It’s saying something about a band when keyboardist Zac Baird, ‘session member’, gets more attention than the band’s guitarist, James “Munky” Shaffer, who plays a few notes throughout the whole thing and must have looked bored out of his mind. Here, it’s replaced with piano and the violin or cello arrangement, and you have to wonder if the band is actually trying to be aesthetically pleasing.
That, and the absence of their downtuned guitar assault.
Taking the anger out of Korn, as this show does, makes them look both limp and pitiful. The tortured music they’ve crafted for over ten years now is of more importance than their talent, their musicianship, and the members behind it. There have been a few exceptions, Nirvana and Alice in Chains coming to mind first here, and Korn wants to join them with their own performance, but just can’t. When it comes to the rock band, it’s no secret that MTV Unplugged can be sometimes nothing more than old men getting out acoustics to show that they can play them. No one can deny it’s an interesting idea, if done well, to show that the veterans of angry music are serious about their evolution, and it must be acknowledged that Korn can do it live: last year’s Live & Rare proved that. This tactic has worked, to an extent, in Korn’s favor, keeping their heads above the water while bands like Limp Bizkit crashed and burned ( The Unquestionable Truth, anyone?), and as the band started to turn their maturity obsession towards the acoustic guitar in another attempt to broaden their audience, we should have guessed it would be inevitable they would eventually go and give us an MTV Unplugged. Frontman Jonathan Davis is now 36 parental angst is probably no longer ideal for someone of that age. Since the departure of Brian “Head” Welch to Christianity, the band has desperately been trying to mature and outgrow the nü-metal stereotype they were until then credited with, perhaps realizing that they need to have something to show for the fact they’re getting older too. Over the last few years, the members of Korn must have had something of a guilty conscience.
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