Korn Flings a Couple of Rotten Kernels

Asking a hard-edged, rage-and-revulsion-filled metal band such as Korn to watch its tongue may be like asking a shark to brush its teeth. But the Huntington Beach band, a prime candidate for leadership in the world of hard rock, has left a rotten aftertaste by carelessly flinging charged sexual epithets on two tracks of its new album, “Follow the Leader.”

It’s hard to see what Korn gains from belittling language about gays in “All in the Family,” or the vile reduction of a woman to an Anglo-Saxon term for her genitals in “Cameltosis.”

Given the band’s two previous platinum albums, and rosy sales prospects for the musically matured, more pop-accessible “Follow the Leader,” lots of young rock fans will be getting Korn’s earful in a highly seductive context. If they’re not listening critically and are not grounded in values that reject the very notion of debasing people for their fundamental sexual being (as opposed to their willful sexual conduct), listeners may come away with a message that it’s cool to play verbal games of sexual humiliation.

Korn is not a band fueled by conscious bigotry, and it’s not hard to guess its line of artistic defense for “All in the Family” and “Cameltosis.” (However, guess is all we can do; we asked for an interview with Korn’s singer-lyricist, Jonathan Davis, but the band’s publicist said Korn and its management were too steamed at The Times right now to cooperate. He said Davis wasn’t ducking the request to avoid questions about the two controversial songs, but rather because Korn and its managers felt “ambushed” by the negative review of “Follow the Leader” in the Aug. 16 Sunday Calendar.)

“All in the Family” is a rare (for Korn) fling with attempted humor; it finds Davis trading a series of insults with Fred Durst of Limp Bizkit, one of the bands that will tour this fall on the Family Values hard-rock and rap fest organized and headlined by Korn.

The homophobic epithets, the band might say, were not meant to disparage gays, but rather meaningless, street-talking jive by two guys “playing the dozens,” the hoary African-American tradition--greatly influential on rap--of verbal combat that emphasizes the competitive trading of fanciful insults. After all, the title “All in the Family” calls back that lovable TV bigot, Archie Bunker, doesn’t it?

One supposes that with “Cameltosis,” which follows lots of blues songs in depicting a man frothing with rage over being two-timed by a woman, Korn would say it was simply parroting what a character boiling with anger might say.

No word should be forbidden, if presented in a valid artistic context. But even if Korn didn’t set out to demean gays and women, the clumsiness with which it handles charged words has that effect. “Cameltosis” lacks any ironic backdrop or perspective suggesting that its narrator, who spouts the objectionable word in an oft-repeated chorus, is anything but justified in his rage and how he expresses it.

“All in the Family” isn’t the first time Korn has played with anti-gay epithets. In “Faget,” from the band’s 1994 debut album, “Korn,” Davis vividly recalled his high school days in Bakersfield, when he was the target of insults for looking and acting different.

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Anyone paying attention could see he was re-enacting a real-life drama, and that the repeated angry cries of “Faggot!” were legitimate artistic means, albeit risky ones given the tendency of people to ignore most of a song’s lyrics and draw their own scenario based on a single refrain or tag (Ronald Reagan’s rosy interpretation of Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.,” and former U.S. Rep. Robert Dornan’s appropriation of Chumbawamba’s “Tubthumping” being classic examples).

Asked about “Faget” during a 1995 interview with The Times, Davis said: “There’s a big rumor about me being a homosexual. Does it really matter? I have lots of gay friends. It shouldn’t matter. I was in the New Romantic scene [in high school] with Duran Duran [as his favorite band], wearing makeup. I got called a fag by the jocks. Couldn’t walk through the halls without hearing that or being picked on.”

And were intellectual brethren of those jocks yelling along to “Faget” with homophobic glee at Korn shows? “Yeah, they do,” Davis admitted. “It just shows how dumb and stupid and ignorant they are. Everybody has their own interpretation of it. That’s the beauty of music.”

The ugliness of “All in the Family” doesn’t stem from overt homophobia; let’s take Davis at his word that he harbors no ill feelings toward gays. Instead, it embodies the ingrained, unthinking homophobic bias that runs strong in our culture.

Maybe Davis, having suffered homophobic slurs in high school hallways, fits the pattern of an abused kid subconsciously compelled to act out his trauma on others. Sorry to say, Korn is not alone among bands in using mindless anti-gay epithets as part of its standard street vocabulary.

Certain local musicians I respect drop disparaging terms for gays as casually as many decent white Southerners, even those who didn’t question the basic humanity of blacks, used equivalent slurs for them a half century ago. On the Adolescents’ 1981 debut album, one of the cornerstones of O.C. alterna-rock, the song “No Way” concludes: “I cannot live in a world this gay.” It’s a shame having to cringe during an album you love--or look for irony that may not really be there--the way you have to cringe when great novelists like Dostoyevsky and Dickens vent their societally ingrained spleen against Jews.

For Davis, the worst of it is that he spouts language demeaning people for their intrinsic nature (if you believe that homosexuality is either “unnatural” or a matter of choice, I’m surprised you’ve read this far). In so doing, he goes against a recurring theme on “Follow the Leader”--the right of each person to be left alone to be himself.

These lines from the song, “B.B.K.” are completely heartfelt, but they are undercut by the clumsy antics, two tracks later, on “All in the Family.”

There’s nothing wrong, wanting to be loved.

Is there something wrong with me?

For once in my life I’d like to be really set free.

Let me be me.

In 50 years, I think, historians will look back on rock music as, overall, a piston in the drive for the fearlessly lived selfhood Davis cherishes in “B.B.K.” By then, we can hope, homophobic social norms and unchecked male rage toward women will have gone the way of segregated drinking fountains, all-white professional baseball leagues, and wartime internment camps for citizens with the wrong bloodlines.

And “All in the Family” and “Cameltosis” will be just ugly little artifacts from the days when it was still widely acceptable to dehumanize people for being who and what they intrinsically are.