The song starts off with a brief instrumental intro as blood-red lighting turns the stage into a war zone. (Mudvayne donned psycho face paint on previous tours, but toned their image down this go-round.)If that doesn’t help, then here: I will describe to you a Mudvayne song, as performed live at Jaxx, “D.C.’s Euro Metal Club”, which shares walls with a kabob restaurant in a Northern Virginia strip mall:1. The Matchbox Twenty to System of a Down’s U2 and Tool’s Radiohead, Mudvayne is more brutal than Staind, less weird than Insane Clown Posse, closest to Slipknot in sound but minus the horror-flick face masks. Mudvayne generates mediocre metal/hardcore. Bo-ring.If you’re like I was a month ago, you’ve come to this review knowing Mudvayne’s name and genre, but not which songs the band is responsible for (“Not Falling”, “Happy?”), even though both have won a lot of airtime. Don’t get me wrong, the band is good at what it does - at points I did find some excitement - but what does it do exactly? Mudvayne churns out the same angst-ridden adrenaline-pushers that have been raging out of “alternative rock” stations since Limp Bizkit came on the scene a decade ago. It was, more importantly, Mudvayne’s brand of artless wham-bam: the band’s mind-numbing repetition, its near-total dismissal of sonic tension, its refusal to try anything fresh or innovative. You stop listening, start yawning.But it wasn’t just the mindless overuse of profanity that condescended. Your brain registers its intelligence insulted. But when “fuckin’s” are so overused as to lose their volatility, and when each unnecessary curse is punctuated by ponytailed fan-dudes roaring with approval I mean, enough is enough. I can concede, from time to time, to the redneck pronunciation of my favorite expletive. Gray, frontman of nü-metal kings Mudvayne, uses “fuckin'” and “fuck yeah, goddammit” as others use “like” and “um”. Our version wins every time.By these standards, then, Chad Gray is a fuckin’ redneck. See? The fricative “f” sound combined with the pairing of phonetic relatives “k” and “g” delivers a doubly seething curse, while the “g”-less, redneck approach leaves this choice expletive weak and incomplete. Then compare to its more frequently heard alternative, “fuckin'”, dubbed the “redneck version” by we who grew up around Confederate flag-bearers. While navigating the backroads of southwest Virginia some time ago, a friend and I concluded that the most incisive pronunciation of the adjective “fucking” clearly enunciates the ‘g’.
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