KORN Frontman: 'There Will Always Be People Who Are Going To Hate, No Matter What We Do'

Radio Metal recently conducted an interview with KORN singer Jonathan Davis. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

Radio Metal: How do you make such two different musical worlds, metal and dubstep, work together? I guess a metal band such as KORN has a very different way of working compared to dubstep artists such as Skrillex?

Jonathan: No, there's a lot of similarities there; there really is. Dubstep music is really heavy. Some of those sounds were just so heavy that we thought it would work so we wanted to experiment. We didn't know if we were going to make an album or what we were going to do, but when we got with Skrillex, we did a few soungs, and once we got there, [we were like] "Fuck the EP. Let's do a whole album. I guess we'll work with all these different amazing producers."

Radio Metal: Was it difficult to mix these two different musical worlds?

Jonathan: Yeah, it was tough. We had no clue about what we were doing. That was something that hadn't been done before. It was a big huge learning curve. That's why we had asked the producer to mix the album with our engineer and he taught Bud [engineer Jim "Bud" Monti] all kind of stuff and Bud taught him all kinds of stuff so we were exchanging information and getting together and making the thing work. Of course it was a hard record to make, but it was the funnest record I've ever made.

Radio Metal: In the Roadrunner Records biography you were quoted defining the mixture found on "The Path Of Totality" as "future metal." So do we have to expect KORN to further explore that direction in the future or do you think you've been as far as there was to explore with combining metal and dubstep?

Jonathan: I think that since we did this record, it wouldn't be necessary to do another dubstep album, so it's on to the next thing. Our records are always kind of different, so I think we'll take what we've learned from this, and there might be subtle influences here and there, but I think overall the next KORN album will be different from the last one.

Radio Metal: You said that people were going to be pissed about "The Path Of Totality" and that made you even more excited about it. Why does it excite you so much? What satisfies you in pissing people off?

Jonathan: What made me excited about it? There's a lot of closed-minded metal purists that would hate something because it's not true to metal or whatever, but KORN has never been a metal band, dude. We're not a metal band. We've always been looked as as what they called the nu-metal thing. But we've always been the black sheep and we never fitted into that kind of thing, so… We're always ever-evolving, and we always piss fans off and we're gaining other fans, and it is how it is. And I love them all, I even love the ones that hate on us, because if they take the time out to go and say that they hate us; it means that they care. [laughs] You can't make everybody happy, but I've been around for 18 years, so I'm like, "I don't give a fuck, I really don't!" I wanna do what makes me happy and makes the band happy. But that doesn't bother us at all. There will always be people who are going to hate, no matter what the hell we do.

Radio Metal: Do you think that people need to have their convictions and habits shaken sometimes?

Jonathan: Yeah, man, that's what keeps everything sweet. You just do one thing and then change and do another thing… It trips them out and in the end they come around. Yeah, and they like that. I like being surprised. It's all about not being closed-minded and enjoy all kinds of music. And, fortunately, there are people like that.

Read the entire interview from Radio Metal.