by Ian Christe
Forced to recognize their own value in the wake of a media blackout, metallers developed a real nostalgia for battles won. Fans and musicians who for so long had been focused on the next big thing, looked back and discovered that an admirable number of metal records stood the test of time. “As Megadeth became successful,” says Dave Mustaine, “a lot of the bands that we passed up, I oddly enough thought, ‘Why should I listen to them anymore, we’re bigger than them.’ But if you open up my suitcase today, there’s a bag in there with Ride the Lightning, the Metallica Black record, Megadeth Rust in Piece, Diamond Head Behold the Beginning and Lightning to the Nations, and Mercyful Fate Melissa and Don’t Break the Oath.”
With that wistful feeling in the air, it was not long before Metal Dreams—a fanzine entirely dedicated to restoring 1980s-style metal—shot to prominence. Editor Chris Dugan supported languishing metal acts generously, passionately charging through interviews with Anvil, Accept, Dokken, and Savatage. Death metal was not especially relished, but alternative rock was viewed as a scourge akin to leprosy. Not entirely seduced, the older generation kept its success in perspective. “Musically, the eighties generation is gone,” says Ronnie James Dio, whose most recent platinum album came in 1989. “Never in a million years will it be as big as it was. That was the music that built MTV, never will that be again. People who say, ‘Yeah, it’s coming back, it’s coming full circle’—those are the people who don’t understand the world as it is. I’ve looked in the mirror recently, and it doesn’t bother me.”
Without merely reveling in the greatness of the past, however, there was a feeling of continual renewal and renovation of heavy metal’s incredible propulsive energy. “The way I see the genres and subgenres evolving, I think there’s just going to be more of everything,” says Matt Jacobson of Relapse Records. “More classic metal, more power metal, more death metal—there’s just more diversity across the board. I think it’s happening with all music. There are more influences than ever before. I think there’s room for a handful of bands from each subgenre to be pretty big and for each subgenre to thrive, ultimately depending on the strength of the bands.”
Logo à go-go: Metal overload in L.A., November 2000
Powered by the late-twentieth-century boom economy, the amount of available heavy metal choices soon grew almost surreal. Reunions by long-lost metal heavyweights Exodus, S.O.D., Venom, and Saxon competed for flocking crowds with insurgent tours by still-thriving death metal and black metal acts. The diversity was overwhelming. At the annual Milwaukee Metalfest—a long-running meeting of headbangers from Japan, Europe, Australia, and anywhere in North America with interstate highways and a caffeine supply—fans roamed freely between rooms and multiple stages—gorging across decades on power metal greats Anvil, intricate and jazzy rap metal upstarts Candiria, and Norwegian black metallers Enslaved as if flipping television channels.
Despite the uncertainty of the mid-1990s, there remained an ever-emerging new young audience for heavy metal that would only be confirmed in the coming years. This fresh audience kept Metallica at the front line of music sales during the second half of the 1990s. SoundScan, the record industry’s sales meter, reported Metallica Black the third bestselling album since it began counting. Even though the band had barely lifted a creative finger, the Load and Reload CDs together sold an impressive 7 million copies by the end of the decade. Eclipsing the popularity of the entire grunge and lite punk genres, Metallica sold more than 22 million CDs in America just between 1995 and 2000, while touring and remaining internationally popular. Meanwhile, the concert trade magazine Pollstar calculated Metallica’s total career headline gross for North American shows at $218 million.
By the late 1990s Metallica was arguably the most popular modern rock act in the world, competing only with U2, R.E.M., and Madonna. Yet its live performances were still riddled with songs by obscure heavy metal giants like Diamond Head and Mercyful Fate. In late 1998 Metallica performed at the Playboy mansion, the show-business equivalent of being invited by the president to play at the White House. According to the RIAA, the organization that accounts for gold and platinum record awards, as of 2000 Metallica had sold as many records in America in fifteen years as the Rolling Stones could muster in all their legendary four decades. Though the world was late to realize it, heavy metal had become the new rock and roll.
XIX
Virtual Ozzy &
Metal’s Digital Rebound
October 25, 1996: First Ozzfest held in Phoenix, Arizona
July 29, 1997: Spawn sound track includes Slayer remix by Atari Teenage Riot
May 2, 2000: Slipknot goes platinum in the United States, royalties split nine ways
July 11, 2000: Lars Ulrich testifies against Napster.com before U.S. Congress
While Metallica’s twenty-two-show Lollapalooza summer 1996 tour grossed a respectable $16 million, the former Bay Area bashers had no intention of reinventing the festival as a roaring heavy metal summit. That job was taken by Ozzy Osbourne—himself snubbed by Lollapalooza promoters the previous year. Although Ozzy saw 10 million CD sales in the 1990s, compared to 6 million albums in the 1980s—the alleged heyday of heavy metal—the beloved singer’s career was due for a face-lift. His public antics during the 1990s included stumbling comatose across a WWF wrestling ring, demonstrating exercise equipment to befuddled magazine editors, and recording a romantic duet with the Muppet Miss Piggy.
In the second half of the decade, the long-lived madman put his enduring charisma to better use. Ozzy’s band played more than a hundred dates in 1996, anchored by a spectacular pair of minifestivals in Phoenix, Arizona, and San Bernardino, California. Dubbed “Ozz-fests,” the two shows brought Ozzy Osbourne together with top metal acts such as Slayer, Sepultura, and Biohazard, plus the unconventional wild cards Neurosis, Powerman 5000, and Coal Chamber. These all-day happenings drew tens of thousands of metal rats out of the woodwork and resurrected the prominence of the slightly doddering Ozzy. After suffering metal neglect in recent years, a popular culture scene was starved for exactly such an iron-plated celebration of excess and power chords.
Suddenly, there was talk of a resurgence of metal, the millions-selling genre that had never gone away. Expanded into an apocalyptic coast-to-coast caravan in subsequent years, Ozzfest, with its sundrenched twelve-hour stretches of adrenaline and aggression, revitalized the concert industry. While box-office receipts suffered during the reign of pop punk, alternative rock, and rap music—leading to wide concern over the imminent collapse of the concert medium—Ozzfest affirmed that huge audiences existed for live music, particularly hardcore heavy metal. “We don’t try to outsmart ourselves,” Ozzy’s longtime wife and manager, Sharon Osbourne, told Billboard. “We don’t try to bring in forty singing monks or Tony Bennett. We just do what we do. A lot of times when people get successful, they try and get too smart and put stuff on that impresses themselves and the people of their age group—yet it doesn’t work with the kids on the street.”
As when he helped along Mötley Crüe and Metallica a decade earlier, Ozzy Osbourne again put his symbolic approval behind adventurous young bands with momentum just beginning to manifest. In this case he took the cream of the crop of an entire field of bands. They all had been hovering around the periphery of the music scene looking for a niche while releasing music on tiny regional labels—or in many cases on their own. They were exceptionally angry, and two years earlier their career prospects were virtually nil.
Dubbed “nu metal,” the Ozzfest bands whipped together a new and improved formula that raged with the thunder of heavy metal while swaying to the funky pulse of rap music. Then they struck a compromise between that mixture and the gruesome sonic assault of death metal. Harking back to the alternative metal wave of 1991, the nu metal bands were grinders of a slam-dancing musical sausage— picking and choosing influences like the aggressive cable-ready channel surfers they were.
The mix of raw guitars, emotional singing, and sonic trickery intr
oduced a popular explosion that had been waiting since the early 1990s, as nu metal bands put a stylish face on the endless, undying desire to lash out. To a band like Korn—initially labeled rap metal—the original metal icons Iron Maiden and Judas Priest were already past the vanishing point. Their memories of live music began during the time when rap and metal began to clash in the early 1990s—the era of the historic live collaboration between Anthrax and Public Enemy. “Our musical history starts with the Red Hot Chili Peppers and early Faith No More,” said Korn bassist Reggie Arvizu, aka Fieldy, to the Akron Beacon Journal. “As a band, that’s where we begin.”
In the decade since the Bay Area thrash band Mordred first added a DJ to their lineup, the funk metal mix had grown much more formidable. Founded in the hinterlands of Bakersfield, California, before relocating to Los Angeles, Korn intensified the precision assault of Pantera and added funky electronic sounds. An energetic live act, the band rode a repetitive rhythmic churn of low-tuned guitar riffs while pantomiming and exaggerating the poses of rappers. Bringing greater contrast to the erratic technique of Mike Patton from Faith No More, kilt-wearing singer Jonathan Davis alternated between a pained growl and a sarcastic, tuneless whine, pioneering a new vocal style.
Nu metal shared some tonal qualities with death metal, but was much more accessible. By 1997 Korn had earned platinum sales of its self-titled debut and the follow-up, Life Is Peachy. Putting anger to a beat, the band grabbed the attention of the affluent suburban teen audience that had previously identified with the antisocial outlook of rap music. As longtime rap scene also-ran Kid Rock began rhyming over Metallica riffs, he also tapped the incredible market power in the rediscovery of guitars. “Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst and Kid Rock are rappers,” says Chuck D from the influential rap group Public Enemy. “They probably rebelled against rock in their teenage years, because it was too white-boy or something. Now it’s available to them, and you have to tip your hat to these guys for doing it.”
Image-savvy and raised on MTV since early childhood, members of the nu school embraced and exaggerated the stereotypes of heavy metal instead of defying them. Like the nightmarish child of glam metal, they relied heavily on image—replacing the hair spray with facial piercings, custom contact lenses, and made-to-order dreadlocks, and tossing into the mix an unsettling slew of masks, midgets, and other randomly appropriate props. As Mötley Crüe and Poison escorted models and strippers on Sunset Blvd. in the 1980s, so in the 1990s Korn and Limp Bizkit showed status by mingling with porn stars on Melrose Ave.
Rap rocker Kid Rock, pre-Metallica samples (Jive)
Awakened to the fad in full swing, MTV recast itself in nu metal’s image at the end of the 1990s, yet cable television was no longer the insurgent medium. The Internet created a nationwide network of all metal fans, not just those willing to wade through the back pages of magazines for tape-trader ads. Korn and its peers were fully aware of the computer age, and they invested heavily in Internet promotion, using new media and e-mail to personalize their relationship to fans in the hands-on style of Metallica and other underground bands. On their websites fans wrote the bios, voted on playlists for live shows, and picked up music for free.
Ozzfest became the physical host for this scene—a rolling virtual nu metal city on wheels. In 1998 Ozzfest launched the career of the transitional band whose success sounded a death knell for the 1990s, Limp Bizkit. Previously the band’s ever-present DJ, Lethal, had survived as a hip-hop hitmaker with House of Pain. Now Limp Bizkit twisted the rap-rock dial confidently in the direction of metal, absorbing the bravado and rhythm of hardcore rap into a saturated framework of guitars and fist-pumping anthems. Their catchphrase-laden songs, like “Show Me What You Got” and “Take a Look Around,” seemed based on slogans cribbed from bumper stickers and county-fair novelties. In the sweaty churn of the slam pit, however, the band worked wonders—its physical effect could not be denied.
After Limp Bizkit and Godsmack in 1998, the Ozzfest in 1999 introduced the eclectic System of a Down, whose down-tuned guitars and scattershot drum arrangements wove threads of Carcass into an eclectic Zappa-esque mix. Wearing face paint and a huge Afro, System’s Lebanon-born Armenian singer, Serj Tankian, sold agitated political lyrics with grindcore growls, feral barking, and nervous squeals. In 2000, the most impressive Ozzfest newcomer was Kittie, from London, Ontario, an all-female band formed after two members met in gymnastics class. As their band’s debut, Spit, sold more than half a million copies, its gimmicky pink hair and barrettes gave way to leather belts and a more mature sound on the follow-up Oracle. “Of course we have a lot of aggression,” said vocalist Morgan Lander to Rolling Stone. “It’s an aggressive style of music, and it’s easier to get your point across.”
Mercedes Lander and Fallon Bowman of Kittie (Jeanne Mitchell)
The nu metal bands understood adolescent rage, but they were too young to remember the time when heavy metal was truly outsider music. Not surprisingly, many traditional metallers remained slow to embrace a form whose biggest musical contribution was oversimplification. The success of nu metal stars like Papa Roach—whose song “Last Resort” was based entirely on a looped Iron Maiden guitar lick—irritated the old guard immensely. “In the past eight or nine years music has gotten really atonal,” says Megadeth’s Dave Mustaine. “The bands all sound identical, whether it’s the alternative bands or even the nu metal bands. I think a lot of it has to do with the music industry—they’re not looking for originality.”
Yet veterans were perhaps guilty of forgetting how simple and charming basic heavy metal had been a generation earlier. There was originality and freshness in the nu metal sound, and its influence inevitably seeped into the underground, drawing old metal into healthy new hybrids. Slayer and Napalm Death remained popular in the late 1990s by stripping the number of musical ideas in their songs to an attention-deficit minimum. Likewise, after Sepultura chose not to renew a management contract in April 1997 with singer Max Cavalera’s wife, Cavalera left his brother and bandmates and formed Soulfly—an Ozzfest favorite whose grinding guitar metal was layered within a state-of-the-art cut-and-paste of sound.
As the wheels turned forward, nu metal reinvigorated heavy metal for an enthusiastic young generation. “Those bands are commercial music,” explains Matt Jacobson from the underground label Relapse Records, “but they’re great for what we’re doing in general. It prepares people for heavier music. I think bands like those are opening people up to underground music. I certainly didn’t go from pop radio to Napalm Death. It was like Black Sabbath and ZZ Top into Mötley Crüe and Iron Maiden, then Slayer, and then Napalm Death. Everyone needs a transition.”
By the end of the decade the distinction between nu metal and traditional metal began to vanish as package tours and festival bills brought genres and fans together. The ultimate bridge between the camps was Slipknot—the band whose rabid countenance most closely embodied the spirit of Ozzfest. “I don’t think jumping up and down and wearing baggy pants have anything to do with metal, but that’s just personal taste,” says Dan Lilker, whose hard-crunching S.O.D. was a major influence on nu metal. “But I know I can definitely tell the difference between Limp Bizkit and a band like Slipknot.”
Appearing from the post-Scandinavian badlands of Des Moines, Iowa, the nine-member Slipknot delivered bullet points on the complex treatises of death metal, showing technical finesse while remaining dedicated to chaos. Including former members of the death metal groups Body Pit and Anal Blast, Slipknot was the result of years of rabid late-night brainstorming while its members worked dead-end jobs in their hometown. The minimum-wage post behind the cash register proved a powerful incubator. Claiming the influence of every style of music save modern country, the band twisted percussive arrangements with scorching groove, weird guitar, DJ squiggles, and a graveyard sense of humor. With cuts like “Left Behind” and “People = Shit,” they digested underground metal for mass consumption and dragged down every other form of music into th
e muck. “We’re going to take all the genres of music that we love,” says percussionist Shawn Crahan, aka 6, “death metal being one of the highest, and incorporate it in everything we’ve done.”
NU METAL
Somewhere around the time that Biohazard hit the scene, funk metal stopped being a joke. Combining the spectral influence of Faith No More with snippets of the hardest death metal, the nu metal bands proved that pancultural metal could pay off. Given a perfect platform in Ozzfest, a yearly summertime touring moshfest, the Deftones, Limp Bizkit, and Kittie turned in multiple-million sales by the end of the 1990s. Though the skater clothes and rap-inflected lingo were a world apart from the medieval garb of a previous generation, the effect on audiences was just as fervent. Slipknot especially retained the whirling chaos of its death metal roots—adding clean vocals increased the potential audience nearly tenfold.
Play That Funky Music Redux
Biohazard, State of the World Address (1994)
Deftones, White Pony (2000)
Fear Factory, Demanufadure (1994)
Kittie, Oracle (2001)
Korn, Life Is Peachy (1996)
Limp Bizkit, Significant Other (1999)
Papa Roach, Infest (2000)
Slipknot, Iowa (2001)
Slipknot, Slipknot (1999)
Soulfly, Soulfly (1998)
System of a Down, System of a Down (1998)
Tool, Aenima (1996)
Rob Zombie, Hellbilly Deluxe (1998)