Follow the Leader was the last member of the 2000 brigade, and the one I got to last. Because I didn't even know this band even existed, it was hearsay in a music magazine I was picking up every month, but I hadn't seen or heard them... no songs on the internet either. No information besides liner notes in Limp Bizkit's Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Falvored Water, which gave the band a mention, and a throwaway line in Indigo Flow. From what little I could piece together (yes, the internet was still taking baby turtle steps), this Korn was connected deeply to Limp Bizkit. Further reading on the subject, courtesy of magazines borrowed from friends, said that whoever this band was, they had been the ones who made Limp Bizkit famous*.
It was a stroke of luck that it wasn't Issues (1999) that got into my hands first, mainly because I had, oddly enough, heard more praise for Follow the Leader from the scant few people I had heard it from. So I was stuck with what I was stuck with, but Fred Durst was there to sweeten the deal for me with the track All In the Family.
Upon first listen, I failed to see what the hype was all about. Until that point, I had been used to jumpy, hard pounding, upper-mid tempo tracks, a lot of rapping, perhaps some screams here and there, but all done in a certain rock/metal-like style. If Papa Roach was like punk, and Linkin Park was like rock, and Limp Bizkit was like a super-charged hip-hop, the likes of which I'd see again*... but Korn was a different blend. It was crunchier, heavier, fuzzier, slower, more metal in its execution than the ones I had seen before. Jonathan Davis didn't rap, he sung, and the things he did with his voice were strange and unusual in the Beetlejuice sense. Fieldy's slap bass was a noise I was not familiar with, especially with the way he used it.
At the heart of Follow the Leader is a groove I can't quite put the words. Perhaps it's that their music was a bit more complex than what I was used to, owing much to the dynamic relationship between Munky and Head, and the fact that David Silvera, while prone to it, was a much more rock-oriented drummer. The moods they put forward made my nauseous at the time, especially with Jonathan Davis' vocalizations: that he used his own crooning voice as instruments to add to choruses was a new idea for me.
At first, I didn't like it at all. But there were interesting songs - the groovy It's On, the harder Dead Bodies Everywhere (more my "style"), the unexpected Reclaim My Place with it's addictive main riff*; or the bleaker, emptier, summer depression of Got the Life, the nausea-inducing spiral of B.B.K., the sickening Pretty, which was downfilled, depressive, violent but of course, utterly beautiful for all these things.
But perhaps the most stand-out, enhanced by the presence of my then-fashion icon, was All In the Family. It wasn't just the weird, saw-like riff, the grumbling bass, the simpler riff, the lapse into full-blown hip-hop during Fred Durst's verses, or the heavier, darker, sicker verses spat by Jonathan Davis, all coming together in an apocalyptic ("Because it's doomsday, kid, it's doomsday"), playground-battlefield style direct trading of sentiments ("I hate you!") was simply delectable. Of course, the homoerotic conclusion, I never saw coming. I remember laughing out loud even after the track was done, what a twist!
The bigger twist however, was leaving the tape running with my headphones on after Side B was done and getting hit in the face with a hidden track, the name of which I couldn't find in the cassette booklet. I didn't know just what the hell this rockin' riff set to a weird, unfamiliar (possibly guest, I thought) vocals telling the story of a kid who wanted desperately to crossdress against his mother's protestations - perhaps he was transsexual, but I got the impression that he was doing it for the hell of it. Then the kid became a rockstar, got rich, owned stocks and all that shit near the end of the world, and then the riff slowed down... first gradually, and then to an unforgettable snail's pace. I listened to it five, six times in a row, I was blown away - this was so weird, so insane, so quirky that I was stuck. What the hell was this?
Well whatever it was, it was easily the best song on the whole damn album. Years later, I would learn that the song was called Earache My Eye and was a Cheech Marin cover. Live and learn, but this was the first instance of my bad track record with knowing or detecting cover songs.
Follow the Leader was also an album true to its cover - sickly greens and browns, something childish but unkempt, deadly like a game of hopscotch right at the edge of a cliff. And it is decidedly either a spring or summer album.
Unfortunately, my Korn tangent came full circle, and I don't think Follow the Leader or any Korn album for that matter, aged well. They kind of didn't. But back then, it was another name on the list that piqued my interest - if they could pull off Earache My Eye, what else was out there?
*Footnotes: 1- This "helping someone blow up" thing would also appear later with Staind, about whom Fred Durst had remarked, according to a magazine article about nu-metal, "they don't seem to remember us." I would learn years later when I got a bit into Staind that Aaron Lewis would do supporting vocals on the song No Sex on their legendary/breakout album Significant Other (1999.) See next entry.
2- Which was Cypress Hill's 2001 single Trouble from the album Stoned Raiders.
3- It's very highly debatable if nu-metal power chord variations could be called riffs, but at the time, I thought they undisputably were, so I'm keeping it like that.
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