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There’s something eerie about returning to Korn‘s 1999 album, Issues. In one sense, the album represents the apex of an era and the beginning of its end, both in terms of heavy music, and in popular culture in general — as both reside downstream from the general historical environment of the time. Listening to it in 2024 is akin to rewatching an murder mystery flick, in that you can still feel the suspense of it all even though you know what happens next. Stylistically, it signifies a point of departure for Korn fans, as it’s really the last “classic” Korn album.
In late 1999, Korn was at the absolute pinnacle of their popularity, and could basically do no wrong in the eyes of their fans. They had even dodged some of the controversial heat affecting their contemporaries at the time. Their own performance at the doomed Woodstock ’99 had gone off without incident. Likewise, they escaped some of the ire of parental groups that got aimed at artists like Marilyn Manson and ICP for “inspiring” the Columbine massacre.
Nu-metal was the predominant style of heavy music, without question. Sure, lots of bands like Converge, Shadows Fall, and Darkest Hour were rising to prominence in the underground, and black metal was steadily becoming more popular (especially in Europe), but a suburban 7th-grader like me didn’t have access to the right avenues to learn about these bands until a few years later.
If you listened to 92.3 K-Rock, watched MTV’s Total Request Live and watched South Park (which featured Korn on a classic Scooby-Doo-themed episode), Korn, Limp Bizkit, Orgy, Deftones, and soon enough, Slipknot, were the big bands of the day. Korn’s 1998 album, Follow the Leader had generated gigantic and iconic modern rock hits like “Freak on a Leash” and “Got the Life” and these songs were EVERYWHERE. Keep in mind, while the MP3 era, illegal downloading, and the cultural Balkanization spurred on by the internet were all in play, the post-war monoculture was still very much intact in the late-1990s.
Released on November 16, 1999, Issues arrived just in time for the holiday season (I got my copy for Christmas that year) and capitalized on the momentum of the previous album such that it sold more than 500,000 copies in its first week and debuted at Number 1 on the Billboard 200. The music video for its lead single, “Falling Away from Me,” stylized as a sequel to “Freak on a Leash” was an instant hit on MTV. The video stands as the perfect summation of Korn‘s classic work, turning agonizing childhood trauma into cathartic, potentially liberating, works of musical art.
But therein lies the rub and the main challenge that faced Korn after this album. By 1999, the band’s lead singer, Jonathan Davis, was no longer a troubled young adult, but a fully grown 28-year-old who was successful beyond his wildest dreams. How do you keep on mining your adolescence for inspiration as it falls further and further into the past? Even on this album, you can hear Davis and the rest of the band wrestle with his new reality on songs like “Trash,” “4U,” and “Counting.”
Likewise, the album is the last that really sticks to the musical palette they created on Korn and LIfe Is Peachy and paints its logical conclusion. Toning down the hip-hop elements from Follow the Leader, the band emphasized their penchant for catchy rock hooks, backed up by heavy guitars and Fieldy‘s characteristic slap-bass. It’s the last album where the fruits of this approach feel fresh, as you can hear on essentials like the infectious “Make Me Bad,” the rousing “Wake Up,” and the fan-favorite “Somebody Someone.”
But from my vantage point, so many years later, even as someone who has long-since left my Korn fandom behind, the real gem on this album is “Let’s Get This Party Started.” Even though I deeply connected with the song as an adolescent, there’s something that still resonates about the lyrics that make up the two sections of the pre-chorus:
“… So I fall face down in a rut
I can’t seem to get out of
Please wake me, please give me some of it back
The feelings I had
… Sometimes I wish I could be strong like you
It doesn’t matter
Each time I wake, I’m somehow feeling the truth
I can’t handle”
Listen to the song and you can hear why fans voted for it in such high numbers when the band put out a survey of what songs to play on their Sick and Twisted tour in 2000. Most nu-metal (like hair metal before it), especially its lyrics, has aged terribly, mired in overcooked cliches and cringe-worthy bravado.
But this was good stuff.
Not to over-intellectualize the album, but there is something very “End of History” about it. (I wonder if Francis Fukuyama is into metal?) In a creepy way, Korn‘s classic albums are perfectly situated between the end of the Cold War and the War on Terror that began with 9/11. Like the film-noir era of the 1940s and early 50s, it’s art that looks inward at the troubled core of domestic life in America at the pinnacle of its power. It’s a voice that whispers a warning to you as you look at all the positive metrics of the 1990s (falling crime rates, rising standards of living, relative peace abroad): “Everything was NOT ok.”
I’m sure some fans will quibble with me designating this the last “classic” Korn album, but it’s hard to deny that 2002’s Untouchables was a notable departure from the band’s 90s material. Sure, songs like “Here to Stay” hit all the familiar notes, but Korn had definitely grown weary of its signature sound and began to experiment. After backtracking a bit on Take A Look in the Mirror (the last album I really enjoyed, the first four songs are fire), the band’s story since 2005’s See You on the Other Side has been one of exploration vs. returning to form — usually to mixed reception from fans and critics alike.
There’s an irony to this predicament that must grind the band’s gears. After all, their entire style was an artistic risk when they set out in the early-90s. Korn was a big experiment in smashing tons of styles together. But what the fans connected with was the particular combination the band perfected over the course of four albums.
With the band hitting their peak in popularity with their 1994 to 1999 output, their core fanbase is mostly composed of younger members of Generation X and the older half of the Millennials. This would explain the comments the band often gets of “I wish they would go back to their old style,” a style that reached its end on this album. Notably, however, the band shares the lucky fate of Slipknot and the Deftones in that they’ve been able to add new fans over the years as well. In other words, Korn is a solid legacy band, rather than one relegated to pure nostalgia.
Additionally, Korn was one of the last heavy bands to truly cross over into mainstream success, to the level where they could pack arenas or even stadiums on their own. And Issues was the album that solidified their catalog as being able to draw those numbers and create that gigantic fanbase. After Korn, Slipknot, Linkin Park, and Avenged Sevenfold are the only bands that really come close to being able to get THAT big of an audience without some novelty or gimmick (e.g., Ghost).
When adjusted for inflation, 1999 was the most successful year for the music industry. It was a rising tide that lifted a lot of lucky boats, including Issues, which sold more than 3 million copies by 2003. For sure, the dominance of a few styles of music (e.g., teen pop, nu-metal, pop country) was suffocating at the time. However, it also allowed for gateway albums like Issues to create an upstream audience for heavy music. And hey, some of those Korn-kids stuck with it and wound up at Ozzfest a few years later and talked to people who told them about Death, Carcass, and At the Gates. (Me, I’m talking about me.)
That level of cultural cohesion around a single band just isn’t possible anymore. Well, other than at a Korn show itself, where I guarantee every soul in the crowd still screams “Beating me down, BEATING ME, BEATING ME DOWN” just as loud as they did 25 years ago.