Where my man Keith relished the fantasy that metal once provided, Fear Factory and their kin make a huuuuge deal out of shouting over and over again, "This Is Reality!" -- in much the same way that my other man, Beavis, revealed to the world a few years back that he was Cornholio. Both claims have equal reservoirs of believability.

Here's another shocker: Women fare as well in nü metal as they do in its metal antecedents and gangsta rap. Which is to say, not very well at all. For all its props to hip-hop, the boyz of the nü don't give love to the ladies at all. Even where a guy like Tupac Shakur would try to make restitution for all his years of "bitch" this and "ho" that by making a nice song about his mama every once in a while, women are portrayed in nü metal as alternately "insane," "fucked up" or some other such nonsense. Everybody's doing it for the nookie, which, in the music of the Bizkit and their acolytes, appears to be little more than a strangely disembodied box to be displayed and humiliated at every opportunity.

That's why Kittie -- a quartet of ladies just out of their teens who pummel and scrape with the best of them -- makes my heart soar with glee. On their debut "Spit," the band brings a feminine touch to the mook revolution, and far from pansying it up with melody and harmony, the gals instead take their flair for drama and make something distinctly darker. (If only because the ninth-grade Satan death scream coming from a pretty girl -- shades of Linda Blair abound in the music of Kittie -- is that much scarier.)

Kittie, when it all comes down, are incredibly close to being a proper goth band. The dyed hair, the lipstick, the paleness -- each member looks like a different side of the actress Fairuza Balk -- will take you right back to that band you saw open for goth band Sisters of Mercy back in '88, right before you went preppy.

Still, even the ladies can't help using the nü as an airing ground for their most pedestrian residual adolescent angst, something that's seemingly beneath their abilities. Songs like "Do You Think I'm a Whore" and their single from a few months back, "Brackish," revel in a confounding game of low self-esteem, blame throwing and empty profanity that seems to be part and parcel of nü metal. The only thing separating Kittie from those girls that television host Maury Povich is always sending to boot camp is a record contract.

Disturbed, a Chicago quartet, is one of the newer entries on the mook mosh pile, and we can tell the band is serious because the singer is bald. These guys mean business. On "Voices" -- a single that just dropped off the modern rock Top 20 chart -- the boys squeeze sub-Metallica riffage into a funky little package that'd make the Red Hot Chili Peppers seem puny. "So, what's up ... I'm gonna make you do some freaky shit now/Insane, you're gonna die when you listen to me" is how my favorite part goes, and it'd be -- hey! -- disturbing if it, like, made any sense at all. By and large, the syntax of nü metal is a mess.

With song after song about uncertainty and confusion, after a while it becomes pretty clear that this isn't rock music, this is pantywaist bullshit about some dude's feelings. Was this really what Woodstock 99 was about? The confusion over how to be a man, over how to act in a schizoid society?

Puh-leeze.

In so much of nü metal, there's a nasal whine that on first listen seems to hark back to our most wonderful exemplars of insurgency down through the rock age: Bob Dylan, Johnny Rotten, Hank Williams Sr. But where these guys had something of a real bite back there where the nasal drip does ever flow, when Fred Durst does it, it's a minstrelsy of sorts: He's dying to create the old rock drama, the kind that really did make you wanna break stuff, instead of just a mutually agreed-upon soundtrack to break stuff to.

But here's the rub: It's not their fault. Can you really blame nü metal bands for cluelessly pumping up a rage that has no center? Can you truly fault them for living entirely without reference points? I don't know.

The guys in Papa Roach or Linkin Park grew up in a time when -- we must admit this now, as hard as it might be -- rock was groping around for a new relevance, and only finding it intermittently. Instead, it usually found gimmicks, and that's why Durst is famously as schooled in the work of Madonna and "Licensed to Ill"-era Beastie Boys as he is in the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Poison. The poor sonuvabitch, like the rest of his generation, had to take it where he could get it.

But I do know this: We should not blame Marilyn Manson for nü metal, nor should we poke the finger at the Beasties, Rage, the Peppers, NIN or even the Wu. Instead, maybe we should blame Glenn Frey, as well as every other piece-of-shit rock star who disappointed these kids in the '80s when they were so desperately needed. Because of such an oversight, all these kids make the music such a broken house of blues might dictate: confused, enraged and laden with a self-pity that, if you're not careful, you just might mistake for sincerity.

These kids aren't just faking the funk; they're faking the rock. And it's hard to tell which is worse.

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