“Someone asked the novelist how he was able to write so consistently and remain inspired and motivated. He replied, ‘Two hundred crappy words per day, that’s it.’ The idea was that if he forced himself to write two hundred crappy words, more often than not the act of writing would inspire him; and before he knew it, he’d have thousands of words down on the page.”
Mark Manson
In January of 2003, Korn were enjoying a break after a year of touring and promotions for their fifth album, Untouchables. It’s usually the only month in a year where a professional musician can get anything resembling a little downtime.
Elsewhere, MTV’s Joe D’Angelo reported that the rap rock and nu-metal genres were declining in popularity, testimony to this being the diminishing presence of bands like Korn and Papa Roach on radio playlists, combined with lacklustre sales of their latest albums at the time.
“Will Korn, Papa Roach and Limp Bizkit Evolve or Die?” is a decent article. If you can get past the fact that it was published when a 640×480 screen resolution was the norm, it very eloquently explains why bands like Korn and Limp Bizkit were no longer topping the charts and selling albums the way they used to.
“[Untouchables‘] first single, ‘Here to Stay,’ made an initial splash at radio and the album debuted at #2 on the charts with nearly 500,000 copies sold in its first week,” D’Angelo reported. “But Untouchables started to slide when its next single, ‘Thoughtless,’ failed to take off. While third single ‘Alone I Break’ hasn’t exactly been ignored by radio, the album now stands at #159 on the chart, selling just 6,000 copies per week. Follow the Leader (1998) and Issues (1999) each sold more than 3 million copies, but Korn’s 2002 album looks to have hit its plateau at 1.2 million.”
In other words, the days of “Got the Life,” “Freak on a Leash,” Woodstock ’99, and just generally lording over TRL were long gone. While most listeners nowadays wouldn’t place a great deal of importance in selling music on a ridiculously overpriced disk of polycarbonate, you have to understand how things were in 2003. Kazaa, Morpheus, and Audio Galaxy were the places to go for digital copies of music and were blamed for declining sales; an album’s success was measured by how many units it would shift; playlists of mis-titled MP3s were for Winamp. Moreover, it hadn’t really occurred to the people running the music industry how the internet could be used effectively, and the phenomenal success of streaming services Apple Play and Spotify were still a long way off.
Despite the decline in sales, Korn weren’t finished. “Here to Stay” had won the Grammy award for Best Metal Performance, and the band were also slated to join the main stage at Ozzfest 2003, along with Marilyn Manson, Disturbed, and Chevelle. Ozzy Osbourne himself would of course headline the tour. Sharon Osbourne enthused about the “amazing line-up … full of the elite of our world, of hard rock. Everybody is an amazing performer, and that’s what it’s all about.”
The prospect of Korn joining Ozzfest seemed impossible not too long before, as Sharon had taken a swipe at the band, calling them “has beens” and “just too fucking gay from the word go” in an interview with Rolling Stone in late 2002.
Korn frontman Jonathan Davis didn’t seem too bothered by Sharon’s remarks, saying, “I mean, with negative press, they are still talking about me, so I don’t give a fuck. … We are all in this thing together. We all want to do a good show, and I can look [past] that. Who cares?“
He also didn’t mind taking the stage ahead of another act. If anything, he seemed happy about it. “I am tired of headlining,” he said in an interview with MTV News. “I like to have time to watch a show and have fun. When we are out doing our own shows we don’t get a chance to do that. By that time, everybody’s going home. So it’s cool opening up for Ozzy.“
The line-up was announced in late February, but earlier that month, Davis was busy working on a new theme for UPN’s Twilight Zone. Davis said to MTV News, “I just thought it would be awesome. … I’ve been a huge fan ever since I can remember. When I was a kid, they’d have a Twilight Zone marathon on Thanksgiving, and I’d watch them forever. One year I videotaped all 24 hours of it, and I watched them all the time.”
It was also around this time that they began to lay down tracks for their sixth album; these sessions would go from April to June. The band — James “Munky” Shaffer (guitar), Brian “Head” Welch (guitar), Fieldy (bass), David Silveria (drums), and Davis — got to work on the album, which they would produce themselves, alongside their crew. Davis would keep fans informed on the album’s progress through the official Korn Korner chatroom, while answering general questions on all manner of topics. I was never in these chats, mainly due to the time difference, but the archives were posted on the band’s site and can be pretty entertaining (long since archived).
Questions and answers spanned many topics, but what fans learned about the new album was that it would mark a return to the raw, aggressive sound of their earlier material. As Davis said to the chat, “This album is stripped back, more raw, probably gonna have both singing and screaming.”
Today, Untouchables is considered one of the band’s all-time classics, sitting very close to the top of many “best Korn albums” lists. However, fans were very divided over it around the time of its release. Some thought the album was over-produced, that it was too polished, that it was… dare I say it… poppy. This being the case, a stripped back approach to recording would have been a welcome remedy for fans who just wanted a simple, dirty Korn album of old. The band’s musicians got to work rehearsing and recording their parts, while Davis took a bus trip around the States to get into the right headspace for writing lyrics.
While laying down the album’s tracks, the band would make occasional public appearances here and there. Head helped out longtime Korn friends Limp Bizkit at Wrestlemania XIX with guitar duties in late March, and in May, Korn performed a cover of “One” at MTV Icon: Metallica. Munky and Head were resplendent with cool black custom-made Ibanez seven-strings. Fieldy rocked his signature K5 bass, while Silveria presided a chrome-finished TAMA kit. Davis channelled James Hetfield brilliantly toward the end when the song sped up, barking, “Darkness, imprisoning me…”, as if the lyrics were his own.
Meanwhile, outside the studio, Silveria had entered the restaurant business, while Fieldy started putting together the follow-up to his ill-fated solo album, Rock’n Roll Gangster. Both musicians took the stage with rapper 50 Cent at a party hosted by Sony’s PlayStation 2 division, continuing Korn’s long-standing tradition of mixing it up with some of the most popular artists in the hip-hop world.
With Ozzfest approaching, the time seemed right to put out some new material. “Did My Time” was the first single from the upcoming album. And true to their word, the track showcased the return to Korn’s raw and heavy sound of old.
“It’s the most bangin’ song Korn’s ever put out in our life,” Fieldy said at the MTV Movie Awards “It’s a way big departure from the last album,” Davis added, regarding not only the new single but the album’s general musical direction. “It’s not so overproduced. This one is more pissed off and raw. Personally, I’ve been having tough times to dwell on and inspires me to write tough things.”
There are ways one can respond to such emotions. “You can bind up my leg, but not even Zeus has the power to break my freedom of choice,” Epictetus said. Korn fans know Davis has faced his share of demons in life, feelings of depression, anxiety, and alienation. One way he responds is by putting his experience into music, and sharing it. He never chose any of the things that happened to him, but he chose his response. He keeps going, and the fans have always felt a special kind of connection with his lyrics.
Fans would get a taste of the band’s new content mid-year. Released on 22 July 2003, “Did My Time” would be the first single off Korn’s upcoming album, while also giving the band some new material to try out on the stage at Ozzfest. And whatever the scale of heaviness, the makers of Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life were impressed enough with the track to use it as a promotional single for the film, though it would not be featured in the soundtrack album.
Ozzy Osbourne preferred not to play more than two shows in a row, which left more than a few days open in the supporting acts’ schedules. Korn, Marilyn Manson, Disturbed, Chevelle, and other touring partners organised a number of “off-dates,” with some teaming up, and others just doing their own shows, like any music festival acts organising side gigs. Not a bad idea at all — Korn fans could go and see Korn, Manson fans could see Manson, while most people would just go to the main Ozzfest dates.
Disturbed frontman David Draiman put it best, saying, “We start going nuts when we can’t play for a while. If we’re in touring mode, and we have the bus and the hotel and our instruments there, we want to play. We love getting in front of crowds rather than sitting around trying to think of things to do in a town that we may not be so familiar with.”
Hitting the road with Ozzy and some bands they’d befriended over the years, the guys in Korn looked set for an awesome summer of 2003. Although, Davis still had a list of bands he wanted to tour with. Given the back-to-basics approach the band were taking with the upcoming album, Davis pined for a return to the good old days when bands were playing shows with friends, and just hanging out. One such band was Deftones, who had toured with Korn in the past, most notably opening for Ozzy Osbourne in 1995 on his “Retirement Sucks” tour. While Davis was keen to get together with his old friends, Deftones frontman Chino Moreno did not feel the same way. “As they go on, it’s the same thing — bad childhoods and mean moms,” he said in an interview with Revolver magazine. “How old is Jonathan? Thirty years old? How long has it been since he lived with his parents? Try to go somewhere else.”
This kind of attitude seemed to be a recurring theme for Moreno at the time, having previously targeted Summer Sanitarium tourmates Linkin Park, Linkin Park, and even Metallica (you know, the headliners) for his ire.
Davis took it well, going for more of an “I’m not angry, just disappointed” tone instead of simply taking shots back. In an interview with New York radio station WXRK-FM, he simply stated, “I don’t hate Chino at all. He’s just a bitter guy. … He’s been bitter since the time when we all started back in ’92 [and] we were all homies.” Which could just be a polite way of saying that haters and gonna hate, but Davis deftly changed gears and enthused about Korn’s new material, saying that the upcoming album would “blow people’s heads off.”
In Moreno’s defence, he was sick of being asked about other bands, and always being compared to Korn. According to Blabbermouth, he explained, “I am a nice guy, and I don’t think people understand how many times I get asked questions about other bands. … Most of the times, I don’t answer them, because I want to talk about Deftones.” I don’t blame him for that. In fact, I even respect his doubling down in a weird way, because that constant comparison and feeling like you couldn’t be your own band would be draining.
“There is such pressure in the West to be likable that people often reconfigure their entire personality depending on the person they’re dealing with,” Mark Manson says in his book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck. I have a great deal of respect for people who do away with that pressure, are just unapologetically themselves, and stick to their guns. Unless what they’re doing is something heinous, which is not the case with Moreno.
[Aside: And to be fair, I’ve probably said worse things about my teaching colleagues and peers.]
This would all pass, as Korn and Deftones co-headlined the Family Values Tour in 2006, even collaborating onstage for some songs. Things have been good between the two acts ever since.
Ozzfest 2003 was a success, with the Clarkson, Michigan show ranking among one of the highest-grossing Ozzfest dates at the time (USD $1,602,356). And Korn did it with their self-produced sixth album essentially done, though they did add four more songs written while on the road. Finishing touches, nothing more, it seemed, and Davis and co. were very content with how things were progressing.
“We didn’t try to overthink it,” Davis said to MTV on a tour stop in Dallas, Texas. “It’s just down and dirty. It’s aggressive Korn screaming again.”
The decision to produce the album themselves came from two places: First, on Untouchables, Michael Beinhorn (Hole, Marilyn Manson, Red Hot Chili Peppers) drove the band very hard to create their masterpiece, which would have been exciting and challenging in a lot of ways, but exhausting in others. Second, the guys in Korn felt that they and their crew knew what they were doing well enough to assess their own musical direction for the album. Silveria said to MTV during that same interview, “What we need most from producers is to keep us motivated and offer outside opinions. Now, I think that between our crew and sound engineer, who’s with us in the studio all the time — they’ve known us for so many years — we look to them for their reaction half the time we’re writing. We’ve done this long enough by now that we feel like we can do it and critique it ourselves.”
Korn decided it was time to roll out some more material. “Right Now” was released on October 7, 2003 as the second single, accompanied by a video featuring animation by Gregory Ecklund, originally made for Spike & Mike’s Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation. The video got regular plays on MTV2, and an alternative video, directed by Nathan “Karma” Cox, was featured on a bonus DVD in a limited-edition digipak.
The album — now confirmed to be titled Take a Look in the Mirror — was set for a November 25 release date. In the spirit of raw, unpolished, stripped back, groove-oriented heavy music, Korn hit the road with Limp Bizkit on the Xbox Live-sponsored Back 2 Basics 2003 tour. Hitting clubs and theatres across the States, the two bands would co-headline, while Droid and Fieldy’s Dreams served as openers. Xbox-hosted gaming and karaoke contests would round out the night’s entertainment. Before the tour kicked off, Davis enthused to MTV, “We’re very excited about it because it’s about us going back to the day when we were doing little halls and Bizkit were opening for us. Those were the good ol’ days and so we’re trying to recreate that again. We always do something different when we have a new album coming out and we decided this bill would be really, really cool.”
While the Deftones did not want to join Korn on any sort of nostalgia trip in any way, shape or form, the guys in Limp Bizkit seemed more than fine with a reunion. And it looked like both bands had a blast, showing off new material, playing the classics. Limp Bizkit vocalist Fred Durst heaped praise on Korn, telling the crowd, “I just want to say without Korn we would not be here today. We’re here to pay respect to the band that changed metal.”
Nice. The trek would span a dozen shows throughout the month of November, but for one off-date, Korn played a surprise free show at New York City’s legendary CBGB club. It was a world-famous venue, having hosted acts such as the Ramones, Patti Smith, Blondie, and Talking Heads. The gig followed Korn’s pattern of fan interaction. Diehard children of the Korn made Follow the Leader and Issues debut at number one on the charts, and Untouchables at #2, while fans designed multiple front covers for Issues. So, a free show was a way to say thanks, at least to those who could fit in the club.
“I know that we have really, really dedicated fans, and I love every one of them,” Davis said to MTV. “If there’s something special that I can do, if I help them in their life to help them get through a bad time I’m down with it. … I really appreciate them.”
The CBGB show took place on November 24, on what would have been the eve of the album’s release. However, Take a Look in the Mirror was actually released early due to a leak, on the 21st. Eminem, 50 Cent, Nas, and Metallica had made similar moves when new material wound up online, and Korn were just the latest to follow suit. Add in the fact that this was a time when record label executives were scratching their heads, not quite knowing what to do about this thing called the internet, and you have a recipe for a pretty tense situation. The same thing had happened with Untouchables, only this time, instead of months, the new material had leaked only days before the new album’s scheduled release.
Bumping up the release date made for a bit of an awkward chart debut. Take a Look in the Mirror initially hit the Billboard 200 albums chart at #19, which many considered a deceptive figure, representing just a weekend’s worth of sales. The following week — which you could consider the proper debut — saw the album jump ten places up to #9, with 179,000 copies sold. Hip-hop legend Jay-Z took the top spot with The Black Album.
Take a Look in the Mirror was exactly what Jonathan Davis and the guys promised: raw, dirty grooves, without the polish of previous mainstream releases. “Break Some Off” soon became an anthemic stomper in the band’s live set, and tracks like “Counting on Me” and “Let’s Do This Now” maintained Jonathan Davis’s lyrical themes of sheer hate and anger, or of simply being at your wit’s end with everything going on around you. “Alive,” which had previously only appeared as a demo, was reworked and retooled for a proper studio rendition. The band’s collaboration with Nas on “Play Me” made for a solid addition to their history of creating with artists from the world of hip-hop, while also making for one of the album’s heaviest numbers.
But it was the brilliantly conceived anti-hit, “Y’All Want a Single,” that arguably cemented the album’s legacy. See, during the final stages of recording, the executive staff at Epic Records felt the album was missing something. As heavy as they were, Korn were still a band signed to a major label, and when a major label act turns in an album, they will inevitably hear the following words:
“We need a single.”
Each and every time. This was the case with every album, as it was for Korn when they were putting the finishing touches on their latest just as they came off Ozzfest 2003. The band were so fed up of the execs pushing and prodding them like this, that they came up with an expletive-laden track, notorious for its strangely catchy chorus lyrics, “Y’all want a single, say fuck that!”
I like to imagine what Davis and the guys were thinking: Okay, they’ll get their single. But we’re going to make those empty suits pay… I know I’d have a lot of fun with that. Davis essentially confirmed this in yet another interview with MTV, as the band saw out 2003 with a spot on KROQ-FM’s Almost Acoustic Christmas show. “We were sitting there just looking at each other and we were like, ‘OK we’ve got to write this single,’ and we started laughing. And we came up with this anti-single, which turned out great,” he explained.
Despite the tongue-in-cheek tone of the song, “Y’All Want a Single” made for a brilliant indictment of commercial radio, television, and modern consumer culture in general. “It’s all about how it seems like kids are fed what is cool,” Davis went on to say. “They don’t really have a brain to search and see what’s going on with music. I’m just saying if kids are really into music then they go and do that, but if they are just everyday Joe, then music is fed to them. And we are just really excited about it ’cause it seems to be a fan favourite. Everybody keeps requesting to play it and everyone keeps talking about that song.”
Whatever Korn’s intention with “Y’All Want a Single,” the suits ended up liking the song, like an audience member waiting, with a dumb look on their faces, for an insult comic to approach them, maybe. I don’t know, but they liked it enough to green-light it as the third single from Take a Look in the Mirror, with an accompanying music video and all.
2004 saw Korn touring almost non-stop. They began the year playing shows in Australia, New Zealand, China, Japan, Indonesia, Thailand… countries they’d either never visited before, or hadn’t played in years. The European festival circuit would follow, with the band taking the stage at Download, Rock am Ring, Rock im Park, and the Montreux Jazz Festival, among others. The latter show was later released on DVD, Korn: Live at Montreux 2004. Back in the States, Korn would join Linkin Park for their Projekt Revolution tour, along with Snoop Dogg, The Used, and Less Than Jake on the main stage.
The retrospective Greatest Hits Vol. 1 was released in October of 2004, ending the band’s contract with Epic Records, and putting a bold punctuation mark on a decade of work. The compilation boasted choice tracks from the band’s career, alongside two newly-recorded covers, of Cameo’s “Word Up!” and all three parts Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall,” topped off with “Goodbye Cruel World.” A bonus DVD containing the band’s performance at CBGB was included with the digipak. Seven of the live tracks made the bonus footage — “Right Now,” “Here to Stay,” “Did My Time,” “Got the Life,” “Freak on a Leash,” “Falling Away from Me,” “Blind” — with commentary from Davis in between. The compilation debuted at #4 on the Billboard chart, with 129,000 copies sold.
Things were looking nice and neat for the guys in Korn, until the departure of guitarist Brian “Head” Welch in February of 2005. He had recently converted to Christianity after years of addiction to methamphetamines and other substances, and playing in Korn didn’t enter into his future plans at that time. He would elaborate on his experiences in an interview with MTV, and later to a congregation at the Valley Bible Fellowship, and his memoir, Save Me from Myself. Following this, Head embarked on a solo career before returning to Korn, healthier, older, and wiser, in 2013.
Back in Korn, Head looked back on the time leading up to his departure. “The last year I was in the band, we were gonna kick out the bass player, Fieldy,” he revealed in an interview with Rolling Stone. “And this guy’s girlfriend couldn’t be on this side of the stage because there were fights with another wife in the band. And obviously the drugs — it’s no secret I was into the drugs, so crazy stuff, like having to finish our blow right before we got to the border because they were gonna come check to see if we had anything.”
“We were so scattered and we all had personal problems,” Munky told Ultimate Guitar. “We weren’t in the best space. We weren’t really — I don’t know, I don’t know how to put it. ‘Cause there was some good songs on the record but it was kind of a forced effort. The songs weren’t flowing and the creativity was a bit muted from these personal dramas each of us had. You can hear the kind of frustration in some of the songs, which is kind of a good thing. My favourite song on that record is ‘Did My Time.'”
Jonathan Davis also confirmed the challenges present during the Take a Look in the Mirror era. “This record, we wrote a bunch of it while we were on the road in Europe,” he explained to Vice. “It was the first record we self-produced and recorded at my house. Head was really messed up at the time, and we were reacting to Untouchables where we did something raw or different, but it didn’t work for me. I think it’s still a good record, like there’s some cool shit on it and I still listen to it occasionally, but yeah definitely my least favourite.”
Yes, Davis ranked Take a Look in the Mirror as his least favourite Korn album. While he held that self-producing the album in his home studio was a high point, overall the band were not in the best headspace, making it a difficult album to connect to. That said, Davis also concedes that “we did what we set out to achieve, which was to get back to the kind of band we used to be before all this crazy shit started happening. And I think we kind of did that.” I have to agree, and they must have got a lot of things right if “Did My Time,” “Right Now,” and “Y’All Want a Single” are still staples in their live set.
It’s not my favourite Korn album by any means. That would be Untouchables, followed by Issues and self-titled. But Take a Look in the Mirror is a solid effort. I remember feeling like it really hit the spot around the time of its release, during my last year of high school, when I’d mentally checked out and just wanted to be done with the place. Today, “Right Now” and “Did My Time” get played somewhat regularly when I go for my walks, along with “Counting on Me” and “Let’s Do This Now.” They are still very incredible tracks to my ears.
It was the end of an era, in a time when Korn and the public were well and truly saturated, and the last album with all five original band members. Whatever struggles they faced during that time — and there were many — one could make a pretty compelling case that it was a flashpoint in their lives.
“I think the way we reprioritised what’s important to us is our families and our music and the party’s not even in the equation anymore,” Munky said. “Before it was always the party first then the music and then the family. Now that we’ve all become dads — we’re all fathers — things have shifted and we’ve grown up and we’ve matured. That definitely has reflection in not only the songwriting but how we handle each other personally and also with making business decisions about everything that comes with a band and compromising and that sort of thing.”
A catalyst for change, for pushing forward, growing stronger, and ultimately being the best versions of themselves.
As for the album itself… make of it what you will.
Lawrence Deveney 