I remember their fantastically insightful
"Korn's Debut Album Too Old To Like Korn" (
Google cache) article back in 2012 (
KoRn came out in 1994, you do the math), which was totally not a ripoff of Invisible Oranges' own fart-sniffing takedown of the usual low-hanging fruit. It was the usual "shitty band is for dumb angsty kids" wank to make the writer (Axl Rosenburg, clearly a courageous individual putting his birth moniker out for the world to see) feel oh so much more mature and
REAL METAL!!! about himself. Most of it.
But there were a couple of paragraphs that really went over the edge. In the middle of the "review" he stated—archive link above so you can confirm the validity of this—that if you were over the age of 18 and could relate to the song "Faget" you were, and I'm quoting from 2014 memory here, "literally retarded
[excuse the Kiwi filter here]", because it was inspired by Jonathan Davis's high school bullying experiences. Now that is a statement made out of either ignorance or insensitivity if there ever was one, because if my experiences in online communities like Something Awful going all the way back to the early 2000s if not earlier is anything to go by, this sort of shit can happen to any white guy
way after high school, from people that technically should be grown adults. And with the last several years showing the overall public just how widespread social media has translated these sorts of locker room hells to people of all ages, I have to wonder how foolish Mr. Rosenburg (gotta love that self-deprecating moniker to shield one from criticism) looks today. Because even back then when he had the gall to end the article with the famous "I spake as a child" quote (fucking
rich coming from a Christianity-bashing fedoralord) to cap off his "dumb kiddie shit" summation of the album, there was one person in the comments section eager to bring up C.S. Lewis' similarly famous counterpoint.
But even if one
was "literally retarded" for liking Korn, their debut or the song "Faget", why the fuck was it such a big deal to a bunch of self-proclaimed liberal progressives like them? I thought these were supposed to be the defenders of the "misfits" as that woefully failed Trump hitpiece was supposed to claim of the metal community? Do they not realize that "ableism" is as much a thing as all the racial and sexual -isms if they give a quarter of a fuck about "equality" as they've been letting on since 2006? I guess it's only the "right" kind of misfits that get white knighted by these people, the rest can join their own version of the Faggot Leper Colony. Regardless of what you might think about Korn or the album in question—a lot of the heat they get is perfectly understandable—you gotta admit people like these kinda forfeit their rights to look down on others in such a way when they paint righteous social justice crusades all over themselves like you can see all throughout their hilariously spectacular failure of a "webzine".
(Sorry for the OT 'tism but I feel I have to make up for the fact that I don't recall ever calling these fucktards out for their own ignorance, smugness and hypocrisy at the time. Probably because it was early 2014, Gamergate hadn't happened and the phenomenon of two-faced leftbully cuntrags was still too unusual a topic for me to want to bring up. Probably because my "fuck it, I'll go read something less dumb to feel better about myself" instinct was stronger at the time. Gotta mention it somewhere after all these years even if it's one of the last places to do it.)