Korn

When I first stumbled onto The P.O.D. Kast, a podcast chronicling the genealogy of nu-metal—mostly out of idle curiosity, plus a nostalgic tickle for late-’90s angst—I fully expected to spend the next hour smirking at the fashions, the haircuts, and the half-baked “angst” lyrics (because let’s be honest, that scene has long been dismissed as macho posturing locked in a time capsule). Instead, I wound up listening to Korn’s self-titled debut album at age 30: in one marathon session, I played it twice back to back; then, a few days later, I returned for another session with three complete playthroughs. It hit me like a sonic cattle prod—jagged, loud, unapologetic—yet beneath the distortion and Jonathan Davis’s snarled vocals I heard something I wasn’t prepared for: a call to drop the act, to stop performing fear, to stop hiding behind rehearsed words.

Picture this: senior year of college, late October, when I recorded a video application for a low-level programming job at Dish Network. Imagine a senior (director’s note: I was at the heaviest I’d ever been, fresh off months of compulsive eating after an ill-advised low-weight junior-year stint) sitting in my dorm room under a single desk lamp—so dim that the outlines of my poster-covered walls blurred into shadow. I read from a rigorously scripted rant about the “cutting-edge technological offerings” of satellite TV—complete with forced enthusiasm, the flourishes of memorized hand gestures, and set-piece bullet points. On tape, I sounded almost passionately engaged; in reality, I was terrified: terrified of graduating with nothing secure, terrified that I would disappoint my family, terrified of my own utter lack of conviction.