KoRn After the "Rock Is Dead" Tour

  Hands will cover ears. Parents will wince. The music is diabolical. Rock's bastard child, heavy metal, has been through the ringer. It's no longer relegated to jeans, leather motorcycle jackets, and long hair. Heck, even Black Sabbath and Kiss have sharpened their devilish hooves again. This form of music, created from the underground, for the underground, has had major bouts with mainstream acceptance. Within metal, the sub-genres run the gamut, with titles like thrash, alternative, death, goth, hardcore, grunge, industrial, punk, progressive, and even retro metal. It's all fairly complex for a sound commonly accepted as "noise."

In the '90's, the face of metal has undergone its biggest make-over to date. Just like Seattle's Nirvana K.O.ed arena rock hair bands like Poison, Bon Jovi, and Def Leppard earlier in this decade, new bands like KoRn, Deftones, and Fear Factory are injecting the metal genre with today's hottest fashions; tear-away track pants, yellow-tinted shades, tattoos, driving guitars, and a nod of recognition towards hip-hop's meteoric rise in popularity. It's that blending of power chords into modern technology that has seen, in the past few years, two very different underground genres, heavy metal and hip-hop, combine. L.A.'s KoRn has successfully found the middle ground. Frazzled critics, who can't pigeon-hole their brand of heavy music, or even begin to understand the millions of KoRn fanatics, have gone so far as to call them the "Backstreet Boys of metal."

"They can call us whatever they want," says 28 year-old guitarist Munky (a.k.a. James Shaffer) from New Haven, Connecticut. "We're always going to be KoRn. It's just a label, and there are always going to be labels to let readers understand the kind of music KoRn is all about. I think it's a heavy hip-hop groove band with melodic vocals. That's how I would describe our music."

Feeling further and further away from his Orange County, Los Angeles home, Munky, along with singer/lyricist Jonathan Davis, bassist Fieldy, guitarist Head, and drummer David Silveria are used to touring hard. When KoRn was out supporting their sophomore effort, Life Is Peachy (1996), they would go for weeks without taking a day off. Rumors persist that a bus driver quit, stating that the tour was the hardest one he had driven for in twenty years.

Presently, KoRn has completed a stint with Rob Zombie playing to enthusiastic fans across the U.S. Initially, KoRn was a little bit nervous about the Rock Is Dead tour, as far as the pressures of trying to match their success with Family Values. But needless to say everything went just fine, except for a small snag on only the second night of the tour when a truck transporting some of both bands' equipment broke down and failed to meet KoRn and Zombie in Albuquerque. But the show must go on, as they say, and it did, if a little stripped down. Both acts regained their equipment the next day, and the tour was a constant success from that point forward. Now that the tour is over, KoRn is reported to record a song with the hip-hop act Outkast.

"People should know that I'm really thankful for everything," Munky says of KoRn's current kings-of-the-hard-rock-mountain position, "but, we've worked hard. We've toured and give more than one hundred percent for this band, from the beginning."

"When we started, it seemed like there was nothing that would hold this band back from being successful. We weren't going to let anything stand in our way. That was our attitude, and we still have that attitude. We just wanted to come out and create something new, which is not easy to do these days. It's all been done before, and I don't think we're doing anything all that different. It's just how we present ourselves and deliver it."

KoRn has gone on to do so much since delivering their third disc, Follow The Leader (an apt title, if ever there was one), which marched to the number one position atop Billboard's chart. The current slew of hard-edged bands and major label record companies are simply following what sells, and what sells is KoRn. All three of KoRn's releases, their self-titled debut (1994), then Life Is Peachy, and now Follow The Leader (which features guest appearances by Ice Cube, Limp Bizkit's Fred Durst, Pharcyde's Tre, and even Cheech Marin of Cheech & Chong fame), have individually sold millions of copies to legions of new and loyal KoRn and hard rock fans, who are celebrated on the new disc in the song "Children of the KoRn."

"I think the majority of people understand what we're doing," says Munky of KoRn's lyrical mixture which pits Davis' sarcasm against his dark day-to-day demons.

"I think people are catching on. I also think it has a lot to do with our fans being able to relate with Jonathan's lyrics. That's why our fans are very faithful to us. Bad stuff happens to everybody, and people can relate to that. I know that I can relate to what Jonathan is singing about."

With platinum discs, sold-out tours, popular KoRn "After School Special" broadcasts over the Internet, their own record label (Elementree, distributed through Warner Brothers), Puma Clothing custom designing their wears, and hit singles "Got The Life" and "Freak On A Leash" from Follow The leader, one big question remains: what's left for KoRn?

"Whatever happens, happens," Munky philosophizes. "I guess it isn't very underground anymore, is it? That's a tough question. I feel we're still a part of the underground. When I see the fans, and how diehard they are, I feel like we're still underground. I think only a few of our really diehard fans really want us to stay on the underground scene. It's tough, we're in a position right now," he admits of their mainstream hugeness.

"We're either going to stay an undergound band or we're just going to blow the roof off. Our music will never be commercial sounding, we're always going to be heavy. We were just discussing the direction for our next album and we want to get heavier. Heavy ass, like the first KoRn record. Raw, and backing off on all the effects, back to just being straight-forward groove, like some old Sepultura or Soulfly. We want back some of those heavy-fat grooves we had when we first started the band. That's what we're talking about doing now."

Regarding the possibilities for a new home video that could include some strange footage of Follow The Leader guests like Cheech and Ice Cube, Munky says excitedly, "We've got some footage that is just unbelieveable."

"One of my really good friends, his name is Danny Hamilton, has some unbelieveable footage from way back, when we first started. Actually he has footage when we were in the rehearsal studio in Anaheim, California, and we were writing the song "Faget" and working the parts out. It's all on video. He's also taped some of our very first gigs, with four or five people in the crowd, and we're like "and our next song, mom, is...." Munky laughs as he recalls those days, long gone, as arenas worldwide beckon his band.

"This guy has filmed the earliest stuff we've done to the latest stuff from this tour. He's with us, filming every day. That stuff is cool, because it's totally us, not like making music videos. Making videos is cool, it's a trip. They get those big old cameras in front of your face and I'm like 'man, I just started playing guitar. I didn't know that I was going to have to act and shit,' " he laughs. "Here I am acting. After we blew up the car in the 'Got The Life' video, our director was like 'look surprised and happy.' We're like 'what? I can't act.' It was actually pretty funny."

And finally, in a day and age where people's tastes change quicker than surfing from website to website, Munky and the rest of KoRn, believe that it's about the music. Above the clothes, the tours and videos. KoRn has to be about making music they believe in and working with people they can trust. "I think that we just want to keep our fans involved," Munky argues. "Like they're a part of it, because they are. They're part of the whole KoRn process. Without the fans loving our band, we'd be working at Pizza Hut or something. We appreciate it and we want them to feel appreciated. They see that all this fame has really just started to escalate recently, with the release of Follow The Leader. I think one of our major challenges is to figure out how to make more time and be more available to our fans."

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