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Roughly half a year ago there was a discussion here on the cultural legacy and (then) recent renewed interest and negative portrayal of the Woodstock ’99 music festival in the mainstream media. I haven’t seen the two documentaries in question but I’ve heard commentaries on them, and they agreed that much of the sneering and hostility present in their narratives is actually directed at the nu-metal genre in general, and the antics of Fred Durst in particular. I was sort of surprised that nobody mentioned this in the discussion. Anyway, it certainly doesn’t surprise me that much that they’d contextualize the whole incident in that way, as nu-metal is generally seen as an embarrassing and pathetic cringefest which was a plague upon pop music at the turn of the Millennium, thankfully one that largely disappeared after a few years as quickly as it appeared. And it was roughly at the zenith of its popularity when this festival took place, which was dominated by nu-metal bands.
When I’ve heard these commentaries I started looking for more on Youtube as my interest was piqued. Back when the BBC Learning TV channel existed it ran a rather good one-hour documentary on the incident but unfortunately I wasn’t able to find it. (I saw one or two other short documentaries from the same period i.e. 2000/2001.) I do recall, however, finding some news report which featured a segment from an interview with Sheryl Crow, who also performed at the festival and had a rather bad experience. I saw this YT clip about two years ago and can’t find it again unfortunately. To paraphrase from memory, she argued that the reason she found the whole scandal repulsive was that the white male nu-metal fans who committed numerous acts of arson, vandalism, rape, harassment etc. were mostly from functioning middle-class homes in the suburbs, objectively privileged by global standards, yet were constantly angry and destructive and couldn’t even put it in words why. She basically accused them of toxic masculinity even though I don’t recall her using that exact expression, but I wasn’t surprised anyway because she came across as the average lipstick feminist.
Leaving the subject of the festival aside, I wonder how nu-metal will be viewed in the context of the culture war. It appears to me that as a phenomenon it was a canary in a coalmine, providing an outlet for the angst of the young white (mostly) male members of a social class that was turning into the precariat under a system of late-stage capitalism, whose average quality of life was about to start collapsing. (Rising rates of mortality, alcoholism, illegitimacy, fatherlessness, unemployment, opioid addiction, prescription pill abuse etc.)
IMO the better explanation is that the music culture itself led to the antisocial behavior. It valued short term gratification and the expression of rage, reinforced through catchy songs and interesting music videos. Once you find that “cool” as a kid, it’s only a matter of time before there’s temptation to imitate that behavior. What better place to do than then the live performance of the band? Social ills don’t have to factor in at all, and in fact we can see the social ills as also being a product of the culture at the time, which includes music culture. Kids look up to their favorite artist, and they love imitating people they up to, and music is the best way to communicate an emotional state. So it shouldn’t be surprising if they internalize the emotional state that they spend hundreds of hours listening to, and if that’s an aggressive state then they will behave aggressively.
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Replying specifically to your comment about nu metal being seen as cringe in its time and after. I think this is correct, but it's worth asking what factors are at work here. What was nu metal, and why might people have hated it?
Class. The audience of Woodstock 99 apparently skewed middle class (the tickets were expensive, but I don't have demographic data); but broadly speaking bands like Korn and Limp Bizkit were "white trash," sometimes lumped in with acts like Eminem, Kid Rock, and (shudder) Insane Clown Posse. Moving into the '00s, a greater divide formed between social classes in popular music – the Pitchfork hipsters mocked and reviled the ICPs of the world (but celebrated trashy black music). This in contrast to the popularity of grunge in the early 90s, a genre which was aesthetically working class but which enjoyed popularity with middle class kids.
Race. Attitudes towards cultural appropriation in the '90s were obviously different; but even in 1999 it was understood that "white people shouldn't rap." Actually, it was probably harder to be a white rapper in '99 – nowadays there are acts like G-Eazy who apparently enjoy success despite their race. But in the '90s the major figures in peoples' minds as far as white rappers were... well, there was Vanilla Ice. Eminem ultimately side-stepped this in various ways – by being technically gifted and by using humour. The nu metal vocalists (Durst, Davis, Taylor) were neither lyrically talented nor (intentionally) funny.
Subject matter (i.e. male emotions, sexual abuse). This aspect is the most interesting to me, by far. Korn's frontman sang about his various childhood traumas, including sexual abuse. This was mocked at the time by other nu metal artists, but this is narcissism of small differences. Some examples of subject matter, by band: Limp Bizkit, breakups, murder, suicide; Slipknot, childhood trauma, rage; Korn, sexual abuse, childhood trauma, bullying; Linkin Park, breakups, sexual abuse, childhood trauma... I could go on. Moving into the '00s, nu metal gave way to pop punk (decidedly more ironic and emotionally guarded) and mainstream hip-hop (even the comparatively cerebral Kanye West never rapped about his uncle touching his private parts), with only emo music going anywhere near the kind of "icky" subjects discussed by Korn et al – and even then, it's comparatively tame and aesthetic. Why exactly we saw an outpouring of lyrics like these in the late '90s is a question worth contemplating.
It's worth noting as well that in the past ~5 years nu metal has enjoyed renewed popularity among the youths – Gen Z seems to have brought much of it back. I work at an art college, and see plenty of Linkin Park, Deftones, and Slipknot t-shirts – but not Korn or Limp Bizkit, so make of that what you will. And yes, they really do actually listen to those bands – I've asked them.
I have to disagree massively with the timeline here. Pop-punk became huge concurrently with nu-metal; Green Day’s Dookie and The Offspring’s Smash both came out in 1994, the same year as Korn’s self-titled debut album, and several years before Limp Bizkit and Slipknot got going.
Also, pop-punk was never just an “ironic and emotionally guarded” genre. The Offspring released “Gone Away”, a plaintive song mourning the death of a friend, in 1997. Hell, even Blink-182, maybe the poster boys for juvenile tongue-in-cheek pop-punk, have a song on their breakout album - “Adam’s Song” - about teen suicide. And drawing some distinction between “emo” and “pop-punk” in the 00’s just has no basis in reality. By that time the two genres were inextricably linked, with most of the major practitioners of the genre effortlessly bouncing between ironic detachment and almost cartoonish emotional sincerity and airing of traumas. Sure, you have bands like Bowling For Soup who stayed committed to above-it-all jokiness, but most of the 00’s-era bands in the Warped Tour scene were famous for their songs about how their dads screwed them up emotionally. (Simple Plan, Sum 41, My Chemical Romance, The Used, etc.)
I'm aware of the connection between pop punk and emo in the '00s – I didn't mean to make it sound like I considered them wholly distinct genres. In the context of the '00s I would say most emo bands were pop punk, but not all pop punk bands were emo. Bands like Blink-182 are a great example of how ambiguous it can get. There was also some overlap between indie rock and emo, to make things even more difficult.
This is actually a little hard to quantify – I looked at Billboard charts from this era, but most of these acts never charted that high. Journalists certainly commented on the decline of nu metal in the early '00s. My perception at the time (I was a teenager in those years) was that there was a sharp decline in the number of white boy dreadlocks post-2001, and a marked rise in skinny jeans and guys wearing eye liner. My Chemical Romance, AFI, Fallout Boy... also the rise of metalcore took place during that period. None of this is to say that pop punk doesn't predate that period (it absolutely does), just that when nu metal collapsed, a specific kind of pop punk moved in to fill the "edgy teen rock" space in radio programming.
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Even there, songs like "Highschool Never Ends" and "Come Back to Texas" clearly have a core of molten sincerity beneath all the jokes.
Oh sure, not to mention songs like “A-Hole”, “Cold Shower Tuesdays”, “The Luckiest Loser”, etc. And their more recent stuff is more openly sincere.
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I don't think that Slipknot and Linkin Park should be classified as nu metal. Slipknot were way too extreme and Linkin Park are just pop. But it seems that the nu metal definition has moved to - being big in the late 90s.
Slipknot’s self-titled debut album is straightforwardly nü-metal, with a ton of rapping and other hip-hop elements such as record-scratching and sampling. I agree that by Iowa they’d already moved significantly away from the genre.
As for calling Linkin Park “just pop”, I think that’s a mischaracterization. Certainly many of their songs are pop, but their first three albums also contain more than enough unclean vocals and crunchy downtuned guitars - look at songs like “By Myself”, “One Step Closer”, and “Given Up”, for example - to qualify as nü-metal. They’re just the band from that scene with the most pop crossover appeal.
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The site ate my post but I don't agree with your last paragraph. I don't think was a canary for anything, the period 90-08 was a great time for white boys. The bottom only fell out for the white precariat in the GFC and things didn't start shifting culturally until like 2010-2012.
Was Nu-metal worse than other comparable music scenes? I have no idea but it seems to me that it's a good target to shit on (and disregard base rates) because it was so dorky, kind of like Juggalos.
I'd argue the situation of the white precariat class started eroding many years before 2008 but their problems were papered over by cheap credit and these trends remained unseen under the surface while public attention focused on the Bush Admin's wars and the usual culture war issues. I recall that Steve Sailer observed the data and concluded that negative trends in white life expectancy started around 2002.
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