Few bands can legitimately lay claim to pioneering an entire new genre, but Korn are one of them. With their self-titled 1994 debut album, the band from Bakersfield, California single-handedly ushered in the nu metal movement which would go onto dominate the rest of the decade and the start of the next one.
But nothing exists in a vacuum, and even trailblazers need inspiration. For the members of Korn, their sound was shaped by a melting pot of metal, hip hop and funk. But there was one classic late 80s alternative metal album that did more than any other to open up the future Korn members’ minds to different styles and sounds.
Speaking to Metal Hammer in 2019, Korn guitarist Brian ‘Head’ Welch looked back on the late 80s – a time when the burgeoning alternative scene was sneaking up behind the all-pervasive glam metal movement. Head admitted that, a few years before he co-founded Korn in 1993, he was still enamoured with late 80s hard rock.
“I didn’t want to let go of Whitesnake and all these bands that had huge guitar parts, because I was a guitarist too and I loved all that stuff,” he confessed.
But there was one album that changed everything for him and his future bandmates. Formed in San Francisco in 1979, Faith No More had cycled through countless members and styles before settling on the post-punk-inspired proto-funk metal style of their self-titled 1985 debut album and 1987’s Introduce Youself. But everything changed when the band replaced singer Chuck Moseley with 20-year-old wunderkind singer Mike Patton in 1989. The first album the new line-up made was 1989’s The Real Thing – a genre-mashing alt-metal classic and the album Head said changed his and his Korn bandmates’ lives.
“All the guys in Korn changed after they heard The Real Thing,” Head told Metal Hammer. “It turned them from being the Mötley Crüe guys into something more alternative. Hearing Faith No More for the first time though, I really felt something. It was darker than other bands you’d hear at the time like Red Hot Chili Peppers, but also had this incredibly cool bass sound that really got me to let go of the old and embrace the new. I caught the vision for where music could go and where we could go later even though it came out long before Korn were a band.
“They didn’t fit in completely with anybody,” he continued. “Sure, they’d got the alternative thing going on, but they’d also got these thrash metal guitars they’d picked up being around the scene with bands like Metallica. That’s what I loved about it – it was guitar focused, but there weren’t too many leads getting in the way.”
Thanks to singles such as early rap-metal anthem Epic and the keyboard propelled From Out Of Nowhere, The Real Thing got Faith No More onto MTV. Along with fellow mavericks Jane’s Addiction, FNM would crack open the door for what would soon be christened ‘alternative rock’, allowing it a way into the mainstream – something that exploded with the release of Nirvana’s Nevermind in 1991.
Korn themselves never hid the influence The Real Thing had on them, taking Faith No More’s funk-inspired grooves and hip hop swagger and putting a darker, more angsty spin on it.
“Even now, if I had to explain what influences go behind what we do in Korn, I’d pick a song like The Real Thing, 100 per cent.” said Head. ‘The way the song starts, with that opening drumbeat and those keys, really reminds me of Blind. And that vocal line! Its perfection, man. All minor music with this bright vocal – ‘I know the feeling/it is the real thing’ is just perfection to me. I’m sad that I’ve never met those guys – I know James [Munky] and Jonathan [Davis, Korn singer] have. We were supposed to go on tour with them before COVID hit and I really hope we actually get to do that some day.”
