It’s Thanksgiving week here in the States, so to help whet your appetite for that notoriously gluttonous holiday, we’re serving up some scrumptious old-school KoЯn via this vicious performance of “Clown” from 1995. People tend to forget just how legitimately twisted and dingy the band was when they first burst onto the scene with their game-changing self-titled debut album three decades ago. Nobody had ever quite heard alternative metal delivered in such a cathartically hostile, vulgar, and shockingly vulnerable (i.e., “Daddy”) fashion before, as the band completely flipped the script on what heavy music could sound, look, and feel like on that record. And it, of course, had everything to do with lead singer Jonathan Davis’s traumatic upbringing that included being molested and bullied as a child, not to mention his experience working on dead bodies as a mortuary student in the runup to his joining the band.
It’s no wonder the album is so dark, but not in the typically cheesy “heavy-metal” way (i.e. no songs about Satan, fire, etc.), but rather in a much more damaged, palpably raw, and real way. Backed by a menacingly volatile and wickedly dank metallic rhythm section, you hear all the (real) demons from Davis’s childhood trauma being exorcised with his distinctive amphetamine-fueled schizophrenic fervor in a viscerally compelling way throughout KoЯn’s classic debut album. And experiencing that sound manifest in a live setting was beyond explosive, particularly back in the day, as evidenced by this ferocious performance. It’s dirty, mean, raw, but most importantly, it was real. Eat it:
