Korn - Follow the Leader

I must admit, I didn’t hold out a lot of hope for Follow the Leader. I don’t really like rap-core, as it tends to be heaviness without class or substance, and vulgarity without purpose. Thusly, an album that I understand to be as influential to rap-core as Follow the Leader is does not inspire feelings of anticipated greatness in me. For a large part, I’m right. But Follow the Leader does have more appeal and subtlety than pretty much every other album in this genre, though that is not saying a lot.

Korn are masters of one thing: sound. They write adequate songs, play their instruments passingly well, and John Davis has an impressive repertoire of voices, if you like that sort of thing. But where they really excel is in finding new an interesting ways to create sounds, sometimes sounds that you would not expect to hear in music. As I understand it, all the sounds come from the musical instruments of the band, and nothing more, which makes it even more impressive. Like Jimi Hendrix before them, they are pushing the limits of what a guitar can do and what it can sound like, though admittedly not as far or as hard as Jimi did.

Korn has progressed beyond the incredibly laborious ground that they covered in their first two albums. The utter darkness of child abuse and the damaging effects of pornography are weighty subjects, such that the weight becomes unbearable if they’re presented as explicitly and as often as Korn did. Thankfully, they are exploring themes of loss of self (“Seed,” “Freak On a Leash”), passive-aggressive-ness (“It’s On!), and parental expectations (“Dead Bodies Everywhere”) on Follow the Leader. The grinding crunch of their guitar work goes right to the gut, and Jonathan Davis sings with passion and urgency (though not grace or fluidity). He says a lot of bad words (and I mean a lot), but he mostly uses them in their appropriate context, and they usually illustrate his point. And the overall sound creates such a specific atmosphere, and that’s something that most bands simply can’t do.

Okay, I’ve spent the last two paragraphs highlighting Korn’s best points, so the album is probably great, right? Well, not really. For all their good attributes, Korn sabotage themselves by being a part of a movement that is one of the worst things to happen to music in the past 20 years (trumped only by disco). Rap-core is the domain of teenage boys who are frustrated by their parents, want to have sex but can’t, constantly misplace their anger, and know too many euphemisms for the male genitalia. Linkin Park excepted, all rap-core groups feed into and affirm that thinking, and Korn are no exception. Ice Cube’s guest appearance on “Children of the Korn” gets the prize for the most unnecessarily vulgar and needlessly disgusting moment on the album. And then Korn dissolves into a gross-out and insult competition between John Davis and Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst on “All In the Family.” This combined with the fact that the album runs out of steam near the end make me not really able to recommend it. I can, however, respect what it tries to do, and admire its adherence to an idea, even if I find that idea to not be a particularly good one.

Prime Cuts:
Freak On a Leash
It’s On!
Justin

22 Rating: -2