"Why does it feel like night today?
Something in here's not right today
Why am I so uptight today? Paranoia's all I got left"

This is not the text of a rejected ad for Prozac or Ativan; instead, this is how the debut album by Southern California quartet Linkin Park begins. On paper, these words seem earnest, dejected and desperate; on record, the overall attempt is to make them sear with blame. On paper, it sounds like the first day at a community college poetry workshop; on record, there's bloody spit shooting out with the words, a lunging forward of the torso, a complete bodily manifestation of disgust and rage, catharsis and breakdown.

At the same time, something in the delivery is just a little too WWF, a little too hot rod. You get the sense that the whole thing is all for show.

And that would make Linkin Park emblematic of nü metal bands everywhere -- they're a bunch of kids looking for a pass because they're screwed up, trying to trade in dysfunction for cool points. They're the sound of the Ritalin generation, all Eminem cadences laid over soaring choruses and hackneyed scratching; it's all so derivative, so by numbers, so strangely -- underneath it all -- eager to please that, like so many other times during my days spent listening to nü metal records, I feel ill at ease. Not because I was being rocked out of my skull but because -- there's no nice way to say this -- I'm embarrassed for them.

I'm not sure what this music is, but it's pretty fair to say that it's not rock 'n' roll. I mean, insofar as rock 'n' roll is a pose, maybe it is that, but nothing else. The horrible truth about nü metal is that it's all a pose. It's like watching a 9-year-old smoking a cigarette: awful, but so stupid you can only hope he learns something from it.

Things don't get any better with the single off their album -- at No. 5 on the Billboard modern rock chart after 27 weeks. (The album is platinum.) "One Step Closer" would have you believe, with its refrain of "one step closer to the edge and I'm about to break," that it's some nod to Grandmaster Flash's "The Message," some paean to a modern world where people no longer count.

Wrong. Scratch the surface, and the song depicts the same kind of garden-variety high school psychodrama you usually get from a good episode of "Boston Public": "I find the answers aren't so clear/Wish I could find a way to disappear." To hear Linkin Park tell it, these boys don't need to rock -- they need some Paxil.

Papa Roach, a Northern California band that has been around in some incarnation since 1993 and whose 15 minutes seem to be up -- a consequence of their overtly pretty-boy looks, perhaps, and the instant MTV overexposure that such a thing can cause -- struck a pose even more vulnerable than Linkin Park's camp-counselor-friendly antics. In "Broken Home," we find our hero going through the darkest hours of his parent's divorce: "I'm stuck in between my parents/I wish I had someone to talk to." What follows is some major riffage, followed by a curdling scream of "Bro-Kan-Hohm!"

It's hard to tell if Papa Roach are masters at trivializing what's easily one of the hardest things a kid can ever face, or if they just happen to be great at pastiche, at playing for cheap sentiment. Either way, as the song plays out, you can almost see the e-mails scroll across the bottom of the "Total Request Live" screen: "Carson, what's up? This is Scott from Champaign, what up dawg?!!! Can you play Papa Roach's 'Broken Home'? My parents fight and stuff, and like, Papa Roach are off the heezy. Thanx!"

I said it before, I'll say it again: I'm not sure what this is, but it's not rock 'n' roll.

Record companies have found a way to make the nü metal bands -- save for a handful of industry-committed titans like Bizkit -- as faceless and replaceable as they have made the hip-hop artists; if you don't believe me, in six months check for most of the names mentioned in this piece in cutout bins everywhere: Disturbed, Papa Roach and so on. To say nothing of the likes of Crazy Town, Incubus or Staind.

But if nü metal takes so many cues from hip-hop, hasn't anyone in its camp noticed how much the mainstream has squashed the life out of hip-hop? Hasn't anyone noticed how replaceable St. Louis rapper Nelly is? What makes these nü bands think that the same won't be true for them? Certainly no prevailing sense of originality; nü metal bands revel in their uniform sound and look (one interchangeable white boy in dreads or white G, one classic pot-smoking hessian, one S/M -- or Manson -- freak and the fat "ethnic" DJ). To most kids, one group is as good as the other.

The bands don't seem to get it, because a grandstanding pose that passes for something extreme or rebellious is still lingua franca for these bands. Check out this gem, from Fear Factory's "Shock":

"I will be the power urge
Shock to the system
Electrified, amplified
Shock to the system."

Dude, I got a shocker for you: You are the system. And you're as expected as rain. At this point, in a mass landscape of boy bands and pop stars, a hibernating underground that seems to at long last know better than to play the Man's game and significant exceptions like the post-grunge Creed, the milky Matchbox 20 and stalwarts like U2, nü metal bands are the only thing passing for mainstream rock music today.

But the record business is playing these kids instead of demo tapes. As Fear Factory would say, "Deeper into this abyss/Weighted down and sinking fast." They probably didn't have the music industry in mind, but it works. They're screwed.

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