Youth culture’s 20-year cycle of musical nostalgia has come around again.
The success of the May 2023 Sick New World festival among Zoomers eager to see bands like Deftones and System of a Down leaves no doubt about the reality of a Nu Metal revival. The search term ‘Nu Metal’ reached its highest point in the U.S. since 2004 recently, according to Google Trends.
Genre, it seems, doesn’t die, as is so often augured. It slumbers, and bides its time.
Nu Metal is special, however, in how unflatteringly it was treated during its heyday (the late 1990s), remaining officially ‘uncool’ despite mass appeal. It apparently made Incubus cringe, and Rage Against the Machine apologise (at least for inspiring Limp Biscuit).
The press never agreed with its mainstream status the way modern Trap or the recent pop-punk revival are promoted.
Still, today, Nu Metal seems to have gone from a reviled, vaguely ‘white-trash’ genre, to a valued inheritance. In fact, the songs themselves were often better written than most rock music is now, including under its umbrella a few excellent (ultimately genre-transcending) bands, like Deftones.
Nu Metal acts also went to the trouble of adopting a specific, coherent aesthetic (Slipknot’s masked jumpsuit-wearing troop, Korn’s dreadlock and tracksuit or basketball jersey combination, etc.). As music commentator Finn Mckenty put it, Nu Metal band members looked like videogame characters or WWF wrestlers.
This is important: audiences, especially younger ones, respond to aesthetic definition. We often hear that people don’t like being ‘put in a box’ and want to be free to adopt endless definitional ambiguity. In reality, however, and looking at consumer choices, it seems clear that we enjoy labels, packages, and easily recognizable looks. Those aspiring to promote their art and affect the wider culture should take note.
In terms of the content itself, Nu Metal’s lyrics were basically nihilistic, stuck in themes of violence and mental illness. Ideologically, the genre was more or less in tune with the anti-consumerist chic of its era, some of which is admirable, if largely impotent. There was a general tendency among Gen-Xers (roughly people born around the 1970s), to buy the idea that tradition or religion are somehow allied with capitalist exploitation and the social conditions causing family breakdown and trauma.
The negativity of Metal in general, together with other genres, however, also sprang from an organic desire to keep private, to obscure, to darken. This is necessary when culture becomes ‘over-positive,’ by which I mean that it values the public over the private, the seen over the unseen. We may think of how hegemonic discourse considers private spaces political (being the loci of odious, ‘oppressive’ structures like the “patriarchy” and “heteronormativity” or the like) and how the modern market mobilises the commercialization of intimacy through platforms like OnlyFans.
Korean cultural theorist Byung-Chul Han describes this dynamic in his Psychopolitics as follows:
Today, everyone is an auto-exploiting labourer … Even class struggle has transformed into an inner struggle against oneself.
Negativity, then, including the aestheticization of aggression, can serve to signal a private space that is not meant to be accessible to the onlooker. Its hostile gesture is like a temperature shock, coaxing society to recover its turgidity, to respect the integrity of certain barriers. Aesthetic cues in a subculture’s fashion, like spikes, chains, and the ubiquity of the colour black, function like a gargoyle warding off the profane from an otherwise sacred space.
But for this to work towards the edification of people participating in such a subculture, there has to actually be a ‘sacred space’ in there somewhere. Nu Metal’s anti-consumerism, for example, (think Sepultura’s Roots album (1996) or System of a Down’s Toxicity (2001)) would have to mean something.
In the rock music spectrum, a shift took place in the late 1980s from ‘Glam’ or ‘Hair’ Metal’s hedonistic anthems about whisky and groupies to Grunge’s tortured artists. Nu Metal’s Korn and similar bands brought an equivalent introspective mood to heavy music.
But if Metal is to be redeemed, it would need to break the ‘Glam vs. Grunge,’ hedonist vs. nihilist, dichotomy. The heroic themes of self-overcoming that were relatively prevalent in classic Heavy Metal would need to be rediscovered.
In the same way, we could warn against reactions to contemporary Cardi B.-type hip-hop retreating into the supposed authenticity of ‘Gangsta’ rap through the rise of Drill music.
If what we may describe as ‘instrumental negativity’ remains unyoked to any genuine vision of ‘the Good,’ it remains mere demoralisation, serving as an escape valve for frustration against commercialization and excessive positivity, but ultimately weakening the subject who partakes in it.
The Return of Nu Metal
My Life with the Thrill Kill Cult concert, Sick New World, Las Vegas, Nevada, May 13th, 2023.
Youth culture’s 20-year cycle of musical nostalgia has come around again.
The success of the May 2023 Sick New World festival among Zoomers eager to see bands like Deftones and System of a Down leaves no doubt about the reality of a Nu Metal revival. The search term ‘Nu Metal’ reached its highest point in the U.S. since 2004 recently, according to Google Trends.
Genre, it seems, doesn’t die, as is so often augured. It slumbers, and bides its time.
Nu Metal is special, however, in how unflatteringly it was treated during its heyday (the late 1990s), remaining officially ‘uncool’ despite mass appeal. It apparently made Incubus cringe, and Rage Against the Machine apologise (at least for inspiring Limp Biscuit).
The press never agreed with its mainstream status the way modern Trap or the recent pop-punk revival are promoted.
Still, today, Nu Metal seems to have gone from a reviled, vaguely ‘white-trash’ genre, to a valued inheritance. In fact, the songs themselves were often better written than most rock music is now, including under its umbrella a few excellent (ultimately genre-transcending) bands, like Deftones.
Nu Metal acts also went to the trouble of adopting a specific, coherent aesthetic (Slipknot’s masked jumpsuit-wearing troop, Korn’s dreadlock and tracksuit or basketball jersey combination, etc.). As music commentator Finn Mckenty put it, Nu Metal band members looked like videogame characters or WWF wrestlers.
This is important: audiences, especially younger ones, respond to aesthetic definition. We often hear that people don’t like being ‘put in a box’ and want to be free to adopt endless definitional ambiguity. In reality, however, and looking at consumer choices, it seems clear that we enjoy labels, packages, and easily recognizable looks. Those aspiring to promote their art and affect the wider culture should take note.
In terms of the content itself, Nu Metal’s lyrics were basically nihilistic, stuck in themes of violence and mental illness. Ideologically, the genre was more or less in tune with the anti-consumerist chic of its era, some of which is admirable, if largely impotent. There was a general tendency among Gen-Xers (roughly people born around the 1970s), to buy the idea that tradition or religion are somehow allied with capitalist exploitation and the social conditions causing family breakdown and trauma.
The negativity of Metal in general, together with other genres, however, also sprang from an organic desire to keep private, to obscure, to darken. This is necessary when culture becomes ‘over-positive,’ by which I mean that it values the public over the private, the seen over the unseen. We may think of how hegemonic discourse considers private spaces political (being the loci of odious, ‘oppressive’ structures like the “patriarchy” and “heteronormativity” or the like) and how the modern market mobilises the commercialization of intimacy through platforms like OnlyFans.
Korean cultural theorist Byung-Chul Han describes this dynamic in his Psychopolitics as follows:
Negativity, then, including the aestheticization of aggression, can serve to signal a private space that is not meant to be accessible to the onlooker. Its hostile gesture is like a temperature shock, coaxing society to recover its turgidity, to respect the integrity of certain barriers. Aesthetic cues in a subculture’s fashion, like spikes, chains, and the ubiquity of the colour black, function like a gargoyle warding off the profane from an otherwise sacred space.
But for this to work towards the edification of people participating in such a subculture, there has to actually be a ‘sacred space’ in there somewhere. Nu Metal’s anti-consumerism, for example, (think Sepultura’s Roots album (1996) or System of a Down’s Toxicity (2001)) would have to mean something.
In the rock music spectrum, a shift took place in the late 1980s from ‘Glam’ or ‘Hair’ Metal’s hedonistic anthems about whisky and groupies to Grunge’s tortured artists. Nu Metal’s Korn and similar bands brought an equivalent introspective mood to heavy music.
But if Metal is to be redeemed, it would need to break the ‘Glam vs. Grunge,’ hedonist vs. nihilist, dichotomy. The heroic themes of self-overcoming that were relatively prevalent in classic Heavy Metal would need to be rediscovered.
In the same way, we could warn against reactions to contemporary Cardi B.-type hip-hop retreating into the supposed authenticity of ‘Gangsta’ rap through the rise of Drill music.
If what we may describe as ‘instrumental negativity’ remains unyoked to any genuine vision of ‘the Good,’ it remains mere demoralisation, serving as an escape valve for frustration against commercialization and excessive positivity, but ultimately weakening the subject who partakes in it.
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