Nostalgia, Authenticity, and Korn

On Catholic guilt, nu-metal, and eventual parenting ideas

Growing up in Metro Detroit and coming from Polish and Irish roots, I was unfortunately raised Catholic. My parents were selectively strict about things that they found inappropriate for my developing mind and sense of self. 95.5 DRQ, the R&B and pop station on the radio, was not allowed, but we could listen to Prince in the car. Destiny’s Child was inappropriate, but Madonna’s Music album was the soundtrack of many rides to the bus stop. I couldn’t listen to any songs marked “Explicit” on iTunes, but I could listen to my dad’s AC/DC CDs.

Looking back, it’s obvious that my parents’ decisions about what I was and was not allowed to listen to stemmed less from an idea of what content was developmentally appropriate for me and more from their own sense of familiarity with the music and media. Things they liked and knew were okay, but new and unfamiliar things were not. I eventually found a workaround to the iTunes rule and started to listen to music that had always interested me, and sometime around 6th or 7th grade, I downloaded two songs from Korn’s 2005 album See You on the Other Side to my shiny pink iPod.

The clandestine operation looked like this– go into the family computer room, ostensibly to play games on Disney Channel’s website or log into Club Penguin. Next, log into your iTunes account and hit up the store. Keep the volume super low on the speakers and make sure the song you’re planning to buy is the right one– we can’t risk Mom or Dad hearing the lyrics. Buy the song with the iTunes credits you’ve been hoarding since Christmas.

Here’s the sneaky part– you have to burn the song to a blank CD. Once you’ve done that, delete the song from your iTunes library. Take your burned CD and download the contents back into your iTunes library– sans that pesky red “Explicit” tag. Relabel all the songs with their names, artists, and album names. The explicit tag will no longer appear since the songs are coming from a CD and not the iTunes store. Break the burned CD and throw it in the garbage underneath something gross. Update your iPod with your latest hard-won songs, and enjoy.

This was the method I used to get everything from Blink-182’s self-titled album to “My Plague” by Slipknot onto my iPod, and it worked relatively well, diminished audio quality being par for the course. Coupled with the fact that I’m fairly sure my parents only perfunctorily looked through my iTunes library, I was able to listen to music that they didn’t (and probably still don’t) approve of with impunity.

I was a really introverted kid and kept to myself most of the time I was home. I would hole up in my room with my iPod and listen to hours of music, both music my parents shared with me and the music I felt I had to hide and smuggle into my life. One of the bands I kept hidden from virtually everyone in my life was Korn. I knew that my parents would not approve of the lyrical content or aesthetics of the band, and that my friends would think I was super weird for listening to aggressive scatting and bagpipes.

I was entering adolescence at the tail end of the nu-metal era. People I knew liked bands like Slipknot and System of a Down, but the emo and metalcore resurgence was already well underway, as well as the alt-folk revival that we insufferable hipsters based our identities around between 2008 and 2013. I listened to some nu-metal, but it wasn’t cool. It was always something I felt embarrassed by and only listened to occasionally and in secret. I had an image to maintain as an insufferable Christian hipster, and I did it very well through most of high school (we do NOT talk about my scene phase; I will throw hands).

And yet, some of my comfort songs were nu-metal jams I would play alone in my bedroom or in my car. “Coming Undone” and “Twisted Transistor” by Korn were two songs that brought me a lot of peace and comfort as a young person with as-yet-undiagnosed-but-crippling depression and anxiety. Something about the aggressive nature of the music, the sonic onslaught, and the lyrics discussing dark themes and the struggle to break free from the darkness really spoke to me. I knew that I wasn’t alone in my feelings and fears, plus the expansive and intense sound of the songs scratched my brain in a really satisfying way.

I never shared my love of nu-metal with anyone in my life at any point. I got older, went to college, listened to an insane amount of emo-revival and midwest emo, and became a teacher. I didn’t have a lot of space in my brain for music, and I ended up falling into the music my friends and other people around me were into at the time. Lots of it was wonderful and fun, but didn’t necessarily scratch the itch the music I had to sneak as a kid did.

In my thirties, I’ve finally admitted to the world that I love nu-metal. I love Slipknot and Korn and Snot and Kittie. I will listen to Soulfly and not feel bad about it. I will enjoy some Coal Chamber and Static-X without shame. These seemingly cheesy bands that were ridiculed throughout my life have become music that is genuinely meaningful to me. It speaks to the rebellious tween/teenager I never got to be, and it allows me to authentically express and access those feelings I never had space for– rage, disappointment, anger, aggression.

That’s one element of nu-metal that is often discussed– it is a deeply masculine genre, pulsing with anger and rage. Many have called it misogynistic and homophobic, and that can be true about various songs, bands, and albums from the era. I have no excuse or explanation for this, and am not attempting to discredit those claims. I will say, listening to the music as an adult with decently-formed progressive ideals and morals, some of it makes me cringe. Some of it also has valid points and uses specifically homophobic language to subvert hypermasculinity.

Korn’s song “Faget” off their first album definitely raises eyebrows in 2025. We balk at the use of the slur and are inclined to dismiss the band wholesale because of this. Additionally, Corey Taylor of Slipknot screams the slur in one song off of their first album as well. While I cannot defend Slipknot’s use as it seems to be fully intended as a derogatory insult (they have since removed the word from performances of the song and advocate for LGBTQ people), there is a depth and context to Korn’s use of the term.

We have to remember that all art is a product of its cultural context. The 80’s were a time of great upheaval in American society regarding sexual liberation and identity. The AIDS crisis devastated the LGBTQ community at the time and there was so much stigma around queerness and illness that led to tremendous loss of life. The “Gay Panic Defense” was used in several high-profile crime cases in which murder was justified by the defendant being afraid of a queer person (or person perceived to be queer). It is within this context that members of bands like Slipknot and Korn came of age.

In several interviews, Jonathan Davis of Korn discusses being called homophobic slurs as a teen because of his interest in New Wave music and his choice to wear makeup and emulate his goth idols. He was called “HIV” so often in school that he eventually tattooed it on his arm. He would be sneeringly called “pretty boy” and mercilessly bullied. Additionally, he was a victim of sexual assault by a woman when he was a child. This level of trauma and abuse informs Davis’s music, and it is deeply apparent in several songs off Korn.

The lyrics of “Faget” are misconstrued as gay-bashing and demonizing of queer people, but deeper examination proves this to be false. The verses are clearly from the perspective of someone like Davis, someone who is vilified for being different and tormented because of how he presents. The chorus comes from the perspective of those who hurl the abuse at him. The use of the slur is not presented as an acceptable action– it is a depiction of the taunting Davis endured. In the first bridge and subsequent verses, Davis simultaneously claims the terms of “pretty boy” and “faget” and denies their applicability to himself. This kind of reclamation and rejection of an identity is echoed in the repetition of the phrase “All my life, who am I?” In a way, this makes sense– who as a teen or young person really feels firmly rooted in any aspect of their identity? Who knows who they are all the time? What do you do with the identity the world foists upon you without your consent or consideration?

The very last line of the song has Davis hurling a homophobic epithet his tormentors, which seems like an understandable response that a person might have when enduring this kind of abuse. This song is vulnerable, raw, and complicated. It’s deeply specific to a personal experience, but people can still relate to the underlying themes. People can see themselves in the song, which creates a sense of comfort. There is a harsh authenticity to the song that makes it relatable, and that has made it an enduring piece of music regardless of the changes of the culture around it.

As poet Cesar A. Cruz said, “Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” While music like Korn speaks to the part of me that wishes she could have been more rebellious, more seen and heard in her deepest depressions and most intense anxieties, for others like my parents, it was disturbing and inappropriate and unfathomable. Walking into this time of my life, I am learning to allow myself the things I wanted and needed when I was younger. I am learning that the things I loved and appreciated and wanted to emulate as a teen were expressions of elements of myself that I could never show. The anger, rage, confusion, depression, and fear I felt at that time in my life was tempered by Catholic guilt, nondenominational Youth Group generic prayer, and the idea that anger and rage were not appropriate emotions for a girl to have.

I guess my point here is this– the ugliness of being your authentic self and expressing what you need to express is valuable. Sometimes life is ugly. We are bombarded with beauty every day in advertising, social media, film, television, music. We see the sweetness and saucy sensuality of someone like Sabrina Carpenter, or the faux-moody beautiful poetess Taylor Swift has become and feel that this is authentic being, this is the way we should be. To a degree, those things are authentic to those people, but not all the time. It is an expression of their art and performance, but you don’t see them collapsing onstage singing their most vulnerable songs. You don’t hear them shouting and sobbing in studio recordings of their songs, like Jonathan Davis does on “Daddy” off Korn.

There are two sides to the authentic coin– the authentically beautiful and the authentically ugly. I have always been drawn more to the ugly, the rageful, the angry in the art I consume because that side of my personality has never been free. I am allowing her to exist and come out in constructive and supportive ways. I am allowing her to be, to breathe, and to work through the pain. And it’s ugly and embarrassing and vulnerable and awful and wonderful and exactly what she needs. I am allowing myself to experience these things, express these things, but never to sharpen them into weapons to use against others. It is not about hurting others in the ways we have been hurt, but being authentically in step with our inner world and allowing the hardest times to pass, and to do it gracelessly, kicking and screaming. We don’t have to be perfect, but we have to be present. We don’t have to be pleasant, but we do have to be kind.

These are lessons I wish I had learned when I was younger. I love my parents for everything they did and sacrificed for me, and I also wish I had had the space to be ugly and needy and challenging and chaotic, like a gross screeching baby bird in the nest. I hope I will have the grace and ability to give that space to my children someday.

But they will absolutely be listening to my music in the car.

Thanks for reading,

A.W.