Please Love Them: They're KoRn

  For most bands, the summer festival circuit is little more than a time-honored rock 'n' roll chore. Its many drawbacks—oppressive heat, short sets, technical nightamres—are outweighed only by the sheer volume of the audiences and the unique opportunity these gatherings present to bond with fellow pop stars over exculsive-to-rock-star-type problems: filing for bankruptcy, the difficulty in scoring Percocet overseas, Pilates vs. Ashtanga yoga, etc. But for KoRn at the Fuji Rock Festival, Japan's biggest annual rock event, it's just high school redux—a chance to feel unwanted and out of place.

Backstage, the band's five members sit in a semicircle, decked out mostly in track suits, hair piled in dreads, looking guilty—possibly of being lower-class white boys from dusty Bakersfield, California. Over the course of the two-day festival, KoRn bassist Fieldy (a.k.a. Reg Arvizu) will pick a fight with a member of Primal Scream by repeatedly insisting, "You look like my Uncle Bob." An hour later, he will exasperate Garbage diva Shirley Manson by incessantly sticking a toy keychain in her face and setting off annoying sounds without a word of explanation. Meanwhile, KoRn singer Jonathan Davis will yell at Goldie, "Fuck you, dick," when the loquacious junglist doesn't recognize him, and he'll hurl insults at nice guys Ben Folds Five every opportunity he gets. Even Junkie XL-a friendly dance rock band from Amsterdam will turn down dinner with KoRn because they've heard they're a bunch of assholes.

KoRn aren't assholes. They just want some love—and when they don't get it, they act out.

"We go to these goddamn festivals, and no fucking goddamn band will love us," the good-naturedly angst-ridden Davis gripes in his Tokyo hotel room after a drunken night on the town. "We get no fucking love at all. It's like we're in our own little world. We're not that goddamn scary. What the goddamn fuck? For once in my life, please love me: I'm in KoRn!"

KoRn are no longer an underground phenomenon, playing heavy, hip-hop-conscious, gothic-leaning thrash rock for skatekids and misfits. With the 1998 smash Follow The Leader, KoRn are now official members of an elite cadre of rock bands with No. 1 albums this decade, like Smashing Pumpkins, the Dave Matthews Band, R.E.M., and Skid Row.

But KoRn and the elite just don't seem to be mixing.

"We're nothing like that, man," Davis screams that night before the band's Fuji performance, leaping off his hotel room chair.

"Like what?" I ask.

"Any of that shit!"

"Any of what shit?"

"Any shit that's out there. There's so much rehashed shit. You see it around us at this festival: musicians fucking hate us. Fucking hate us!"

"Why is that so important?"

Davis ignores the question and switches tack. "What can you call it?"

"Call what?"

"The music. What can you call it? It's like the Clash. What the fuck can you call the Clash? Fucking punk, pop, reggae."

"People call you heavy."

"We just want to be heavy," Davis says as if hearing the the word for the first time. "All we want to do is bring heavy back into rock 'n' roll. Because Ben Folds Five suck. It's fucking Cheers music."

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