All quotes are from Jonathan Davis that I got from various interviews... Some songs have more than one quote or are just what i read.
KoRn
Blind - "Blind" is about Jonathan talking to his conscience and his conscience talking back.
Ball Tongue - "Ball Tongue" is about a guy they had to work with on a T-shirt. He either had a pierced tongue, a wart, or something on his tongue, and he was a dick to them.
Clown - "...This skinhead guy came up and started flippin' me off. When we started, I bent down and the guy took a swing at me. Our tour manager Jeff got into it and knocked the guy out. I wrote this song about him..."
Divine - Some guy trying to take a girl away from Jonathan and he was pissed off so he wrote this song.
Faget - "'Faget's about when I was in high school. I was a dirty looking kid, I wasn't in the in crowd, and all the jocks picked on me and called me a faggot. Now all these jocks are coming to our shows and I get to call them faggots. I get a kick out of it..."
"Everyone thinks I'm bashing gay people in this song, and I'm not. It's really about me going through high school being called 'pussy', 'queer', and all that stuff, about getting picked on by all these jocks."
"When I was at high school I was kind of a nerdy looking kid, cos I wasn't in the cool crowd with all the jocks I got called a faggot a lot. If you're not in the cool crowd you get picked on, so that song is my revenge song - cos now all those jocks who used to call me faggot come to our shows and jump up and down to 'Faget' and I just laugh at them."
"That was me being picked on at school. Yes, being called a queer and a faggot. 'Coz I was the New Wave kid who would go around wearing make-up and ruffled shirts and shit, and the kids didn't like that too much. They used to beat my ass and call me a faggot. Now all of those kids come to my shows, and I got the sickest revenge, 'cos I wrote 'Faget' and they wanna be my friends now."
Shoots and Ladders - "The lyrics are all from nursery rhymes, and a lot of nursery rhymes go back to the Middle Ages. They're actually pretty twisted if you know the stories behind them, like about Black Death and stuff."
Fake- This song goes back to when Jonathan experienced alot of Fake people in his high school.
Helmet in the Bush - "It's about a speed problem that I had. You know, you do a lot of speed, and if you're male, your penis retracts severely. Bakersfield is one of the meth capitals of the world. Speed takes your soul away - I'm trying to tell people that in the song."
"I was hanging around a speed dealer, and one thing led to another...I wrote 'Helmet in the Bush' about it. I was staying up. I had to. Two years later, I quit. I was going on tour, and you can't do that on tour. Speed takes your soul away."
Daddy - "People think Daddy was written because my dad fucked me up the ass, but that's not what the song's about. It wasn't about my dad or my mom. When I was a kid I was being abused by someone else and I went to my parents and told them about it. They thought I was lying and joking around, so they never did shit about it. They didn't believe it was happening to their son. I don't like to talk about that song, this is the most I've ever talked about it."
Life is peachy
Chi - "'Chi' is about a lot of alcohol and drug abuse, people turn to that when they have problems so that they won't have to feel their pain."
Lost - "It's the stereotypical thing about your best friend meeting a chick, and then you're nothing."
Swallow - "'Swallow' is about how I got fucked up when I did speed and got so paranoid that I'd see people staring in my window."
"That's about being paranoid. Drug-induced paranoia."
"That's about being paranoid on speed and drugs. I do speed every once in a while, but I don't deal with gross, stupid shit like heroin."
Good God - "It's about a guy I knew in school who I thought was my friend, but who fucked me. He came into my life with nothing, hung out at my house, lived off me, and made me do shit I didn't really wanna do. I was into new romantic music and he was a mod, and he'd tell me if I didn't dress like a mod he wouldn't be my friend anymore. Whenever I had plans to go on a date with a chick he'd sabotage it, because he didn't have a date or nothing. He was a gutless fucking nothing. I haven't talked to him for years."
"'Good God' is about a friend who took advantage of me all my life, made me do things I didn't want to do, and threatened me with his friendship. I basically ended up taking care of this kid forever, and he ended up fucking me over really bad. This is about that, then him coming back and trying to be my friend. He was a really controlling person and would put our friendship on the line if I wouldn't do things that he wanted to do. That kind of shit."
"'Good God,' that's about one of my best friends taking advantage of me and just totally ruining my life when I was little. I only had a couple of friends when I was really young and he was my best friend. He wouldn't hang out with me if I wasn't like him you know, that stupid little boy bullshit...I guess my whole life was fucked, called a faggot all my life and stuff, I wrote that about him."
Mr. Rogers - "'Mr. Rogers' was done when I was really fucked up on speed, and you know, I don't know if you know what speeds like, but you get in really crazy moods and your brain doesn't think right. I was totally obsessed with Mr. Rogers, and I had all kinds of videotapes and I watched them, and I was thinking about how little kids watch them. The shit that he teaches them, if you look into it deep enough, it's kind of really perverted and bad like Mr. McFeely, and it really scared the shit out of me. I just talked about how evil and demented this guy is. Now that I've sobered up, it's kind of stupid, but I can still get really deep and see how perverted it is. It's not a total childrens show."
"I fucking hate Mr. Rogers! When I was a little kid, Mr. Rogers is all 'You've got to be nice and be honest and be a good person.' Being that way as a kid, I got fucking picked on and I was a nerd. I never got anywhere. I always got shit on! So fuck you!"
"Wrote that about how I use to watch that filthy old man on TV, and he always told me to be polite, the things they tell you to do on TV, and all it did was get me picked on for being that way. It made me a good person, it was a contributing factor, but I fucking hate that man. Thanks, man, for making me polite and easy to take advantage of, and trusting everybody."
K@#$%! (Kunts) - "People think it's sexist, and it isn't. It's more me subconsciously bitching at all the women who've hurt me in my life. It's not about women in general, just those women who've hurt me. Initially, we wrote it to send out to American radio for a joke, because they always chop up all the other songs. So we were going to send this out as the first single to get people talking, and then follow up with a 'real' single seven days later."
"People are like saying I'm a women-hater and shit, but I'm not. Sure there are some women I hate, but there are also some men I hate. And that's what that song is about. I don't hate women."
No Place To Hide - "No Place To Hide" deals with Jonathan's anxiety about Korn's success.
Wicked- original version by ice cube. vocals covered by Chino Moreno. "Whenever the deftones were in the same place we were at...we would do it live.
A.D.I.D.A.S. - "The song stands for 'All Day I Dream About Sex'...It is about how big of a pervert I am. I have wanted to do a song called that ever since I was in school."
"It stands for 'All Day I Dream About Sex'. It's about how much of a pervert my ass is, and how I daydream about what a stud I am. But when it comes down to it, I'm a fuckin' pussy and I'm in there jacking off."
Lowrider - "Lowrider" was originally done by War, and Korn just covered it.
"We always played it before 'Shoots and Ladders' for the two years we were out. I always played it on bagpipes, and half the kids in the crowd would get it, and half wouldn't. So when we played in L.A. at the Palladium, the band decided to back me up and we just did it. It was fun to play, so when we went into the studio we recorded it. That's a fresh song, a classic, it's the perfect song for us to cover, it's us! It just kind of happened."
Ass Itch - "That was the last song I wrote, and I was so burned at writing out lyrics because everytime I write I get depressed because I start thinking about things, you know? So the whole song is about that. In the chorus it says, "Before day, my sun will be dying," it's because I put myself on the line all the time, and for what? Because it seems like next year people aren't going to be listening to it anyway."
Kill You - "It's about a relative I first met when I was 12. I fucking hate that bitch. She's the most evil, fucked-up person I've ever met in my whole life. She hated my guts. She did everything she could to make my life hell. Like, when I was sick she'd feed me tea with Tabasco, which is really hot pepper oil. She'd make me drink it by saying, 'You have to burn that cold out, boy.' Fucked-up shit like that. So every night when I'd go to sleep, I'd dream of killing that bitch. In some sick way I had a sexual fantasy about her, and I don't know what that stems from or why. But I always dreamt about fucking her and killing her."
"'Kill You' is about my step-mom, well actually my ex-step-mom, and how I fantasized about killing her all the time when I was little because she was such a bitch."
Follow the leader
It's On: "'It's On' is my shit peer pressure song. Me being so stressed out going out and partying. Everybody's just going 'Come on dude, it's on.' That's partying, it's alcohol, cocaine, women. All that wrapped into one. In the chorus I talked about why am I really doing this? It's all my fault that I'm doing this because all the alcohol, the booze, and the chicks do is just make it worse. They just rearrange all the problems in a different order that I can deal with at that moment."
Freak On A Leash: "One of the best titles I've ever heard for a song. That's my song against the music industry. Like me feeling like I'm a fuckin' pimp, a prostitute. Like I'm paraded around. I'm this freak paraded around but I got corporate America fuckin' making all the money while it's taking a part of me. It's like they stole something from me, they stole my innocence and I'm not calm anymore. I worry constantly."
Got The Life: "That's a song baggin' on myself. How everything's always handed to me. How I look up to God and don't want this anymore. Like I want something more out of life than all this, and I've got everything I really need but I sometimes don't like. I don't know how to explain it."
Dead Bodies Everywhere: "That was the song about my parents trying to keep me out of the music business. My father was in it and he knew how it was and I totally understand now that I have a son. I want Nathan to be a musician but I don't want him to go through the hell I went through. That's the same thing my Dad was doing. A lot of people can relate to it, because it's like the dads are wanting their sons to be football players and their sons want to be doctors or something. That peer pressure is like trying to make them something they're really not. And the Dead Bodies thing is like so I did it and all I got out of it was dead bodies everywhere and got all traumatized. Thanks a lot Dad, Mom."
Children Of The Korn: "That's the song that Ice Cube is on -- Cube came up with the title. I fed off of what he wrote, he was talking about growing up and puberty. Dictating what he can do, like how you gonna tell me how to live and who to fuck? And all this stuff. And I took that and in my stuff I was talking about being a kid always known as the fuckin' town faggot. It's funny how things change. That some of these people picked on me and all of a sudden look who's laughing now. Also, in another of the verses I talked about all these parents fucking hating me for what I do, saying I'm corrupting their children, but in turn these parents need to step outside of themselves and really listen to what I'm talking about. Then I think they can understand that they were kids before. They're just really quick to judge me. All the Children Of The Korn are all our Korn fans. All those kids going through that shit and feeling what I feel."
B.B.K.: "Big black cock! That's what I call a jack and coke. Those little glasses they serve in Europe and everything. That's what I named it, big black cock. And that's another song about me dealing with the pressures of this album and how I, you know, I'm trying to kill myself, but you know? Do I really want to kill myself? Things I'm just questioning myself. Most of this is self-structured."
Pretty: "It's a story about this little girl that came into the coroner's office when I was working there and she was fucked by her dad. She was an 11 month old little baby girl. Her legs were broken back behind her and he just fucked her like a toy doll and chucked her in the bathroom. It was the most heinous thing I've ever seen in my life and I still have nightmares about it."
All In The Family: "Fred was there after KornTV and we said, 'Let's do a song together. Hey man, let's go back and forth and rip on each other like an old school battle.' I don't know whose idea it was, I can't remember if it was mine or Fieldy's or Fred's, but we came up with the idea and we started writing and we worked on it together. I came up with some bags on myself for Fred to say. It was all in good natured fun."
Reclaim My Place: "This one is about the whole band and about all my life being called a homosexual. And then I became this big rock star in a band and I'm still called a fag even by my own band. So it's like I was fuckin' pissed off at them. It's like erase them all because I'm gonna reclaim my place and say hey, they owe a lot to me for what I did, and I owe a lot to them back. But, it still kinda sucks. I've never ever gotten away from that fucking 'fag' title, just because I'm a sensitive kinda guy, kinda feminine. It really sucks."
Justin: "Justin was the kid dying terminally with intestinal cancer. His last dying wish was to meet us and it really freaked me out. That threw a whole bunch of new kind of pressures on my head. That's really intense. Someone's gonna die and his last thing he wants to do is come hang out with us. So I truly just freaked out. It's like why would you want to meet me? What makes me so special? And in turn I talk about how I admire his strength and his life. I couldn't stare at him because he was so content he was gonna die. No one could look him in the eyes. I totally admire his strength. I wish I had it."
Seed: "That's all about the same thing again. Laying in bed in my hotel room, thinking about do I really need all this stuff? All this pressure on me? Because I'm a stressed out freak. It's about Nathan, it's about every time that I look into his eyes, I see myself how I used to be, innocent and stress free. I'm kind of jealous of it. It really sucks, I used to be that way. It's like I have to work so hard at this thing in my life. I have to become a stressed out freak. I put food on the table for my child. Every time I look in his eyes, I just see myself staring right back at my ass laughing. I was like care free, innocent as a child. It's really weird and I'm really jealous of it."
Cameltosis: "That's a love song. It's about women in general, women who hurt me. It's Tre's lyrics. He's going on about chicks and my chorus is like I'm so scared to love anyone and really let them in after I got hurt really really bad by a girl. I've let Renee in a little bit, to be honest, but I'll never be that in love ever again. That's what I'm saying, if you've loved twice, you're gonna get fucked, 'cause you usually do."
My Gift To You: "Renee always wanted me to write her a love song and that's why I called it 'My Gift To You'. I always had a fantasy of fucking her and choking her to death. I fantasize about what it would look like, me in her body and watching me do it. So it's like a really sick fucked up song. I love her so much, I want to take her out of this world. It's really strange. She used to leave notes on my pillow, like 25 ways she'd like to kill me. She's got this weird death fetish. We're kinda fuckin' freaky. She got it. She's all 'Thank you, that's kinda fucked up. I was expecting a fuckin' I love you, baby kinda song.' I'm all, 'No, you know me.' I mean, I can't do that."
Others
Proud - "It's about my parents and friends thinking I was a stupid little dumbass shit for quitting my job to join a band."
Sean Olson - "That song is really about being fucked over by friends or so called friends, and getting them back in the end."
