Word: nu
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...sang pop ballads. After the Idol finale, interest in Aiken surged, and his startlingly sincere first single, This Is the Night, trounced Studdard's to become the best-selling single since Elton John's reworked Candle in the Wind. Modern rock radio, which is dominated by hip-hop, nu-metal and irony, was overwhelmed by a wave of requests and was forced to play Aiken's song. Rolling Stone put him on its cover and had to increase the print run to meet demand...
Sometimes dismissed as "hipsters" (a much maligned group with websites like www. hipstersareannoying.com to prove it), they're a discrete posse, ages 20 to 35, with their own set of cultural emblems. If preppies had Nantucket and duck decoys, this bunch has Los Angeles' Eastside, nu-new wave, vintage, Clarks (the shoes), Larry Clark (the director), hi-lo, po-mo, irony and iPods...
...Chino Moreno were a girl--and he'll probably take this the wrong way--he would be Christina Aguilera. The nu-metal that Moreno yawps as lead singer of Deftones is the masculine obverse of Aguilera's teen pop; both are gender-and age-specific modes of musical expression about sex, self-doubt and self-pity. Both tend to be pretty awful. But Moreno, like his Dirrty doppelganger, is perceived as being a cut above his peers, mainly because he can sing and occasionally because he can think...
...crisp hurricane of guitar, Moreno sings, "I get all numb/We're the same numb/And it brings our knees to the earth." It's not subtle, but then it doesn't objectify anybody, and it has a winner of a hook. That is probably the most we can ask of nu-metal...
What makes Deftones worthwhile and, yes, one of the better albums in the brief history of the genre is that it sounds fantastic. Loud-soft dynamics are a staple of nu-metal, but Deftones doesn't just shift mood and rhythm from song to song--sometimes heavy-handedly, as in the back-to-back placement of dissonantly named tracks Good Morning Beautiful and Deathblow. It does so within songs, and sometimes within bars. It takes a tight band to pull this off, even in a recording studio. Guitarist Stephen Carpenter and bassist Chi Cheng actually seem to like melody...