The extended universe of nu-metal in 2000 included rapping clowns, rappers who wore clown makeup, clowns who did not rap but used turntables and wrote lyrics about Chuck D, and rappers who sounded like Chuck D and vehemently denied using turntables. Two of the genre’s most iconic songs were named “Nookie” and “Freak on a Leash.” It was deemed an evolutionary merger of hair metal and hip-hop, and yet, if there’s any unifying factor in what came to define the state of popular rock in the second Clinton term, it’s that no one seemed to be enjoying any of it.
Nu-metal was angry music—some of it sourced from childhood trauma and the despair of rural and suburban America outside the so-called monoculture; some of it sourced from the toxic masculinity ingrained in that monoculture. Yet, this was the music that moved millions of units during a prosperous time for the music industry. It also created a context where Deftones could make an album about sex, drugs, and druggy sex that cemented their reputation as rock’s most unmarketable weirdos.
White Pony may have transcended the dubious genre by fashioning a truly new form from post-hardcore, industrial, trip-hop, shoegaze, ambient electronics, and synth-pop. But Deftones were once undoubtedly rap-metal. What’s more rap-metal than lead singer Chino Moreno dropping in on Korn’s 1996 album Life Is Peachy to help cover Ice Cube’s “Wicked.” In both chronology and sound, Deftones’ 1995 debut Adrenaline was stuck between stations: not quite rap enough, but somehow missing out on the inconceivable moment when stone-faced post-hardcore acts like Helmet and Unsane were the subject of seven-figure bidding wars. Deftones’ sophomore bow, 1997’s Around the Fur, had no real bars, per se, but its aggression and imagery played just as well at Warped Tour, Ozzfest, skate parks, mosh pits, and other places where metalheads and hip-hop fans tangled dreads.
The sonic genesis of White Pony came from Around the Fur’s second single, “Be Quiet and Drive (Far Away),” which was nothing short of nu-metal’s “There is a Light That Never Goes Out.” Not only was it the first indication of Moreno’s fatalistic romanticism, but it was also the band’s first embrace of outright melody; it’s the closest thing to a classic Smashing Pumpkins song to come out in the same year as Adore. Critics took notice—it was chosen as SPIN’s No. 12 single of 1998—but it never stuck on radio and as a total outlier on Around the Fur, it was an obvious fork in Deftones trajectory. Going further down that path would mean courting tastemakers who would likely still snicker at the name “Deftones,” but it also left them without an easily identifiable target market.
It’s easy to see things from the perspective of Maverick—the band’s label at the time—when Moreno, bassist Chi Cheng, guitarist Stephen Carpenter, drummer Abe Cunningham, and turntablist/synth player Frank Delgado turned in the masters for White Pony in 2000. The concept of mixing nu-metal with new wave wasn’t entirely original—after all, Orgy scored a major hit with a cover of “Blue Monday.” But despite its sharper dynamics, louder vocals, glossier production, and a wealth of earworm choruses, White Pony was still not as obvious as playing New Order songs in drop-D.
White Pony debuted at No. 3 with over 117,000 copies sold—enough to earn the top spot on Billboard in any given week in 2017, but the kind of numbers that led to a stern talking-to from the label in 2000. “I remember [Maverick] sitting me down and pointing [out that] Papa Roach and Linkin Park had sold six million albums while [White Pony] hadn’t sold a tenth of that,” Moreno recalled in a 2010 interview. Even though Moreno had spent the past three years trying to prove to skeptics that he and Fred Durst had nothing in common, his immediate reaction to Maverick’s needling betrays his rap-metal roots: “First, I wanted to stick this idea up my ass.”
Lead single “Change (In the House of Flies)” could most accurately be described as a heavier version of “Be Quiet and Drive (Far Away)”—they tuned their guitars lower and played at a slow grind, and Moreno’s lyrics were more inscrutable and unsettling (“I took you home/Set you on the glass/I pulled off your wings then I laughed”). “Change” was a deeper, darker shade of rock, but not heavy in a way that was going to move major units in 2000.
Maverick didn’t hear a second single, which was a self-fulfilling prophecy given their unwillingness to release one for nearly eight months after “Change” peaked at No. 3 on Billboard’s Alternative Rock chart. “Pink Maggit” is the last song you’d consider for a single, seeing as how it’s the last song on White Pony, seven minutes long, and the drums don’t come in until it’s nearly halfway through. (It is also titled “Pink Maggit.”) But Maverick thought there was something to the chorus—“’Cause back in school/We were the leaders”—and given how directly benchmarks like “Last Resort” and “One Step Closer” spoke to the high school outcast, the wheels at the label began to turn.
This is how the song that defined White Pony—and Deftones’ career for the next several years—isn’t even on the record. “They asked me to rewrite [“Pink Maggit”] as a three-minute song,” according to Moreno. “They kept hounding me about it, so I was like, ‘Watch this.’” The new version was written in a day, and Paul Hunter was hired to direct the ensuing video, a savvy move given how his clips for Eminem and Dr. Dre dominated the summer and those two never had much trouble infiltrating rock audiences. Deftones were afforded all of the financial and promotional firepower that could be mustered by a booming major label in 2000, and Maverick decided, in their infinite wisdom, that White Pony was best served by a video treatment that amounts to Never Been Kissed scored by Fred Durst. It stalled at No. 27.
Time has been about as kind to “Back to School” as it has been for Fieldy’s haircuts or Wes Borland’s eye contacts, but the rationale behind its creation makes it an unintentionally perfect appendix to White Pony. Moreno made this song out of spite, wanting to be contrarian while seeking the approval of authorities and popularity amongst his peers. For all of their heightened ambitions, for all of the infusion of cash and drugs, Deftones crucially but quietly maintained the same shitty, relatable, adolescent emotions that fueled Adrenaline—I mean, there’s a song here called “Teenager.” Deftones never come off as too cool for school—an indispensable quality for a band if they’re gonna record while living on houseboats in Sausalito. They sing about partying with strippers and being abducted by aliens and riding in cars with Tool’s Maynard Keenan without ostracizing their diehard fanbase.
At the very least, “Back to School” proved that Deftones were impressionable, enthusiastic, and willing to follow even their most dubious ideas to fruition—Chino Moreno made a trip-hop album in 2006 and a witch house album in 2014, each at least five years beyond its genre’s sell-by date. Their influences and interests were scripted onto their work like stickers on a Trapper Keeper; the title of “Feiticiera” was “some Portuguese name I read in a magazine and liked,” whereas “Pink Maggit” was taken from a random shot at Nas taken by Kool Keith on his first Dr. Dooom album. Given the eventual fate of “Pink Maggit,” it’s ironic that the line itself mocks Nas as a sellout for agreeing to an elaborate and expensive video treatment.
White Pony is the most coherent and novel expression of Deftones’ varied influences. The band’s covers of Sade’s “No Ordinary Love” and the Smiths’ “Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want” date back to 1995, around the time when Deftones were defined by the aggro hooks of "Bored" and "7 Words" ("suck, suck, suck, suck, suck, suck/they fuck with my head"). When they compiled all their covers on 2005’s B-Sides & Rarities, they proved to be true believers in MTV and alternative rock radio, providing something a little-left-of-the-dial that won’t leave you completely exiled from the center. You never have to guess what Moreno likes about these songs; the cruel swing of Drive Like Jehu and Jawbox’s “Savory” is the instrumental basis for “Feiticiera” and “Knife Prty,” while Moreno’s vaporous, seductive vocals draw heavily from Cocteau Twins and the Cardigans.
But of all the influences that came to the fore on White Pony, none was more crucial than cocaine. Deftones had always been a party band, recording Around the Fur while living and getting fucked up together in a Seattle apartment complex. Fur sure sounds like a weed album—the pinched snares, rubbery bassline, and bloodshot vocal EQ’ing underlying “My Own Summer (Shove It)” are the raw elements of a dub song.
Meanwhile, White Pony was made in a studio once occupied by Fleetwood Mac during Rumours. Moreno called it a “cocaine concept album,” though the “concept” part seems redundant. Plenty of the album’s sonic details make its intentions clear—the neck pick that brings in the final chorus of “Digital Bath” bursts like a ruptured vessel, “Knife Prty” is bisected with blood-curdling, otherworldly shrieks from Rodleen Getsic and turntablist Frank Delgado’s contribution to “Korea” has the uncanny resemblance to the sound of a credit card trying to scrape the last caked-on line from a mirror. That song, in particular, lays Moreno’s obsessions bare and captures White Pony in all of its grimy debauchery: “strippers and drugs and [explitive]" he told the Washington Post in 2000. The main riff of “Korea” is an atonal cluster of notes, it’s impossible to replicate Moreno’s verse melody on piano and the bridge is engineered for a mosh pit. Every song feels overlayed with a blindingly white sheen.
Where most DJs in the nu-metal era were relied upon for the occasional wiki-wiki scratch or looking cool in the video, Delgado was instrumental in the world-building of White Pony: a constant, hollowed-out whoosh pervades “Digital Bath” like the immediate, incapacitating rush of the first hit, while he scatters abrasive percussion in the margins of “Rx Queen” like empty beer bottles and pizza boxes. Drake, the Weeknd, and Future have defined pop in the new decade by plumbing the spiritual void of the VIP lounge, but White Pony is the exact opposite, fully embracing newfound decadence as an escape from misery, the high life always the solution rather than the problem. The hook on “Digital Bath” succinctly expresses White Pony’s spiritual ethos: “I feel like more.”
The rock star clichés that accompany coke-induced bloat would come later—Deftones were fined $1 million for turning in their 2003 self-titled album late, while 2006’s Saturday Night Wrist found Moreno struggling terribly with weight gain and writer’s block, hounded by label-funded song doctors and swapping out producers ranging from Dan the Automator to Bob Ezrin. But on White Pony, Deftones liked the drugs and the drugs liked them. Moreno strove to write about something other than his own experiences, a way of separating the band from their autobiographical past work as well as the subject matter of their nu-metal competition which Moreno mocked as “me, myself and I.” When asked where most of his songwriting ideas came from, Moreno bluntly answered, “drugs.”
“It was probably five in the morning—we were still up partying—and I just pictured this whole scenario of having this girl, bringing her downstairs and taking a bath and like, out of nowhere, just reaching back and . . . electrocuting—basically throwing some kind of electrical device in the bathtub and then taking her out of the bath and drying her off and putting her clothes back on.” This was Moreno’s origin story of “Digital Bath” during an extensive and not altogether flattering interview from 2000. “Knife Prty,” the most elaborate and exotic track on the album, was inspired by an actual dance party on their tour bus with Abe Cunningham’s cutlery collection. Moreno said, “I made up this fake scenario of some kind of underworld society of knives, people who just get off on these erotic fantasies.”
White Pony explicitly indulged in BDSM, blow, and bloodsport while making good on the original promise of nu-metal to revitalize rock by separating it from classic rock canon. “The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin—those bands haven’t influenced us in any way,” Korn bassist Fieldy told Chuck Klosterman. “Nobody in the band ever listened to that stuff. Our musical history starts with the Red Hot Chili Peppers and early Faith No More. As a band, that’s where we begin.” For Deftones, it was Faith No More and Primus. “I always thought that Northern California had all the integrity,” according to Cheng.
On the other side of the U.S., the Strokes and White Stripes were bringing their version of sex and drugs back to rock’n’roll. Of course, New York’s “New Rock Revolution” recodified the de rigueur critical theory that Velvet Underground, Television, the Ramones, and, of course, New York City were at the center of the universe. For all of the legitimate criticism of nu-metal’s dopey lyricism and intolerable misogyny, there was always a rather blatant, though underlying classism that often came with it; these bands emerged from Des Moines, Memphis, Jacksonville, and some of the most unglamorous parts of California’s interior. Nu-metal was also a welcoming arena for musicians of color, though it was mocked as suburban white-guy music by no less of an authority on the subject than Ben Folds.
It’s understandable for Deftones to run from their rap-metal past, but it allowed White Pony to be seen for what it is—a model of personal evolution that was aspirational and relatable compared to what came next. The Strokes attended Swiss boarding schools, Julian Casablancas’ father ran a modeling agency, and Interpol showed up in suits on their very first day. Meanwhile, here’s Deftones, who, at least until the stylized vampirism of White Pony, didn’t strike an image of cool or even conventional anti-cool. They were five skateboarders from Sacramento with dreads and risible facial hair, inspired by bands that critics reliably misunderstood—the early work of the Cure and Depeche Mode had about as much credibility as nu-metal.
