Bands to watch for: Corn

When I say the word "metal," what do you think of? Probably the same things I do: Charvel guitars, slap bass, wearing your own band's shirts, and having a job at a carwash. But there is more to metal than just thrash, as the upcoming California band Corn proves. They play an innovative style of new-metal that doesn't just regurgitate all the familiar cliches we have come to associate with metal, but instead introduces a whole new set of conventions that we think will be met with both critical and popular acclaim.

This is a DIY video they put up on their MySpace to create buzz around their band. The quality is a little rough because my friend Carlos did it as the final project in his video production class at Shoreline Community College but don't let that distract you. Please make a bulletin about it if you want to support them!!

Alts, bangers, or wiggers?
Like Biohazard, it is kind of hard to say exactly what Corn sounds like because they are pretty much doing their own thing. The only band I could really compare them to is Bloodlet, because they both play down-tuned, sludgy songs about how you hate yourself. But unlike Bloodlet, who are kind of derivative and unoriginal, Corn adds a lot of elements to the mix that make them much more interesting.

This is the bassist's zine. It isn't really like your typical music zine, it's mostly personal stuff about going to church, thoughts on straightedge, etc. It is either 2 stamps or a trade. He is on #hardcore a lot and really friendly!!

Sometimes I think that they are an alternative band like Stone Temple Pilots because there are lots of parts where the singer talks about how nobody likes him, his stepdad is a fucking shitbag, and how he has low self-esteem. He probably got stuffed in his locker a lot in high school. But when the jocks would mess with him, instead of fighting back he would just put on a big forced smile and fake-laugh at them because he wanted to make it seem like he was above all of it and it didn't really bother him. He would just let them push him around like he didn't care, like he was soooo over the whole bully thing that it didn't phase him at all.

Corn is the world's first post-racial band. The singer for Corn's fur-lined track suit transcends their race and sends the message, "Skin color doesn't matter." The fat guy on the upper left is like "Yo, what's up!!" and the guy in the shades is all, "Dawg, don't fuck with this unless you want ya wig split."

But actually, he would skip his last class ("Applied Math II") and go home and put his pillow over his face and scream as loud as he could "I FUCKING HATE YOU FUCKERS!!! FUCK YOU!!!!" because he saw this one cute semi-gothic girl that he likes watching him get stuffed in the locker. She wears cut-off denim shorts with those black-and-white tights underneath with Doc Martens, he ran into her once at a midnight showing of "Rocky Horror Picture Show" and felt like they had a really good vibe.

The singer for Corn is wearing sequined track pants (although it looks like a lot of the sequins have fallen off). I think he is trying to say to all the bullies/stepdads who picked on him, "LOL @ you guys, I'm proud of being a 'freak'. I own this image, and I'm gonna be popular with it." But still he wants you to know that he is kind of vulnerable, which is why he is holding himself and swaying. The scars have not completely healed.

Also I bet his stepdad is like the dad from The Wonder Years, and was really disappointed when his son said he didn't want to play football. He probably came home from work one day all pissed off because he does framing/roofing and his foreman is a fucking asshole, and was like "Hey if all you're going to do is sit around my house and listen to Slipknot, get me a fucking beer!" Then the singer for Corn is all, "Fuck you, you're not my real dad!!" And his stepdad turns all red and pushes him up against the wall and is like "You think you can take me on you fuckin' pussy?!" and slaps him. The singer for Corn starts to cry and his stepdad is like, "If you're gonna act like a little bitch then I'll treat you like one!!" and sticks his finger in the singer for Corn's butt. I am not sure but I think that's what the Corn song "Clown" is about.

Corn's first demo, has a creepy pornogrind kind of vibe on the cover. They are from the same area as The Meat Shits.

But they also seem like they like metal, because a lot of the songs are really dissonant and heavy. I feel like they are probably big noisecore fans because on the record there isn't even a bass player. In the parts where most bands would have the bass, they just have these weird sounds that remind me of pieces of metal clanking together. It seems like something 7 Minutes of Nausea would do. They have a guy who plays with them live and does "noise/effects" and sometimes uses a bass to make the clanking sounds, I don't know how he does it. He's probably into circuitbending or whatever and rewired the whole bass.

This isn't finished yet, but I did this Corn poster in my "New Media III" class. I want to rework the highlights on the alien's skin when I have time (probably not until spring break).

Also, are they Mexis? I can't tell. Some of them look like it, but they could also just be wiggers who work outside doing manual labor so they are really tan. I don't really see a lot of Mexis with cornrows, and usually the only people you see with dreadlocks are rapey white pot dealers. They will ask you if you want to come over to their place to smoke some fatty dank nuggets and watch "The Wall" but really they just want to feel you up in their van, then when you're like "Fuck you, get off of me" they laugh and as you're getting out of the van, they're all, "Ass, grass, or cash, nobody rides for free!!" and drive off to go get some Taco Bell and find a pay phone so they can call all the people who paged them.

The bassist plays an upright bass, like the guy from The Stray Cats. I think it's really cool and original that they even incorporate elements of rockabilly into their sound/image. Also, I guess it's just the light or something, but it looks like there are 5 strings on his bass, LOL!

Here is an interview I did with Corn for my "Video Production I" class. Sorry I talked so much, I'm not used to being on camera and I got a little nervous and couldn't shut up. I laughed so hard when the one guy said his named was Fieldy Snuts (like "Feel These Nuts/Testicles" LOL!!!), that guy is so funny and crazy!!

What's next for Corn?
At the risk of sounding like a fanboi, I think Corn could be next Infectious Grooves (another genre-bending California band who I will cover in a future edition of Bands to Watch For). They would need to develop a charismatic mascot like Sonic, Bubsy, or Poochie, but I think the alien I made for the poster above would work perfectly so that's not really a problem. I just feel like the time is right for new-metal to break through into the mainstream, what with Desert Storm and the failure of the DotComs making everybody so nervous about the future. Corn's anger and vulnerability mirror the way that we all feel in these uncertain times.

I looked on WebMD and it said that hair loss and bloating in someone as young as the singer for Corn can be indicators of really serious illnesses like GRIDS.

The only thing I see potentially holding them back is the singer for Corn's health. I'm worried that being in a young band that is building a strong local following has led him into an unhealthy lifestyle. Because their music combines intense minor key riffs with dark lyrical themes, it seems like it probably attracts a lot of troubled young adults with low self-esteem, which means it would be really easy for an older dude in a moderately popular band to have sex with them. Since he hasn't accepted Christ into his heart yet I can see how that would be really tempting and probably put him in a lot of really bad situations and lead to tensions in the band.

"Life Is Peachy" 7" (Wild Rags). This one is easier to find than the demo but I think the production is a little too polished, kind of like how the Excruciating Terror LPs weren't as good as the demos and 7"s because they were overproduced.

Recommended listening
Corn has a demo and a 7" out. Both are excellent but I recommend the demo if you can find it. It's especially rad if you have a good system in your car. My friend Carlos, who made the "Blind" video at the top of the page, has a bomb-ass system in his Integra GS-R. We'll put the demo in his tape player and go to the Everett Mall and just chill in the parking lot or drive up Casino Road. Every time one of the bass drops hits people are all, "Damn what is that, it must be Def Bass Krew!!" but then the singer for Corn starts screaming and they're all like "Oh snap, I didn't know rock could bump like that!!" and we're like "What's up now, bitches!!" and give them the gasface.

Corn on MySpace

Guest post: Where's the love for awesome hardcore bands that turned into shitty metal bands?

This is the first of what we hope will be many guest columns from MI readers, in this case from frequent commenter and MI Twitter follower Snoopz. Naturally it isn't as good as something we would write ourselves, but you can't have everything, can you? If you're interested in writing something, please send it to our email or send a direct message on Twitter- the more the merrier!

This is my shot at a guest column for Metal Inquisition and it’s gonna be about hardcore bands that “went metal” in the 80’s and early 90’s, and, well, how that was totally fuckin awesome! Now right now, people who were hardcore fans in the 80’s, their heads are exploding, because what I just said is the equivalent of a teenager today telling me, a 30 year old, that it must have been awesome to be around in the 90’s to see the emergence of Slipknot and Sevendust. I’d say, “no, I went to Tattoo the Earth Tour and it sucked” and we would just not see eye to eye. Well I don’t connect well with older hardcore fans, record collectors, and so forth. I see them as the No Fun Club. Like, if my favorite Cro-Mags album is the wrong one, forget it, I’m not even worth talking to. No accounting for personal taste with these hardcore puritans, there are good albums and bad albums and, a consensus has been reached on the matter, and I should shut up.

School of Violence, Junkyard, and Broken Bones?! It's like a who's-who of forgettable crap all in one image!

The records I’m going to mention today, by Warzone, Token Entry, and DYS, are universally hated despite musical innovation and adventurous lyrics. What the fuck? I’ll get into this right now. I’m pretty positive most Metal Inquisition readers have a general awareness of hardcore music, but I should clarify that records I’m talking about don’t sound like the metalcore bands that were all spawned by At The Gates’ Slaughter of the Soul. In fact death metal is not really a factor. Think crossover, cheese metal, funk metal, thrash.


Here is a photo of my room around 2000. I was heavily involved in some hardcore archeology at the time, digging up albums from ten years earlier. Note all the tapes. Guess what? They were cheaper than Cds. And what tapes was I finding the most in used bins? The “sellout” metal albums by punk and hardcore bands that nobody wanted. Now you are getting an idea about why I know so much about this shit.

Warzone - Self-titled
Warzone was a NYHC band, had a killer 7 inch and two great, well-produced full lengths, and then the 1989 S/T album dropped, ruining everything in a lot of people’s eyes. When I was first listening to Warzone in the mid-90’s (they were reunited and playing often) I did not even know that the album existed. I found it hard to believe, when told by friends, that some “awful” Warzone record was out there with bullet holes on the cover. I searched for years. Nothing. Finally in the early 00’s I met a friend who had received the record as a birthday present. A gag gift of course. Amazingly his copy was a promo sent to a radio station and contained a press release for Caroline Records that was, I admit, rather funny, describing their logo as “the iron cross of unity.” My heart sank when I saw that the program director of the station had written on the release, in pen, “despite their best intentions, this is a lame band.”

Almost as awesome as the old Lion's Den picture where they're on the train tracks

The record rocks, good luck finding it on mediafire. Sure it has a thin sound, the guitars sound like a series of samples for a RUN DMC record all strung together, but this whole record moves at a mid-tempo groove that will fuck you up.


Token Entry - "The Weight of the World"
On to Token Entry, a melodic straight edge band from the late 80’s who dropped Weight of the World in 1990, a kind of hard rock funk metal record that is near and dear to my heart. Here are the words of AMG “The vocalist looks ready for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, the guitarist is black, the bass player was kidnapped from a hairy metal band, and the drummer looks like seventy percent of the male actors in Los Angeles.” Too much for most hardcore fans I’m sure. A photo of a band not looking right on the back of the record is enough for most fans to dismiss the album as “sellout” before putting it on the turntable. It’s like, if the record’s cover is in full color, it’s a deal-breaker. Oh well, their loss, this release is real fun and was recently re-issued.

DYS - Self-titled
Last and the best. DYS, self-titled LP. Fuck man, it kills me to see people on Amazon.com saying the discography CD is good only if you program your CD player to play the tracks from Brotherhood alone. 1984, this record is not influenced by thrash, it’s really just longer hardcore songs, with some higher-pitched vocal. In the words of the guitar player, "the most technically proficient and cleanest sounding record in the history of Hardcore." This shit is all muscle, so look out. Lyrics?

A demon trapped within all men
Has won the battle here
And those who set the demon free
Now have cause to fear
Gone the days of loneliness
Trapped within his brain
He steps forth into darkness
And remembers all the pain

Damn, you should listen to that stuff when working out.

Conclusion
Again, I’ll tell you all, I wasn’t there when all these records dropped, but I’ve been listening to this kind of shit for years and have got pretty much 100% negative feedback from people learning about my musical tastes. I dig Mucky Pup, and M.O.D., two bands recently dismissed here at Metal Inquisition. I don’t know why I got to go against the grain. A few years ago I saw a review in the thrash zine HeartattaCK lamenting that the cover of a new 7” featured cover art in the style of the Suicidal Tendencies Join the Army record cover. “I hope that this style of art does not come back,” said the reviewer. I wondered, “what the fuck kind of crappy album covers does this person like? Blurry photos with typewriter font lower-case text?” That is the antithesis of cool. Crossover rules.

Reader request: Mucky Pup

I never really paid attention to Mucky Pup back in the day, but reader Savage made a request in the comments of our earlier Nocturnus post, and if there is anything that defines us here at Metal Inquisition, it's customer service. In fact, at one of our innovation retreats in 2008, we rewrote our corporate vision statement as follows:

The mission of Metal Inquisition is to provide society with superior products and services by developing innovations and solutions that improve the quality of life and satisfy customer needs, and to provide bloggers with meaningful work and advancement opportunities, and investors with a superior rate of return.

With that in mind, we enter the bizarre and frightening world of Mucky Pup.

I don't really know a damn thing about this band other than that they have a dumb name and I never gave them a chance back in the day because of it. Also that some of them were in Dog Eat Dog, who I listened to a little bit.




U Stink But I Heart U
Apparently this song was their big break, and I actually vaguely remember it. I was a huge fan of the comic strip Bloom County when I was a kid, including the hair metal band Billy & The Boingers that featured Bill The Cat. The guy who created the comic strip held a contest in which he asked bands to record their version of Billy & The Boingers' hit song "U Stink But I Heart U." Mucky Pup's version won, and was included on a flexi that came with one of the Bloom County books (which I had).

I'm not exactly sure what it mean when your band's biggest accomplishment is winning a jokey contest from a comic strip, but it is safe to say that's Mucky Pup's biggest claim to fame. Maybe they can tell me why Sarge is always so mean to Beetle Bailey!! And for christ's sake, why can't Blondie let Dagwood enjoy a sandwich in his hammock with nagging him about chores?? Fucking bitch.



Hippies don't like water
Aside from "U Stink But I Heart U" I don't remember any other Mucky Pup songs, so I fired up Youtube and checked it out. WTF is this shit?! It makes Brokencyde seem dignified, respectable, and stylish! Then again, I have to remind myself that this was 1991 and things were very different back then. Hypercolor wasn't ironic, Living Color thought it was perfectly acceptable to wear Body Glove wetsuits on stage, and MDC had turned into the hardcore version of Weird Al (see "Tofu Spaghetti"). The Youtube description notes that MTV never aired this video... weird! I can't think of a single reason why they wouldn't air it 24/7!!

Ugh I don't even know what to say... 1000000x worse than Brokencyde!

Also, "hippies" were still a relevant part of the cultural lexicon, with bands like Enuf Z'Nuf blending really shitty hair metal with a particularly superficial, irritating take on the 60s. Apparently Mucky Pup did not like this, so they made a novelty song about it. I'd like to think of it as an abominable, cringeworthy combination of Ugly Kid Joe and Murphy's Law... only without the cool parts of Murphy's Law like hitting people with an 8 ball in a sock, and with more fatties.

It gets worse when the fatty starts skanking and you can see his enormous, pasty thighs shake like a bowl full of vanilla jello

From the perspective of someone writing this in 2009, it seems quaint and a little charming to complain about hippies like we did so vigorously back in the 80s and early 90s. And maybe it is a little naive, but it reminds me of my salad days. It makes me long for simpler times, before screamo crunk and beardos, before scene hair and one-man MySpace drum machine goregrind bands. I just want to put a Scatterbrain tape in my Walkman, put on my baja jacket, and go skateboard behind Safeway. Either that or go smoke weed on a rock in the woods and listen to Pantera. Instead, I have to do my taxes and write a proposal for market research on Crest toothpaste and I am listening to Lady Gaga. Sigh...



Mr. Hand
This song is about how the singer masturbates a lot, presumably because the ladies aren't checking for him. It is actually sort of catchy, once again in a "poor man's 'Crucial Barbeque'" kind of way. I probably would have thought it was pretty funny in 7th or 8th grade. But I also thought it was a really good idea to wear red sweatpants, a Forced Entry shirt, a Batman hat and puffy white high tops from K-Mart (the brand was "Jox") six days of the week.

Between his physique, wardrobe, and hair I have no idea why he isn't drowning in pussy

Apparently the world had a big appetite for comedy metal in the 90s, and one of the staples of the genre is wearing oversize, zany Dr. Suess hats. The drummer for a local comedy punk/metal band called Dumt wore one every fucking time they played and it made me want to kill him even though I loved Dumt a lot. Actually, I still do.

These hats fill me with rage in a way that very few things are capable of

The Dr. Suess hats remind of other early 90s fashion mishaps like those stripey tights that were so popular at Lollapalooza. I always wanted to fuck the art fag chicks in my 8th grade art class that wore Doc Martens with stripey tights and listened to Skinny Puppy and Alien Sex Fiend.

Anyway, this song is fucking terrible, I don't even have the patience to look on Rapidshit for a copy of their album (or albums... did they have more than one?). This is like the equivalent of playing old NES games for the first time. Maybe if it was 1988 you would have looked past their many obvious and serious flaws, but it is 2009 and this shit sucks by today's standards.




Dog Eat Dog - "No Fronts"
I guess some people from Mucky Pup were in Dog Eat Dog, but I'm not looking it up because I just want to be done writing about this awful shit. I used to listen to this band a bit, but I haven't heard them for years and they are much fucking worse than I remembered them being. Apparently they felt like they hadn't made big enough assholes of themselves in Mucky Pup and decided to start a new band in which they would do the most embarrassing shit possible, then record it onto a CD which they would sell.

Look at him rap aggressively into the fisheye lens! He's so angry/authentic!

Listening to this song for the first time in years, the main thing I noticed is how these are maybe the very worst lyrics I have ever heard, even surpassing Brokencyde's "hardcore shit make u feel the toxic" line. I will highlight the parts that make me cringe and vomit the most:

No fronts no tricks no soap box politics
No guns just blunts we kick this just for fun

We come with the fat joints
To uplift the moods
Big up to people catchin' on this groove
This is Dog Eat Dog not a snitch or a snoop
I might chew a bone but don't call me pooch
We're not braggin - No
Are we laggin - Never
I can already see we got your tail waggin'
I could doggy bad ya
Or have you for lunch
The answer is no now - who fronts?

Introducing the kids who get loose
Microphone check one to the deuce
Deuce to the tre relax and parlay
With the 4-5-6 we roll hits
Flip the script to move your hips
Flavor we kick the boom to the bip
The boom to the bap ABK type fat
Strapped with crazy herbs and that's that

Alright kid what ya want ya get
S.G. Dog Eat Dog represent
You know the time so act like you know
Listen to the way this ill shit flow
We travel around all boro, any city
Some got beef but they wont get to me
If you come correct and your vibes are true
Peace to your crew
We're looking out for you

Holy fuck that was hard to bear, I seriously thought about smashing my monitor a few times just to make it stop. It's like a bunch of band geeks heard "Urban Discipline" and decided they wanted to give being tough a shot... only they added fucking trumpets to the mix, so it didn't work out so well. The video is full of the most annoying 90s cliches like flannels, fisheye shots, snowboards, and beanies. It's like a Saturday Night Live parody of post-Beastie Boys 90s culture, only it's all too real. Do not want.

Conclusion
I like Ugly Kid Joe and Murphy's Law better, fuck this band. Some things deserved to die with the 90s.