Never Settling For Second-Best

06/24/1998 1:47 PM, Yahoo! Music
J.R. Griffin

Some of my favorite things are in second place: Portland, David Letterman, Orange County, my little league baseball team. When you're second place, you try harder. A television commercial that I can't fully recall told me that once, and as I was chatting with Deftones guitarist Stephen Carpenter, I couldn't help but remember that concept. Because, as far as the rap-rock genre of "Adidas Rock" goes, Sacramento's Deftones have been, well, numero dos to their buddies in Korn. The two bands got their shot at grabbing mainstream attention at about the same time, Korn wound up the one that received a loin's share of the attention, nailed a gold record and ended up on Lollapalooza. The Deftones, after the release of their debut, Adrenaline, were always the runners-up, suffering from the identity crisis of always being Korn's little friends, never quite getting their own piece of that hype.

That's when irony stepped in. Korn's follow-up, plagued by the band's own out-of-control hype and wound up in bad nursery rhymes and strange sexual perversions, fell victim to the worst musical clichés of all: the sophomore slump. The Deftones, however, struggling in their second-place notoriety, got in the faces of the fans and toured nonstop until they surfaced with Around The Fur, one giant leap for hardcore kind that crossbred intense rock/ rap passion with pop levity.

But I should stop with these comparisons. Carpenter would have my head for it.

"We're constantly associated with Korn because we're friends with them. Well, we are friends of them. But we didn't get together because we wanted to sound like Korn. We didn't get to where we are because we're homeys of Korn," says Carpenter.

As if being overshadowed by Korn wasn't enough, the Deftones had to constantly deal with the armies of Korny-Deftoney soundalikes that were popping up in every city the guys visited. Carpenter sighs, "We get a demo of a Korn band at every show we play."

But don't think the guys to be arrogant jerks. While touring for Adrenaline, the Deftones developed a reputation of being somewhat the snobs because they worked to distance themselves from the scene growing around them. But now, Carpenter explains it was all a defense mechanism to retain the little band identity they did have.

"We just don't want to be lumped into this chunk of music that's going on. We didn't create this band two years ago to get popular with all of these bands that are popular right now. We've been doing this for 10 years now," says Carpenter. "There's just so much of the same stuff that's going on right now; the media is making it a competitive thing like who's better and who's been doing this and that. And none of us want to do that. We just want to do our own thing and that's it."

The Deftones' own thing is an exhibit of sheer skater-punk aggro-ness and bottomed-out bass balanced by slightly psychedelic obtuse guitar strains. Whereas the rolling bass line of a song like "My Own Summer (Shove It)" easily allows singer Chino Moreno to vent all the requisite rage, a tune like "Be Quiet And Drive (Far Away)" has an almost emocore vibe not unlike Fugazi or Quicksand.

Around The Fur is a respectable album in a genre that's been all but ignored by radio and MTV and has won most of its fans through live gigs. In fact, the Deftones--sick of the imitators and sick of being second-best--just may be the band to bring such post-metal rumblings into the ears of the mainstream. "I was telling people, as we were finishing this album, that this is probably the heaviest pop record that's going to come out this year," says Carpenter. "Anyone else would listen to it and say, 'That's too heavy to be pop.' But it is. It's right there. It's basically sitting there in the hands of the mainstream, just waiting for them to embrace it, to catch up."