Millennial nu-metal daze

A Kittie korner, a writer’s lament.

Calling all brooding millennials who still dress in black. Are we nearly at midlife-crisis age? I can’t say I even think of myself as being remotely normal enough to be in the throes of one. But in 2023, I’ve been watching Gen Z discover, react to, and evaluate nu metal. The subgenre’s drop D-tuned melodrama defined a zeitgeist of murky angst for me and other people who grew up between the mid-1990s and early 2000s. Fast-forward nearly 25 years later, the act of joking about it conjures a new emotion at odds with itself—let’s call it shamed nostalgia.

Since the beginning of September, I’ve been lobbing Disturbed jokes at Tone Madison‘s guiding light, our publishing guy Scott Gordon, after I first texted him over Labor Day Weekend that I was eager to hit up Half-Price Books to look for a near-mint copy of Down With The Sickness (2000), because it’s too good for any ol’ record store. Several “Droppin’ Plates” intro hypeman jokes and “Stupify” word associations later, I inevitably found myself actually returning to listen to my 14-year-old self’s not-really-favorite band’s poorly articulated sense of demonic menace. I indulged for a moment, but quickly found that I couldn’t deal with the vicarious embarrassment. I mentally shelved it between the pages of Sharpie-marked notebooks where I once scrawled attempts at poetry and made-up music albums to fit the words into in order to entertain myself in rural suburbia.

Let down, or “disturbed” you might say, by my own referential conjuring, I began to meditate on the peak time of daydream-doodling band logos in the margins, and unearthed another 2000 record of the nu metal genre, Spit, by Kittie. (By some slight serendipity, unbeknownst to me until I started writing this piece, post-genre performance artist Poppy covered the title track with an industrial flair in May of this year.) What’s interesting about Kittie during the turn of the century is that, perhaps because they were Canadian, literally in high school at the time (like me), and not all post-grunge dropout dudes, they partly side-stepped this manufactured division between the teen dance-pop and nu metal spheres that I fell for (and that Poppy, for instance, has since erased for the next generation). In retrospect, it was all part of the same ecosystem that Carson Daly and company nurtured on Total Request Live (or TRL), every weekday, strategically airing at 3:30 p.m. after school.

That isn’t to say Kittie didn’t face their own sexist and ageist criticisms in the media and online (which could be the subject of an entirely separate article). But unlike so many of their peers who flamed out, Kittie continued throughout the 2000s as they matured into a unit, a sisterly bond between Morgan and Mercedes Lander, who crafted albums and not just “edgy” singles. Their grimmer, sharper sophomore record Oracle from 2001 is an absolute highlight, and features one of the best metal-flipped Pink Floyd covers I’ve ever heard.

As shown in the opening minutes of the 2002 tour documentary Spit In Your Eye, the band also has a history in the Madison area. Kittie’s first-ever headline show was at the Cross Plains sports bar, Kitt’s Korner—of all places, but considering its name, maybe also somewhat apropos?—formerly at 3738 County Hwy P. Concertgoer Terry Mayer’s experience was immortalized, in text and a couple stage photos, on Concert Livewire in February of 2000. You needn’t even use the Wayback Machine to scan through it in all its charming basic-HTML glory. In the aftermath of testosterone-fueled disasters like Woodstock ’99 (hyper-analyzed in the last few years), it’s encouraging to read Mayer write about the mindfulness of the band amidst crowd chaos, like the lighting rig shaking to the point of near collapse, as Kittie’s bassist at the time, Talena Atfield, directly helped young fans out of harm’s way.

“It’s incredible to me how the raw intensity of the music we were creating impacted so many and that first almost out-of-control headline show for us was a symbol of what was to come,” vocalist, guitarist, and songwriter Morgan Lander writes to Tone Madison via email, describing the moment as career-defining. It’s a thought that’s tied up in the gigging landscape at the turn of the century, “a magical time for shows and smaller clubs, many of which don’t exist any more. We were so naive and ‘along for the ride’ that, only after reflection years later did the impact of the shows, fan interactions, and music we made really hit home with us,” Lander concludes.

I suppose Lander’s words are largely what I expected to read in a general recollection, but they also pierced another thought about that era versus our present one (however all us self-described social outcast millennials have compartmentalized this time in our lives). It’s not just about the music; it’s also about the spaces in which the music and musicians developed. As the industry continues to squeeze out the realistic hope of even being a full-time musician, Kittie having a formative moment here at a club like Kitt’s Korner in small-town Wisconsin almost seems surreal, sadly.

We’ve taken all these leaps forward in terms of dismantling forms of gatekeeping, genre-scene boundaries, and attitudes towards women and gender nonconforming artists (“gender does not equal genre,” Morgan Lander told MTV2 host Chris Booker 22 years ago, a comment that still inspires me). Perhaps what’s missing from my era of shamed nostalgia, is the sense that an up-and-coming band could confidently storm into Madison and not be forced into the monochrome walls erected by local Live Nation subsidiary FPC Live—for the prospects of a more locally conscious and unpredictable experience. (Props to The Annex at The Red Zone on Regent Street for at least committing to host a stable platform for touring metal acts.)

My own immaturity, cowardice, and shallow understanding of the world may have defined that time before I was able to make the hour-long drive to shows in cities like Baltimore. (Shoutout to the now-shuttered Talking Head, perhaps B-More’s version of Kitt’s Korner in the context of this piece.) But, while that is the case, I am at once actually proud of the fact that I never (sub)consciously shut artists out of my musical curiosity because of who they were, as many of my male peers did. I would even say that the members of Kittie were integral to my nascent, pre-formed idea that there shouldn’t be limitations imposed on who owns a particular style of music.

So, while the algorithm may bombard me with a steady virtual feed of new video reacts to Korn, Limp Bizkit, Orgy, Coal Chamber, and yes, Disturbed, for the foreseeable future—or just a YouTube spell, however long this reappraisal of nu metal endures—I guess I now have to become comfortable growing into someone whose inner monologue mutters but doesn’t immediately say aloud, “Back in my day…” Don’t call it a crisis; call it an ever-self-scrutinizing writer’s lament.