Fans and music critics alike have come up with so many different labels for different types of music over the last century that they’re seemingly impossible to keep up with. Even within the heavier music community, there are so many different subcategories of rock and metal.
Rock ‘n’ roll and the blues eventually branched out in so many different directions, especially starting with “heavy metal” in the 1970s. Then there was punk, glam, the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, thrash, hair metal, grunge in the 1990s and, of course, nu metal toward the end of the decade… and those are just some of the many subgenres that have been created.
Artists don’t typically love being lumped into groups with other bands because everyone wants to believe that they are so incredibly unique that there could be no such way of doing so. This isn’t to say that a lot of bands aren’t unique, but for different purposes, whether it’s due to their style, geographical origin or the time period that they came up in, these labels exist. Sorry.
Alas, we’ve come back to nu metal. There are a couple of different components that can lead to a band being slapped with the nu-metal categorization. For starters, it’s a type of alternative music that’s heavy, but is generally laced with other genres including hip-hop and rap, industrial, funk and even grunge [via MasterClass]. Baggy clothing, tracksuits, baseball caps, dreadlocks and spiked hair, frosted tips, goatees and facial piercings are among the general sense of fashion associated with nu metal.
So, many bands that came up in the mid-to-late 1990s followed some of these trends, and thus, were lumped into the nu-metal category. And a lot of them hated it. We aren’t entirely sure why, as they all seem to be quite proud of the music they’ve made and their legacies, but scroll below to see how certain nu-metal icons felt about being called nu metal.
Unfortunately, we still don’t know how Fred Durst feels about it.
How 15 Nu-Metal Musicians Felt About Being Called ‘Nu Metal’
Top 50 Nu-Metal Albums of All-Time
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