Whenever the 90’s are invoked, the spectre of so called ‘Britpop’ (or worse still, ‘Cool Britannia’) hangs over the entire decade. In the early 21st century, we are still living with the vestiges of 90’s Britpop – this year alone, the record buying public have been subjected to yet another Oasis studio album that summarily fails to reach the songwriting zenith of ‘(What’s the Story) Morning Glory?'
Rather than revisiting the now cringeworthy ‘Oasis v.s. Blur’ battles, the foolhardy associations with the emergence of New Labour, or any other supposedly seminal moment in what was a period of often desperate and self-congratulatory attempts to forge a new ‘golden era’ of British pop; this post is dedicated to the wave of ‘nu-metal’ in the late 90’s and early noughties that marked my adolescence.
Nu-metal bands – the likes of Korn, Limp Bizkit, Papa Roach and Slipknot – beat a path to success by effectively tapping into, if not ruthlessly preying upon, the emotional vulnerability of angsty teens. These bands were a slightly more hard-edged and downbeat prototype for today’s legion of emo bands. In recent years, the enormous commercial success of My Chemical Romance – who have successfully converted nearly all the pocket money of the young and emotionally fragile into boosting their record sales – owes much to nu-metal artists having done the initial legwork.
In their heyday of the early noughties, Limp Bizkit and Papa Roach were the most prominent examples of resoundingly dumb, alpha-male nu-metal makers, with big lumbering down-tuned riffs and a dreadfully embarrassing habit of trying to emulate their favourite rap stars. These bands exuded bone-headed vitriol, penning lyrics about anger, violence and generally ‘not giving a fuck’, yet the brash simplicity of the music and its lyrical messages were central to the widespread appeal of nu-metal. If you ever felt inexplicably pissed off as a young hormonally charged teen, nu-metal seemed like appropriate mood music.
The idea that nu-metal provided a truly effective artistic outlet for a supposedly disaffected, angry and unstable younger generation is one that many nu-metal acts readily bought into. Many appeared to firmly believe that their music truly spoke to their fans. Slipknot, for instance, came to affectionately refer to their fans as ‘maggots’ that ‘feed’ off the aggression and self-described ‘sickness’ of their music.
Although many nu-metal artists willingly claimed that their music resonated profoundly with the younger generation, they absolutely failed to channel the youthful angst of their fans into anything other than increased record sales. Without any sort of resistance, nu-metal artists accepted a negative stereotype of an allegedly nihilistic and uniquely apathetic generation, and set about effectively exploiting it for commercial ends. In retrospect, perhaps this is one of the most faithful expressions of teen angst that pop culture can muster in modern western societies – after all, nu-metal, like so much teen angst, was at once short-lived, obsessively image conscious and ultimately vacuous.
N.B. The biggest dunderhead of the nu-metal bunch would have to be Fred Durst, who gave us the lyric, 'I hope you know I pack a chainsaw, I'll skin your ass raw!'
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