First, a qualifier: What is nü metal? In reality, nü metal barely exists -- in fact, nothingness is a popular theme among nü metal bands. Not to put too fine a point on it, but if it chug-a-chugs with the big hairy guitars, makes a stop-starty sound over and over, yarls or does the ninth-grade Satan death scream (alternating with busting a Caucasoid rhyme from time to time) and has some wack DJ scratching and interjecting his best Chuck D "Yyyeah!" every so often, it's probably nü metal.

For some time after Kurt Cobain and before the Wu-Tang Clan, the metal world woke up with a massive headache from the sickly-sweet pop tendencies of grunge and realized that right under their noses, directly in their bright blue-light ray, not men but total fucking pussies were in their domain. And what's more, dude, Judas Priest frontman Rob Halford was a fuckin' homo!

No more.

Enter nü metal, that genre of bands who have distilled their shared history and now wide-ranging influences into a white-hot form that doubles as aggravated assault, intent on expressing one emotion: anger.

But at what?

Honestly, dude? It's totally obvious: yer fucken mom and dad. Or so it seems. What else could incite the blinding rage about ... well, nothing that so informs the nü-est of nü metal?

And so, to prove my hypothesis -- that the whole world has gone c-r-a-z-y that this shit is actually in the mainstream now -- I did what no one in America over 13 years of age has the patience (or time) to do: I sat down for a good hard listen to the country's most popular nü metal albums, poring over the cover art, getting that nasty headphone sweat over my ears and, perhaps most important, perusing the lyric sheets.

Boy, is my sense of irony tired.

In the absence of Nirvana -- and just about every other good band that, for one reason or another, imploded and failed to produce decent singles during the latter half of the '90s -- nü metal has done well with the seemingly always-fledgling modern rock radio format. This, in a lot of cases, might cause some of the bands mentioned here to be identified as the new sound of what was called alternative music.

But make no mistake: There is nothing alternative about it. You can't swing a dead freshman these days without running into this sub-Bizkit band or that one. In fact, the influence of Limp Bizkit throughout just about all of modern rock these days is nothing short of epidemic; it's not even worth quibbling over what exactly lead singer Fred Durst and the boys are angry about. Take one listen to their last record, one look at MTV News, and it's obvious what's pissing off Durst: playa-hatas, charges of inciting riots, attorney bills and bitchy pop starlets. In so many ways, Durst is not a whit different from Puffy Combs.

What's far more interesting -- and telling about what makes these bands resonate with the kids -- is looking into what the lesser bands are on about, what's propelling these more or less anonymous working bands, each one more angsty than the other, onto the charts for their brief spell.

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What would my high school friend Keith make of the fact that the umlaut in nü was not in tribute to the glammy days of metal yore but, of all things, irony? (Irony had not played too well in metal prior to, say, 1998, unless it was the punk-metal Anthrax.) What would he make of the fact that Durst, definitively the biggest star in the nü metal world, tried to rap?

And what about all the anger? Could Keith's well-adjusted -- if admittedly somewhat closeted -- mind have handled that? Who or what can incite such anger? Beyond that, if kids today are supposed to be so smart and media-savvy, why can't they see through all this showbiz rage and know that they're being played by bad poets, overweight DJs and clueless hessians? As the Minutemen, an angular punk band that very well may have made the world ready for Primus, a zany, thrashing funk band that arguably could have paved the way for the Bizkit, would have asked, What makes a man start fires?

When it comes to cover art, the influence of the movie "Se7en" on nü metal cannot be underestimated; so much of the imagery -- be it CD packaging or videos or promotional material -- depicts a rustic world of science and higher learning gone horribly awry. Using calm colors and clinical typefaces, the imagery of nü metal tells us that there's a new face to the rock gore endemic to metal since its birth; where Gene Simmons of Kiss once spit blood and fire, nü metal swells and hemorrhages internally, trading the horror movie for the museum of medical oddities, where alien emotion matches up perfectly with alien body parts.

So much of nü metal all but quotes the greats of goth and industrial, and it doesn't even know it. That deep, dark, satanic yarl? We used to call that Scraping Foetus Off the Wheel. The dust-blown trench coat pose with the imposing guitar arpeggiation? The Mission UK.

Also, there are very few proper nouns in the lyrics. Nü metal avoids specifics like a politician who knows he's not saying anything anyway; why indict someone who might be listening? Time was, metal lyrics were divided into two distinct camps: Comic Book Blood 'n' Guts (images of hell, war, apocalypse and so on) or Comic Book Goodtime Poo-Say (Motley Crüe, Poison et al.).

In nü metal, it's all he said, she said, you, me and, ad infinitum, I. It's not a far cry from the singer/songwriter histrionics of the '70s, only all the other cultural signifiers try to point out what big balls this stuff has. If you're not convinced that this is the case, well, you're on to something.

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