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Post by Deleted on Jan 7, 2013 17:20:13 GMT -5
Sparked by the Godsmack Sucks thread, it seems that this genre label has a lot more bands thrown into it than maybe fits the description.
A friend of my mine considers Fear Factory to be Nu Metal "in a way" (although he fully acknowledges their industrial influence) because of their song structure. No lead guitar/guitar solos, emphasized rhythm structure and electronic elements. (He also doesn't see the term Nu Metal as a negative connotation)
When Nu Metal first got big in the late 90's it was used primarily to describe bands that had Rap/Hip-Hop elements fused with their rock sound. Obvious examples include: Limp Bizkit, KoRn, Linkin Park.
Then it started being used to describe bands like Godsmack, Disturbed and Drowning Pool which don't use that at all. Bands that by some metal elitist standards where seen as trying to project themselves as some ultra heavy band when their music said otherwise. Slipknot also would get this stigma while it was being shoved over the fence into another genre called "MallCore" created by the same like-minded people. (That's another discussion for another thread)
So which is it?
Does the label of Nu Metal really have that flexible of an umbrella to encompass all of that? Or are we just taking bands and slapping the name on them because we think they suck and don't want them to co-exist in our favorite genre?
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Post by Viking Snad on Jan 7, 2013 17:34:57 GMT -5
Personally, there is no sub-genre beyond metal. There's rock, hard rock, and metal. Life is so much easier if you keep it narrowed down. Most of those bands ride the line of hard rock and metal. Simplicity is better than over complication.
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Post by Evilution E5150 on Jan 7, 2013 17:36:22 GMT -5
Fear Factory predate Nu Metal
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Glitch
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Post by Glitch on Jan 7, 2013 17:37:52 GMT -5
I miss using the term mallcore. LOL To me at least, I consider nu metal to be better renamed Heavy alternative(with hip hop elements depending on the band).
I think the thing is it wasn't really a genre at first, but after bands we're being called that, everybody tried to see where they fit in the spectrum. Drowning Pool I would definitely call nu metal, but with more metal influence than other bands.
The one band that is called nu metal way more because of who they hung out with more than what they sound is System of a down. They are almost their own genre.
Godsmack didn't start out as nu metal(more like a hard rock band) but once they added heavier distortion, they kind of blended with the scene they were in.
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Post by fuzzywarble, squat cobbler on Jan 7, 2013 17:45:01 GMT -5
Drowning Pool was nu-metal but ultimately became another post-grunge band.
Nu-metal basically started out with rap/rock bands but it eventually came to be described as a genre that featured little to no guitar solos, drop tuning for heavy bass effects, and electronica elements at times.
I feel that Godsmack started out as a nu-metal type band but eventually became a cross between post-grunge and hard rock.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 7, 2013 17:46:25 GMT -5
Fear Factory predate Nu Metal I am aware. My friend likes to equate them as "Proto Nu-Metal" for the reasons I stated above. That they kind of started that sound. I guess it goes back to the no guitar solo's/lead guitar thing. I don't think a genre should be coined on the absence of one facet alone.
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Post by Evilution E5150 on Jan 7, 2013 17:49:08 GMT -5
nu-metal to me was always a gateway metal
like you a dumb kid in your early teens, you saw Fred Durst or Jonathan Davis rocking out on the tv or hear them on the radio and think they are good so you save your money and check out their stuff and buy music mags and stuff like that
from their you find out about heavier acts like Slayer and Pantera or old acts like Judas Priest and Iron Maiden or even furth with Black Metal and Death Metal bands and from there you branch out more to find something your really like and leave Nu Metal behind
at least thats how i did it
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Post by Deleted on Jan 7, 2013 17:53:03 GMT -5
nu-metal to me was always a gateway metal like you a dumb kid in your early teens, you saw Fred Durst or Jonathan Davis rocking out on the tv or hear them on the radio and think they are good so you save your money and check out their stuff and buy music mags and stuff like that from their you find out about heavier acts like Slayer and Pantera or old acts like Judas Priest and Iron Maiden or even furth with Black Metal and Death Metal bands and from there you branch out more to find something your really like and leave Nu Metal behind at least thats how i did it I did the same thing. Even though it took me forever.
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Post by DrBackflipsHoffman on Jan 7, 2013 17:53:14 GMT -5
Quickly became a catch all term for all that Ozzfest/Family Values/Roadrunner garbage and easily palatable spiked hair baggy jeans crap that inexplicably got huge for those few months between 2001/2002 rather than any kind of sound. You could take a look at a band and just go "Yep" and you'd know exactly what the deal was.
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Glitch
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Post by Glitch on Jan 7, 2013 17:58:13 GMT -5
Quickly became a catch all term for all that Ozzfest/Family Values/Roadrunner garbage and easily palatable spiked hair baggy jeans crap that inexplicably got huge for those few months between 2001/2002 rather than any kind of sound. You could take a look at a band and just go "Yep" and you'd know exactly what the deal was. The funny thing is that in late 99, it looked like heavy music in general was gonna be big . Then it got trimmed down to the more radio friendly bands.
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Post by Evilution E5150 on Jan 7, 2013 18:02:20 GMT -5
Quickly became a catch all term for all that Ozzfest/Family Values/Roadrunner garbage and easily palatable spiked hair baggy jeans crap that inexplicably got huge for those few months between 2001/2002 rather than any kind of sound. You could take a look at a band and just go "Yep" and you'd know exactly what the deal was. The funny thing is that in late 99, it looked like heavy music in general was gonna be big . Then it got trimmed down to the more radio friendly bands. because like everything that takes of now days the suits have to work out a way mass produce it for the general public, and thats what we got left with
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Post by Bishblast on Jan 7, 2013 18:09:34 GMT -5
A good bit of the stuff hat gets labeled as Nu Metal is closer to post grunge... but by and large, the representatives of those sub-genres tend to be rather awful.
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Post by babyfootball on Jan 7, 2013 18:15:17 GMT -5
One of my favorite topics to ruminate on, so prepare yourselves!
I came "of age" perfectly aligned with nu-metal's proliferation in the world of popular music. So I feel like I'm particularly qualified to talk about it. When I was a pre-teen, I was into the following music: grunge (Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots, etc...), pop-punk (Green Day, Rancid and the Offspring), Metallica (but not a lot of similar bands like Megadeth, Slayer and Pantera) and mid-90s radio rock (the Wallflowers, Tonic, Counting Crows). When I turned 13 or so (in 1997) I became particularly angsty, and while the grunge, punk and metal stuck with me, the softer side of my musical tastes were left behind. I was a novice guitar player, and faster, more technical metal was too hard for me to play along with at the time. So I turned to loud, angry, simple music. And that's what I consider to be the hallmarks of what became known as nu-metal.
Everything changed for me when I first heard KoRn (Life is Peachy-era) and Limp Bizkit (3$ Bill Y'all). I heard loud guitars, angst and swagger all rolled into one. I had delved a bit into Marilyn Manson and Rammstein prior to this, but as much as I loved the presentation, it didn't resonate with me personally. It was a lot of theatrics. Bands like KoRn, Limp Bizkit, Staind, Coal Chamber, Sevendust and P.O.D. (despite their Christian overtones) were different to me at the time, because they sounded like stuff I could feasibly do, and they looked a hell of a lot more like me than Manson or a bunch of nihilistic Germans.
I was also getting heavily into the Deftones at the time, who I've always felt got lumped in unfairly with the nu-metal crowd, although in 1997 "My Own Summer" fit in perfectly with the other modern hard rock sounds at the time.
By the time 2000 or so came around, nu-metal was at around the same place grunge was in 1994, starting to get watered down with its forefathers taking different directions (in most cases, a turn towards what they hoped was more money by creating more marketable, accessable music) while a legion of poor imitators showed up, some having more success than others. I actually initially considered Linkin Park as a part of this wave, along with bands like Crazy Town, American Head Charge, Dope, Slaves on Dope, the Union Underground, Kittie, Saliva, Drowning Pool, Adema, Trustcompany and so many others. I still can't believe when I hear their new stuff that it's even the same band as what I really thought was going to be a one-hit wonder "One Step Closer."
The thing about bands like Fear Factory is that they always sort of existed on the fringe of the true nu-metal movement. I mean, lots of nu-metal bands took cues from Biohazard and Faith No More but those bands didn't sort of adapt their overall sound to the lunkheaded, down-tuned craze of nu-metal the way that Fear Factory did. I mean, listen to a good chunk of "Digitmortal" and tell me that they weren't guilty of almost parodying themselves. Machine Head did the same thing, and like a few bands like the Deftones, Linkin Park, Incubus (always considered this a stretch too, but S.C.I.E.N.C.E. is a funk-metal record that came out on Immortal Records, which was THE nu-metal label of the time) were able to break away from that scene in a way that doesn't feel forced.
Disturbed I consider to be sort of a wacky case, because I remember at the trail end of my nu-metal "phase" (though there's a solid handful of records from that time in my life I can still get down to) my friend Chuck used a gift card to pick up "The Sickness." I don't know what he was expecting, but it was on Giant Records (not a genre-specific label at all) and he had a record by the band Earth to Andy that he liked a lot that was on the same label. But when we popped it in, we thought it was the goofiest thing we'd ever heard, especially songs like "Down With the Sickness" and "Droppin' Plates." It blew up, and even though I still don't really consider Disturbed to be a "legit" metal band (I consider Slipknot much more "legit" than them), they've really evolved their sound and don't sound so much like rap-metal anymore.
Which brings me to an interesting point, the difference between nu-metal and rap-metal. Not all nu-metal bands are rap-metal bands but I'd say most of them have played in the rap-metal style, if you know what I mean. But so did Anthrax, Faith No More (again) and others and they certainly never put out anything that really sounds like nu-metal, so I don't know exactly how you draw the distinction.
My personal story concludes with jumping straight from nu-metal into emo (the legit, '90s kind) when I was 15, without having an Epitaph or Fat Wreck Chords phase (or even worse, a ska phase), and through that getting into more classic punk, hardcore and indie rock, which kind of indirectly led me back into metal when I was a bit older, so even though I look back at my Staind-fan days with kind of the same disdain as a no-longer-teenage girl might look back at her Backstreet Boys fan days, I can appreciate some of those records now from a completely different angle, hearing the classic punk, hardcore and metal sounds where all I ever heard before was loud angst.
You can dissect any genre of music like this, but the only conclusion I can come to when it comes to what exactly makes nu-metal is similar to that of Potter Stewart's on pornography: "I know it when I see (and hear)it."
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Post by babyfootball on Jan 7, 2013 18:28:00 GMT -5
A good bit of the stuff hat gets labeled as Nu Metal is closer to post grunge... but by and large, the representatives of those sub-genres tend to be rather awful. And post-grunge is just as complicated and hard-to-dissect genre as nu-metal. I think the big bands that are usually cited as post-grunge are probably Creed and Nickelback, though oftentimes bands as early as Stone Temple Pilots, Bush and Candlebox are called this too because they were obviously influenced by the big grunge bands: Nirvana, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam and Alice in Chains (who I'd argue are 4 distinct styles of music in and of themselves, but that's a whole other topic), but they weren't really "grungy" per se. To me, post-grunge is almost hard rock but not of the AC/DC variety (who I'd actually call Godsmack closer to than any of these other styles, just much more heavily distorted and with a stupid "dark biker" theme) stripped of any punk influence, meaning that it's glossily produced and devoid of any "real, palpable, raw" emotion. I'd say that in terms of heavy, modern rock, post-grunge is all but dead in the mainstream, with mainstream rock bands sounding more like weird, false emo-metal with a Linkin Park-esque element and a sort of watered-down, "classic rock-influenced" power ballad rock, with half-raunchy "rockers" as the "other single."
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Post by thuschongswing on Jan 7, 2013 18:28:56 GMT -5
...says it all, really. Seriously, though, nu-metal is great when you're 13/14 and angsty. Can't compare to the real thing, though ;D
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Post by Deleted on Jan 7, 2013 18:29:01 GMT -5
The funny thing is that in late 99, it looked like heavy music in general was gonna be big . Then it got trimmed down to the more radio friendly bands. because like everything that takes of now days the suits have to work out a way mass produce it for the general public, and thats what we got left with I'm looking at the back of my Ozzfest 2001 shirt and we have: (In my opinion) Black Sabbath ( Not Nu Metal ) Marilyn Manson ( Not Nu Metal ) Slipknot Papa Roach ( Some might consider them Nu Metal ) Linkin Park Crazy Town Disturbed Black Label Society ( Not Nu Metal ) MuDvAyNe The Union Underground >>>taproot ( Don't know enough about ) nonpoint ( Don't know enough about ) Hatebreed not Nu - Metal) Systematic ( Don't know enough about ) SpineShank ( arguable ) Pure Rubbish ( Don't know enough about ) Beautiful Creatures ( Don't enough about ) OTEP ( Not Nu Metal ) No One ( Don't know enough about ) Godhead ( Not Nu Metal, affiliated with Manson ) Pressure 4 5 ( Don't know enough about ) Drowning Pool American Head Charge ( Don't know enough about )
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babyfootball
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Post by babyfootball on Jan 7, 2013 18:54:09 GMT -5
Yes! I forgot about Taproot (I heard they were associated with the Deftones back then and bought their record "Gift" and was terribly disappointed)! They were totally nu-metal, but they had very little rap/hip-hop influence, and their singer had the worst nasally voice to boot. Nonpoint definitely were, too. I'd argue that Spineshank were, but loosely. I also totally thought that OTEP were nu-metal as well, but whatever they are, I'd say that they're just really really bad. American Head Charge were, same with Pressure 4 5.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 7, 2013 19:06:02 GMT -5
OTEP I always associated with the Killswitch Engage, Lamb of God Metal Core era. It was that awkward time when you'd have shows that were book ended by similar types of bands and then had In Flames playing somewhere in between. I still don't know how they got on those tours. The reverse of that (once again featuring In Flames) was a show I went to that featured in order: Dark Tranquility (opener) Sentenced Killswitch Engage In Flames Killswitch might as well have covered "One of these things is not like the other".
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Post by Wolf Hurricane on Jan 7, 2013 19:24:38 GMT -5
nu-metal to me was always a gateway metal like you a dumb kid in your early teens, you saw Fred Durst or Jonathan Davis rocking out on the tv or hear them on the radio and think they are good so you save your money and check out their stuff and buy music mags and stuff like that from their you find out about heavier acts like Slayer and Pantera or old acts like Judas Priest and Iron Maiden or even furth with Black Metal and Death Metal bands and from there you branch out more to find something your really like and leave Nu Metal behind at least thats how i did it I was sort of like this. Nu-Metal was a gateway for me to more Gothic tunes; I more or less went from Disturbed and Drowning Pool to Evanescence and Lacuna Coil. From there, I discovered groups like Nemesea and Nox Arcana that don't get a whole lot of mainstream radio play.
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Post by EvenBaldobombHasAJob on Jan 7, 2013 20:47:36 GMT -5
I'll be honest I've kinda come back around to it, at least, some of the better bands. I wouldn't have ever discovered heavy metal if not for nu metal serving as a gateway, so I can't really hate it. and some albums (the first and 3rd Korn albums, the first Slipknot album) are legitimately great. the main flaw with the genre was largely over-exposure and too many samey-sounding bands, which to be honest is something that happens to every "popular" heavy metal genre at some point (same thing happened to Metalcore, and then *ugh* Deathcore). the originators were legitimately good bands (I LOVE the Deftones, and I still rock a lot of the bigger Metalcore bands like Unearth and Shadows Fall) but they ended up getting over-taken by bands who were largely terrible (Linkin Park, Trivium).
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