Slipknot and Friends

When I was growing up (around like 12 or 14 maybe?) I listened to a lot of Nu Metal. I played in a band in a friend's garage that covered Slipknot and KoRn and System of a Down, and I generally positioned my own teenage difficulties inside that ultra-specific USA-masculinist-performative malaise (a lot of hip hop from this period was confulent with Nu Metal). When I got older (around 18/19), I went to art school and started meeting people from way outside my lower middle class networks; kids my age who had grown up with parents who were painters or photographers or novelists or architects or whatever, and who had a fine-grained, excluding taste that understand that Nu Metal was bad, populist, shallow, and most of all (it was the early 2000s, we were still in the hangover of the 90s sellouts and posers) unforgivably commercial. For many reasons I was a sort of chameleon back then, and I immediately understood why, for example, Burzum or Sunn O))) were the correctly worked-through…