A New Generation Is Making Nu-Metal Their Own
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The post A New Generation Is Making Nu-Metal Their Own appeared first on Consequence.
During her performance at Glastonbury, alternative pop star Rina Sawayama laid bare her frustrations. As she prepared to perform a cut from her 2020 album SAWAYAMA, “STFU!,” a familiar ride cymbal reverberated through the night air – that of Korn’s “Blind.” Over the backdrop of the nu-metal classic, Sawayama took a seat, furrowed her brow, and expressed her displeasure with The 1975 frontman Matty Healy, blasting him as “a white man that watches ‘Ghetto Gaggers’ and mocks Asian people on a podcast.” She added, “He also owns my masters, I’ve had enough,” before doubling down on her alt-metal aggression by interpolating the bridge of Limp Bizkit’s “Break Stuff.” The message was as loud as the distorted guitars: Rina’s pissed.
This might be surprising if you only knew Sawayama from her collaborations with Elton John, but her embrace of nu-metal is far from sudden. “STFU!,” which features a mixture of low-tuned riffage and hip-hop-influenced drums, already has the bones of a long-lost nu-metal chart-topper even without the backing of “Blind” or “Break Stuff.” “XS” sneaks buzzsaw guitars into a dance-pop banger, and it only takes one listen to her cover of “Enter Sandman” to confirm that Sawayama knows her way around an over-the-top rock tune. She’s long been incorporating the signature stylings of the metal-rap-pop fusion — and she’s not the only one.
Nu-metal, once written off as a regrettable phase in pop music’s past, has become a primary influence for a crop of artists from a diverse set of backgrounds who exist outside of the traditional metal landscape.
“I wanted to make kind of aggressive, clowny music. I wanted it to be perplexing, bizarre – the opposite of cute, indie girl rock music,” explains the artist Sasami, whose latest album bolstered her indie songwriting with the unmistakable mark of nu-metal. “I kind of intuitively found myself getting more and more into heavy rock music, and I would scream a lot even when I was performing my first album — and there’s no screaming on that album. It was a really mellow album, but I just got really aggressive live. So, I knew when I made Squeeze that I wanted to bring a much heavier sound to it.”
And bring a much heavier sound she did. In contrast to the sometimes noisy, often accessibly beautiful indie rock of her self-titled debut, Squeeze ramps up the rage tenfold. From the industrial grit of opener “Skin a Rat” to the chugging “Sorry Entertainer” to the avant-garde aggression of “Squeeze,” the new batch of songs reframed Sasami Ashworth as unafraid, confrontational, and ready to blow the roof off of any room her band might play. Just take a look at the album art for proof.
“When I toured my first album, I had pretty much an all queer/femme band, and so we had the classic [problem] of having to deal with male sound people and male venue people,” Ashworth says of leaning into metal. “[There was] this kind of angst about having to constantly prove ourselves as worthy musicians, so there was a general undercurrent of anger bubbling.”
Ashworth and her band’s experience is unfortunately common for minorities in the music industry, and the underlying sentiments that fuel such behavior extends far beyond the entertainment business. From daily microaggressions to the seemingly endless string of political attacks on marginalized communities, there’s no shortage of reasons for women, BIPOC, or queer folk to look for avenues to express feelings of frustration.
To do so through nu-metal may strike some as an odd decision. The genre brings with it something of an optics problem, carrying political and social baggage left over from its commercial peak. As portrayed in documentaries like HBO’s Woodstock 99: Peace, Love, and Rage, the nu-metal community is an easy target for ridicule. The film tells the story of the disastrous Woodstock ’99 festival, which featured a lineup that leaned heavily on hard rock and metal. Though initial reviews of the festival were positive, the weekend now lives on in infamy, with reports of rioting, rampant sexual assault, and several deaths.
At its worst, nu-metal has been packaged as a sonic concentration of toxic masculinity and the prejudices that come along with it: homophobia, transphobia, misogyny, and racism. To 2023 ears — and one could argue, to 2003 ears as well — the content of songs like Limp Bizkit’s “Eat You Alive” are, to put it lightly, less than tasteful (“You want nothing at all to do with me/ but I want you, ain’t nothing wrong with wanting you/ ‘Cause I’m a man and I can think what the hell I want/ You got that straight?”).
“Historically, of course, there are BIPOC metal and nu-metal musicians, and there are femme metal and nu-metal musicians,” Ashworth tells Consequence. “But for the most part, it’s a pretty male-dominated world. And I think it’s just kind of ironic, because I feel like people who are marginalized are the ones who are feeling the most potent rage.”
Even some of the genre’s biggest figures, like Korn frontman Jonathan Davis, author of the well-intentioned but unfortunately-titled song “Faget,” have retroactively diagnosed the scene with systemic cultural problems.
“Oh man, that scene was full of misogynistic, opportunistic dickhead jocks,” Davis said in 2019 of the ‘90s nu-metal community. “The sort of people who’d be bullying me at school if they weren’t supporting my band at shows.”
And yet, decades after the genre went from dominating the charts to bearing the brunt of low-hanging punchlines, its angsty theatrics are making a comeback. Artists like Sawayama, Sasami, Poppy, Yves Tumor, and more have taken direct cues from nu-metal, working drop-tuned riffs into their songs and showing off their most blood-curdling screaming abilities.
Then, once on stage, these artists often make their embrace of nu-metal even more explicit, as the genre’s most heralded tunes have become go-to covers. In addition to Sawayama’s recent interpolations, there are artists like 100 gecs, who put their own unique spin on System of a Down’s “Toxicity.” While those unfamiliar with Dylan Brady and Laura Les’ chaotic style might have been surprised to see the two artists share a headline, anyone who has spun their track “Billy Knows Jamie” knew it was only a matter of time before the duo dove head first into the waters of nu-metal.
And audiences, for their part, seem to be happily along for the ride.
“You have a lot of people on the older end of it that are just nostalgic for nu-metal, the sound of nu-metal from when they were young, and a lot of those people tend to feel like nu-metal was given an incredibly short shrift. They’re excited to hear somebody champion this music without any irony or pretense,” explains Holiday Kirk, creator of the popular “crazy ass moments in nu-metal history” Twitter account. “On the younger end of things, I think people are just mind blown that you had all these different bands dressing like crazy, making weird music, and being ridiculously famous and well compensated for that.”
Kirk’s page, boasting nearly 125,000 followers, is just one showcase of the growing appetite for nu-metal and nu-metal-adjacent art. And the hunger isn’t an exclusively online phenomenon, as Kirk has begun organizing live nu-metal events, bringing in DJs and bands to celebrate both the genre’s heyday and its revival.
Of course, nu-metal has a bit of a shaky past when it comes to its fanbase, sometimes attracting a less-than-tolerant crowd. With newfound interest in the genre and its culture, is history bound to repeat itself? Fortunately, artists and fans have made a strong, explicit effort to keep the modern scene inclusive and safe for anyone interested in the music.
“It was just a matter of, like, I don’t want these fucking people in my audience,” Kirk explains. “A lot of metal publications will just let the shittiest people run rampant because they think that, ‘Oh, we need these people in our audience. They click on our pages. They watch our videos. What are we supposed to do?’ And to me, it’s like, no, fuck that shit.”
As the child of an immigrant, Ashworth explains how selectively leaving behind aspects of different cultures is second nature for her, and mining nu-metal for its more positive aspects is no different.
“You know, my dad is Caucasian and my mom’s Korean. I have this really special ability to take what I like from each culture and kind of abandon what I don’t agree with from each culture. And I’ve always done that in my life and I feel that way about music, too,” she elaborates. “So, [for nu-metal], it was really easy for me. Like, I’m going to take the double kick pedal and I’m going to abandon white supremacy, you know?”
The end result is a new wave of diverse pop, indie, and alternative artists expressing their rage by adopting the aesthetics of the music many of them grew up listening to, as well as a diverse new generation of listeners ready to exercise their negative feelings. The music once criticized for being unwelcome to people who don’t look like Fred Durst has now become a space not only made up of those from marginalized communities, but led by them.
“Rattly slap bass and drop-C, seven-string guitars, that speaks to anyone that has had any sort of emotional experience of rage,” says Ashworth of nu-metal’s relevance in 2023. “I think that’s what I like about metal or nu-metal. It actually does have this super twisted, dark energy – but we all have twisted dark energy.”
A New Generation Is Making Nu-Metal Their Own
Jonah Krueger
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