Originally Posted by: PonyOnewell him singing about his f'ed up childhood and what goes on in his head and the many things wrong with him are kind of all along the same vein... and that's what people mean by the same thing... i mean yeah you get a break from hearing about how he has "issues" and hates himself and hates his parents so that he can sing a song like "adidas" which infamously stands for "all day i dream about sex." i don't know. to me that's hardly profound.

much of the good rock out there deals with the lead singer's or band members' problems; Tool, hell, most of their songs are rooted in drugs, sexual hang ups, and betrayal by loved ones. but the quality of their music is far and beyond Korn's.

look, this is what happened: Korn started doing well, and part of the reason they were doing well was that all these kids could relate to their music; they didn't get along w/mom and dad, they were considered a "freak" at their school because they wore black and didn't like to play sports, and they either had or felt like they had problems (coming from someone who's been variously diagnosed as having clinical/chemically imbalanced depression, ADD, ADHD and a slew of other things i can tell you most of them think they have issues).

Korn starts to do really well, and the record company pushing them at the time as well as MTV realizes that there is a big subsection that wants them, so, they start pushing them to the forefront. they get sponsored by apparel companies; how often does that happen with a rock band???? not often. Korn makes a mind boggling amount of money from sold-out tours, multi-platinum CD's, sponsorships, TV/radio appearances, etc.

Now at this point I still don't inherently have anything against them. there are two points to pushing your band into the mainstream: 1) so that your music can be heard and b) because you want a career in music, both of which are normal things. now what pisses me off is when a band stifles its creativity and sticks to a formula that "works;" Radiohead alienated many of its "fans" with Kid A/Amnesiac. Tool alienated many of its fans with Lateralus. Marilyn Manson alienated many of his fans with latex breasts and increasing anti-Hollywood banter instead of anti-Church banter. Korn didn't want to risk alienating some of their fans by progressing musically so they stuck to what always worked: parents suck, sometimes i feel like i should kill myself, i have issues, i'm an outsider, etc.

except now they were big enough that it became just another cliche MTV mass-market bunch of crap, and with it came other MTV mass-market piles of crap. at that point in my life i started to get so sick of everyone who listened to rock moping on about how much their lives sucked when in fact they had parents who loved them and paid attention to them, teachers that cared, and also - gasp! - millions of kids across america and a few hundred at our school who were also "freaks." you know what? back in the 1800's, an Asian person was a "freak" in San Fransisco. Now go there and a third the city's population is Asian! after a certain point your numbers strip you of your uniqueness.

so now you've got one out of every three white kids in america self-diagnosing themselves with schizophrenia, OCD, or as being a sociopath, etc and all it does is belittle the diseases for those who actually have it. now the totally normal feel like they're part of a huge family of other depressed people, and kids that are actually in need of help are commiting suicide and shooting up schools because no one can differentiate between the girl who was cheerleader for three years and now wears black eyeliner and put spikes in her Adidas jacket and calls herself Raven and the kid who's gonig to go home tonight and kill himself.

and on top of this mountain, this suburbanite-funded depressed media juggernaut sits Korn, who are now demigods of the i-want-to-be-disenfranchised 12 to 16 year old middle class kid set. they go on MTV Cribs and are living the exact inverse of what they claim to be; they aren't "street," they aren't "hood," they aren't any of that stuff, they're just as rich as the bling-bling homey G producers and MC's that everyone hates. They drive Navigators, Escalades, Bentley's (oh, BTW, one of Korn's latest sponsors is a company that makes chromed out dubs for luxury cars & SUV's), they live in these palaces that are filled with the latest expensive technological crap, they carry around wads of hundreds that they love to flash around... so i guess that they're just depressed that they have become so successful and touched so many.

they are hypocrites, and probably my least favorite band from an ethical standpoint. plus, i'm sorry, drop-tuning an Ibanez and playing a simple 3-to-5-note lick with heavy distortion over and over and over and making the strings on your bass so loose it sounds like you're slapping your wang against it when you play isn't my definition of "talent." talent is making an instrument sing, not go "bumumumumbumumumumbumbumbumbumbumbumbumbummeeeeeeehhhhhhhhmmmmm." that's what i did the first day i plugged my SG in.


go to a music store and ask one of the guys to give you a five minute tutorial on how to program a Roland/Korg/Yamaha drum machine. In fact, ask to be shown how to use the Korg Electribe B, the one with the red trim; that's a pretty easy to use beat box. let him show you how to use it and then when he walks away, try to do everything again on your own.

people think that with a drum machine you just sit down and push a few buttons and you have a beat; that's not true at all.

Can't ^ belive i read all that - but yeah all that is true dumb A kids want to be just whomever they look up 2 ??? having those problems is nuthing to proud of - they want people to feel sorry for them - but has nuthing to do with what wer arguing bout- and ther bumbumbumbumbumbubmbmubmbu ... thats the head banging parts of the song - they do make ther instruments sing - and they have some pretty hard parts to ther song - unless yer good at guitar and u can pick those up like that - and with the whole drum machine thing - all u need is a musical sence - the machine doesn't really take TALENT to use just knowledge of the machine - guitar and everything else takes talewnts of the instrument to get the same music out AND knowledge - i'm sure u can see that