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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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