I recently posted about how a lot of late ’90s nu metal could have been reasonably good – but alas, on almost every top-selling nu metal album from the era the artists insisted on doing one surprisingly specific and yet universally irritating thing.

It wasn’t the tracksuits, the lack of guitar solos, or the rapping the ruined it – it was the whining.

Yeah, the whining – whether groaned, whispered or moaned, and always just before the breakdown, or in a quiet intro or outro – was so prevalent on major releases that it became synonymous with ’90s nu metal.

As I said in my previous post, if you edited out all the whining and moaning bits from all those releases, you’d end up with some surprisingly solid material.

Sadly, the faux angsty whining is so inescapable and off-putting that it ultimately overshadows the better qualities of these albums – and therefore spoils what might otherwise have been decent moments in metal.

“Nothing to do with real metal”

The whining, in turn, vindicated the feelings of True Metal Warriors who at the time claimed (and presumably still do) that nu metal was an abomination, that “it has nothing to do with real metal” or whatever hysterical hyperbole they’d hurl at it (in my previous post I point out that the only phenomenon more divisive than nu metal in the genre’s 50-plus history was the ascension of the dreaded hair metal).

While it is true (or should I say, trve) that a lot of nu metal was painfully dull, formulaic, or otherwise sub-standard, that phenomenon is in no way limited to this genre. In fact, most of everything being sub-standard crud occurs in all art and culture.

And contrary to the rhetoric from True Metal Warrior legions, the ensuing popularity of nu metal actually did some great things for the music we love.

A case in point: I was reading about Slipknot’s 2001 Iowa album in an old edition of the now-defunct Terrorizer magazine (I read old metal mags – this story was from 2011). The article promoted the 10-year reissue of Iowa in the form of an interview with Slipknot co-founder Shawn Crahan

To be clear: I’ve never gotten excited about Slipknot. Yet one thing is clear from the moment you start Iowa: here is a heavy metal album where where large portions of it, unlike ‘conventional’ nu metal from the era like Disturbed, Korn, Limp Bizkit, Linkin Park, meet the definition of extreme music.

There’s headbanging riffs. Mad drumming and percussion. Aggression in spades. And a superlatively dark and menacing feel throughout (Crahan says in the Terrorizer article how much the band hated each other while they recorded, and how the negative sentiment manifested in the song writing).

Yet this is an album that was so successful that it reached the #1 spot in the UK and Canadian charts, and a remarkable #3 in the United States Billboard charts.

For perspective: in the same week that Iowa attained its US peak, R&B artist Aaliyah (who’d died unexpectedly a week previously) was in the top spot and Alicia Keys was in fourth. And here, inching its way near the top, was a dark, abrasive and ugly monstrosity unlike anything else in the mainstream.

It’s worth remembering that album charts meant a great deal in 2001. To receive a good chart position wasn’t just indicative of (albeit commercially driven) popularity; it also brought self-perpetuating momentum, with all the accompanying coverage. Charting by its very nature meant your music would be heard not only by fans, but by masses of newcomers. And any ensuing controversy, often in the form of radio stations refusing to play a release, often helped with even more publicity.

Which is why, regardless of whether you think the nu metal phenomenon meets a highly subjective genre classification, Iowa made a great contribution to extreme music.

Compare it the other artists charting at the time that played heavy-ish but nonetheless accessible guitar-based ‘heavy’ music: Linkin Park, Puddle Of Mud, Alien An Farm, Drowning Pool, Disturbed, Limp Bizkit and Staind. Many went on to enjoy even greater commercial success (and some sunk into obscurity). But none achieved it with music that was this genuinely harsh and extreme.

In fact, with very few exceptions, it’s almost unprecedented for an album so harsh-sounding (by mainstream standards) to attain such mainstream success. Pantera’s Far Beyond Driven is a noble example when it reached #1 in 1994. Otherwise, it hasn’t been matched.

And so in 2001, for a brief but glorious moment, an explicit, uncomfortable, parental-upsetting album asserted its ugly face in a place otherwise reserved for the pop music elite like Aaliyah and Alica Keys.

I’d like to imagine that Iowa was a gateway album, that kids in 2001 who came across it through Billboard’s charts got exposed to a whole new kind of angry raw music – and from there went on to plumb the full depths of everything that death, black, thrash, sludge, crust, grindcore, industrial and all its shunned friends had to offer.

Obviously I don’t have any empirical evidence. But even if that didn’t really happen, Slipknot attaining the #3 spot in the US, and comparable positions in other countries, meant that some other R&B or pop artist was knocked down a few notches.

As Iron Maiden vocalist Bruce Dickinson said about Maiden’s Bring Your Daughter… To The Slaughter single reaching the #1 chart position, thereby knocking Cliff Richard off the top spot: “That probably deserves some kind of public service award.”