by a combination of derision or indifference. Their ill-fated foray into dubstep, for example (2011's The Path of Totality ), is considered by many to be a curiosity at best and an abhorrence at worst despite it being by and large successful in its intended purpose of dragging the band out of their comfort zone (this after their previous record, an attempted return to form, was dismissed by most as a stale and diluted effort). Having said that, there's an odd satisfaction to be had listening to The Serenity of Suffering , their twelfth(!) album and second since the return of original guitarist Brian "Head" Welch; at its core, it's the nostalgia trip promised but not delivered by Remember Who You Are , tho...

We all know that expression is the most important ingredient in art. We also know that, sometimes, the way an artist expresses themselves isn't what some would call "appropriate". Ever since the first person took offence to an artistic statement, there have been artists that revel in offending. Recently, Wakrat (side project featuring Rage Against the Machine bassist Tim Commerford) released their new single Generation Fucked, a snappy little tune with a nice groove. Oh, and 36 F-bombs. That got me thinking about this week's column, and what might make the cut on a list of the most explicit songs ever released. As it turns out, there are a lot of explicit songs, so I had to pare the list down somehow. With that in mind, the boundaries I set are as follows: a) No hip-hop or extreme metal. Low hanging fruit. b) No joke/novelty bands. Sorry, Tenacious D and Steel Panther. c) No album tracks. For inclusion on this list, a song has to have been released as ...

This one might be a tough sell. Whether or not you see the debut album from Korn as a pioneering release for hard music or the harbinger of hard music's ruination depends largely on your opinion of what came after. If you subscribe to the latter group, you likely lament that Korn begat Limp Bizkit begat Staind begat Puddle of Mudd, so on, so forth. Of course, it's a little silly to blame Korn for Puddle of Mudd, but they've made themselves easy targets with a string of albums over the past fifteen years or so that hover somewhere between "diminishing returns" and "gaudy embarrassments". But let's forget everything that came after for just a moment, and remember that there was a time twenty years ago when nothing like Korn existed. Their unique blend of bowel shaking tones, hip hop rhythms and explicit anguish officially ushered in the genre later labeled as "nu metal", for better or worse. Korn doesn't speak ...