Albums with their own pages:
- Audience-Alienating Era: Korn made various attempts to change things up in the 2000s after nu-metal's fall from mainstream visibility, but none of them really stuck. Their MTV Unplugged special is particularly infamous, with some calling their acoustic set a bold experiment, but other fans and critics being outright hostile to the very idea of Korn without distortion. 2007's Untitled showed that fans just weren't responding to the added electronic elements. 2010's Korn III: Remember Who You Are is largely agreed to have come up short as a return to form (to which the band agreed after a torturous experience working with producer Ross Robinson). And the Genre Shift into dubstep on 2011's The Path of Totality sparked a lot of mixed reviews. The consensus is that Head returning to the band, for 2013's well-received The Paradigm Shift, got the band back on track.
- Awesome Art: Say what you want about the untitled album, the artworks made for it are very impressing in their surreal, overly detailed approach.
- Awesome Moments:
- The music video for "Falling Away From Me". After 3 minutes of seeing young kids hear their moms being beaten by their dads, one of them, a tomboyish girl, opens up a glowing box and the band suddenly appears and rocks out loud and long enough, while locking the door, to help the girl escape from her abusive dad and join an entire army of kids in his backyard!
- In 2006, Korn was due to play the Download Festival in the UK, but Jonathan Davis suddenly had to be hospitalized due to a blood infection that might have killed him if he'd gone onstage. Rather than cancel though, they pulled a murderer's row of singers on the bill to fill in and play their most famous songs. This included M. Shadows of Avenged Sevenfold, Dez Fafara of DevilDriver, and Corey Taylor of Slipknot/Stone Sour.
- Ray Luzier was asked to learn five songs for his 2008 audition for touring drummer. Luzier learned thirty. Here's his audition
, which is so in-the-pocket that Fieldy and Munky just hire him right then and there. Luzier, of course, became a permanent member.
- Awesome Music:
- The entire Untouchables album, their first (and arguably best) blend of Alternative Metal and electronic influences. It's truly the band at their peak.
- The self-titled debut deserves special mention, as it was the beginning of the Nu Metal era in earnest. It cannot be overstated just how fresh the album sounded at the time.
- Follow the Leader showed that Korn could give their sound a mainstream polish and not lose any of the madness that made them Korn to begin with. Two of their most famous tracks, the naggingly-catchy "Freak On A Leash" and the almost-disco "Got The Life" are here, plus the Hidden Track is an infectiously stupid cover of "Earache My Eye" by Cheech & Chong.
- For both Korn and Pink Floyd, whenever the former plays their cover of "Another Brick in the Wall" live, expect everyone present, many of whom are more likely to have been too young to remember the latter in their heyday, singing, with the strength of every fiber of their being, "HEY! TEACHER! Leave those kids alone!!" It really proves that song's staying power.
- Jonathan Davis singing "Kidnap the Sandy Claws" from Nightmare Revisited.
- Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The abbreviated bagpipe-driven cover of War's 1975 hit "Lowrider" towards the end of Life Is Peachy, which contrasts sharply with the angry nihilism present on the rest of the album.
- Broken Base:
- See You on the Other Side alienated some of the more "hardcore" Korn fans with its softer sound. The Untitled album was supposed to bring back the fanbase, but it didn't help much. Korn III was yet another stab at that, and the general consensus there is that it was a shallow, uninspired attempt to recapture past glories (a take the band themselves agree with).
- The Path of Totality started it up again, with fan reactions to that record's then-new Dubstep sound being... mixed, to say the least. Critics, however, were relatively okay with it.
- This continued to occur for their single "Never Never", and many fans wondered if The Paradigm Shift would be any good. However, it seemed to have earned praise from many fans for returning to their Nu Metal roots.
- The MTV Unplugged album. Some fans felt the arrangements of the songs without pickups or distortion suited them and that it was a cool experiment with pleasing results. Others felt that acoustic Korn simply didn't work at all and the arrangements just made them even more awkward. Granted, the Unplugged format is an acquired taste to begin with.
- Are the band missing something without David Silveria's distinctive drumming style? Or is Ray Luzier a worthy successor? Expect to find this popping up in many, many comment sections.
- Ra Diaz. A worthy stand-in/likely replacement for Fieldy, or a soulless mercenary whose cleaner, more technical playing style completely misses the entire essence of what bass is supposed to be in Korn?
- Covered Up:
- Cameo's "Word Up".
- Also inverted: not by them; but the artists covering Davis' songs in Queen of the Damned.
- Common Knowledge: Despite what the name would suggest, "Daddy" is not about Jon being molested by his father; it was written about him being molested by his babysitter.
- First Installment Wins: "Blind", the first track of their debut album, lays in the number of Korn's signature songs.
- Their first album is still viewed by most as their best, being admired even by people who generally dislike the band and Nu Metal as a whole.
- Gateway Music: As with most nu-metal music, Korn's was a popular introduction to more traditional forms of heavy metal for many young metalheads in the 2000s.
- Heartwarming Moments: Less than a month after Jonathan Davis' estranged wife Deven had her fatal overdose, the band were booked to do some shows celebrating the 20th anniversary of Follow the Leader. Jon, trooper that he is, plowed through the shows anyway, and the final show ended with him being embraced by the entire band. It goes to show what a brotherhood Korn is.Jon: We love each and every one of you; we'll see you guys sometime real soon. I FUCKIN' DID IT!!!
- Hilarious in Hindsight: Their 1996 single "A.D.I.D.A.S." reads like an anti-product placement song with how it bastardizes the eponymous sportswear brand's name into a backronym for "All Day I Dream About Sex." Two years later, they'd sign an endorsement deal with none other than Adidas's rival, Puma.
- Memetic Mutation:
- "ARE YOU READY?!?" from "Blind".
- "Something takes a part of May," (a mishearing of "Something takes a part of me" from "Freak On a Leash") a sort of companion piece to *NSYNC's "It's Gonna be May" meme, frequently shared every April 30th.
- Misattributed Song: Pick a famous nu-metal song. Chances are at least someone out there thinks it's by them.
- Narm: Jonathan's lyrics are often criticized for their overly simplistic vocabulary, overuse of profanity and copious amounts of wangst, as well as his odd way of singing them.
- Nausea Fuel:
- The music video for "Right Now," which uses some of the more disgusting clips from the animated short series Lloyd's Lunchbox of the title character mutilating himself in various horrific ways. It ends with him pulling his entire skull out of his mouth!
- Then there's the video for their cover of "Word Up!", where the band members' faces are digitally superimposed onto dogs.
- Once Original, Now Common: Korn suffers pretty heavily from this. Their self-titled debut album was considered original at the time of its 1994 release as an earnest, raw, and commercial unfriendly take on Alternative Metal. Being a mix of alt metal, grunge, groove metal, funk metal, prog metal, and hip-hop, there was nothing like it before at the time. However, when it became a sleeper success, it spawned one of the most controversial genres in metal: Nu Metal. The countless nu metal bands (and even alt metal bands that weren't part of the genre) that were influenced by them and saturated the market led to them not seeming all that original to someone who hears their music later. In fact, many metal purists will deny how massively influential they were, or would otherwise say the music was a negative influence. This is despite the fact that they were more-or-less responsible for salvaging heavy metal music out of underground purgatory.
- Older Than They Think: The band decided to cover "Word Up!" for their Greatest Hits album because they had been playing it as a sound check for years.
- Retroactive Recognition: Aaron Paul played the main character of the "Thoughtless" video.
- Signature Song: "Freak on a Leash" and/or "Blind".
- So Okay, It's Average: Those who were not completely turned off by The Path of Totality generally feel that whatever value it has is largely the novelty of dubstep metal. One critic referred to it as sounding like "a remix album for which no original version exists."
- They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: The Path of Totality, which was mostly dubstep, drum 'n' bass and noise metal.
- Ugly Cute: The weird little baby creature from the "A Different World" video and the sadomasochistic man (aka Lloyd from Lloyd's Lunchbox) from "Right Now".
- Values Dissonance: In "Children of the Korn" and "Faget", Jonathan Davis grapples with childhood memories of bullies that accused him of being "gay". While those are harmless, cathartic Creator Breakdowns, it's not far-fetched to hear them as implying homophobia, considering Davis and Fred Durst toss such slurs at one another in "All in the Family". Or maybe Davis was just tactless about it; the video for "Hater" is dedicated to fans who sent the band accounts of their experiences of bullying, including a lesbian fan who briefly discusses her own gay-bashing, and Davis himself later stated that he hated "All in the Family" and refused to play it on Follow the Leader anniversary shows.
- Wangst: Once again, a common criticism of Jon's lyrics. Jon makes it very clear in many songs that he had a very rough life, so a lot of songs tend to be on the melodramatic side of things.
- Win Back the Crowd:
- The Serenity of Suffering surprised a lot of people, and while not a full return or praise of that of Untouchables, Life Is Peachy or even the self-titled album, it still garnered some impressed reactions, especially to those who were disappointed with past Korn albums.
- The Nothing has also garnered this to an even bigger degree than Serenity. Not only was it very well-received by fans both old and new - jaded or otherwise, it's even gone on to become the band's most critically acclaimed album by professional reviewers, after fan-favorite Untouchables held that title for 17 years.
