"Within three months of leaving St. John's I started having sexual feelings towards my half-brother. Instead of becoming like one of the Brothers, in my twisted, warped thinking, I thought my brother was better off dead. That night I was charged with manslaughter. I was 13 and my brother 10."
Excerpted from a photo exhibit documenting the lingering agonies of hundreds who suffered similar fates at a Canadian boys' school some 40 years ago, these confessions might as well be primal screaming from the wounded child at the heart of nearly every Korn cut. It's a voice manly men ordinarily silence, although the Bakersfield band's ability to alienate more adults than the 3 million teens they captivate makes leader Jonathan Davis's disclosures—both real and imagined—butch rock 'n' roll.
Davis is the latest in a long line that includes Kurt Cobain, Freddie Mercury, Rob Halford, Robert Smith, Martin Gore, Iggy and Axl, maybe Elvis and John Lennon—tortured outsiders with negative/positive charisma. Davis is not as poetic as those people, but he's blunt, and his lyrics come off as an abused kid's journal entries for good reason: Davis was molested as a child, his parents didn't believe it was happening, and now he's angry at Mr. Rogers for teaching him to be neighbor-friendly. He even wrote some of his best lyrics about it.
Korn's fourth album, Issues, lacks the hip-hop cameos and comic relief that expanded the quintet's following beyond the core attracted to its grim debut. At the height of last year's Follow the Leader breakthrough, Korn were already resorting to the typical metal line about how their next album would recapture the heaviness of their '94 coming-out—a blast that crests with "Faget," Davis's furious remembrance of teen homophobia, and ends with "Daddy," where he lashes back at his childhood rapist, sobbing long after the song's final thrashing climax. But unlike its predecessors, Issues doesn't dwell on past horrors. Instead it suggests how Davis's adolescent victimization bleeds into his adult present.
Researchers and therapists say male adult survivors of childhood sexual mistreatment can suffer from anxiety, shame, depression, dissociation, hostility, low self-esteem, suicidal behavior, intimacy problems, compulsions, drug dependence, and fear their sexual abuse has turned or will turn them gay. These are Davis's own issues, and they define Korn as much as his buddies' Goth atmospherics, death-metal guitar grind, jazz-funk bass popping, hip-hop syncopation, and kooky hairdos.
Davis's role in Korn is the same as Mercury's in Queen, Halford's in Priest, and Michael Stipe's in R.E.M., and it extends throughout the now-mega-mainstream Family Values spectacle: He's the tortured artist who articulates what the others suppress, avoid, and perpetrate. On Follow's "All in the Family," Davis and Limp Cracker Fred Durst call each other "fag" 100 different ways, a name-calling that's taken on more meaning since Durst has revealed himself to be a rough-trade thug who'd suck off anyone to get ahead.
Davis calls himself a fag, too—a fag "except for the dick part," which is such a quintessential rock 'n' roll thing to be. But morphing from the frontman of a cult act the media wouldn't touch into an MTV darling isn't easy: A nervous breakdown forces him to face the hopelessness worsened by booze; he separates from his recent bride; his new sober state widens the divide between this mortuary school graduate and the band who chose him to be their singer and subsequent thematic center. His band members taunt him, just as the school bullies who picked on him for being a sensitive New Romantic once did.
"I feel ashamed. . . . Who gives a fuck if my life sucks?" Davis cries on "Beg for Me," one of several Issues songs bemoaning new pressures and seeking solace in performance, fans, brotherhood, flesh. Davis often stumbles into hackneyed rhymes, but what he lacks in grace he compensates for with a rash metaphysical force matched only by his band. Boasting a brontosaurus-butt riff that sums up why metal can still be good for you, "Beg for Me" is its own redemption.
