Wellbutrin Turned Me Into A Korn Fan

At least, that's what I told myself.

I hate asking for help. Like, I actively avoid asking for help until I’m in a hole so deep that it threatens to leave me forever fucked if I don’t claw my way out. I’ve been like this my entire life, and it’s a tendency that has impacted my academic, work, and love life for as long as I can remember. My reluctance to show vulnerability contradicts my career of Being Vulnerable On Main, but it’s real, and it’s debilitating.

Even in widowhood, I’ve been hesitant to take up offers to help me out with tasks around the house or other errands because the thought of making it even more clear that I don’t have it all together is mortifying.

With these fears front of mind, I sat in the exam chair in my psychiatrist’s office earlier this month, and—in my roundabout way—I managed to ask for help. I admitted that I could never remember to take my second dose of Adderall, so I mostly gave up even trying. I told her I’ve been feeling stuck, like my head is trapped in those disgusting 1950s gelatin molds, floating in the aspic among cubes of ham and flecks of cabbage. I’m frustratingly self-aware enough to understand that I’m in the throes of self-sabotage but too paralyzed in indecision to do anything about it.

I find it so gauche to ask for meds, especially since my psych isn’t a pill pusher and because I’ve long been ambivalent over whether or not I benefit from psychiatric meds in the first place. But toward the end of our nearly hour-long conversation, she wanted to know if I’d be interested in trying the antidepressant Wellbutrin as a sort of off-label treatment for my inattentive ADHD. After she laid out the science and potential side effects, I figured it couldn’t hurt to give it a go.

It takes a while to build up in the body, and I might not know whether it’s working until weeks four through six. I’m about to enter week three and haven’t noticed much change yet.

I did have a hyperfixation on Korn that entire first week, though.

I assume most of my readers know about Korn, but for those who don’t… I won’t go into all that much detail; Google and Wikipedia are waiting for you with open arms. All you need to know is that Korn is a nu metal band that reached mainstream popularity in the late 90s and early 2000s. They’re best known for their hit “Freak On a Leash” from their massively successful, Billboard charting 1998 album Follow the Leader. And if you don’t remember the song, you might remember the memorable music video that came with it. The video debuted on MTV’s Total Request Live in February 1999 and soared to the number one spot on the pop-leaning program, beating out boy bands like Backstreet Boys and the Pop Princess herself, Britney Spears. “Freak On a Leash” was so popular on TRL’s countdown that it had the honor of being put into retirement. On top of all that, the video won a VMA for Best Rock Video (back when VMAs mattered), a Grammy for Best Short Form Music Video. As of today, it has 347 million views on YouTube.

Fun song. Great video. But Korn is not a band I think about. My memories of Korn are primarily held in the part of my brain that houses flashes of a world before 9/11, MTV on my dad’s old television set, cucumber melon scented body spray, and the mean boys in fifth grade who were really into skateboards and Blink 182. The only time I am ever forced to consider them is when they pop up on the Crazy Ass Moments In Nu Metal History Twitter account.

Which is precisely how all this shit started.

Then I looked up the “Freak On a Leash” video and started yapping about it…

And it didn’t take long before I searched for the music videos and live performances of Korn’s most popular songs on YouTube. I tried to listen to some of their albums and realized I couldn’t even get through 30 seconds of most of their songs, but I didn’t even care. I ended up listening to three of them—”Blind,” “Freak On a Leash,” and “Got The Life”—on a loop all night and into the next day.

I should have known something was wrong when I decided, after watching several live performances of “Blind,” that the live version is far superior to the studio version. I knew something was wrong when I decided to watch Korn’s hour-long Woodstock ’99 set at three am.¹

I tweeted about Korn approximately 20 times that week. Tweets include:

• What if I got a little emotional watching Korn play “Blind” in front of over 200k ppl at the shitshow that was Woodstock 99, what then? 🧍🏾‍♀️

• What does it mean if I watched Korn playing Blind at Woodstock 99 at least like 33 times in the last 72 hours?

• Me, still unironically korn posting: How is Jonathan Davis not even half Mexican?

• Queue’d up korn on the jukebox to celebrate the bills win

• It’s actually SO powerful to walk through the delancey st essex st station blasting Korn in your headphones.

I was a woman possessed. I even watched a 20-minute-long YouTube video of a voice coach reacting to “Freak On a Leash,” for fuck’s sake. What was going on?

There’s a good chance most of this is explained by the fact that I don’t have a typical nine-to-five. My only job right now is to write my memoir, and while I’ve made some progress on that front, I’ve found it very difficult to organize my days efficiently. Gelatin head only makes this worse, so I’m allotted ample time to think about a nu metal band at 4 am on a Tuesday when I should be sleeping.

This is what I would derisively call “jobless behavior.” But did starting Wellbutrin have anything to do with my new, short-lived obsession? I mean, both things began at approximately the same time.

(Yes, short-lived. After about a week and a half, I started to taper off from my need to watch Korn perform “Got the Life” at Big Day Out Festival 1999 a few times before I left the house. I reached post-Korn clarity.)

I Googled “Wellbutrin hyperfixations” and was met with disappointing results. Naturally, the only moderately helpful links sent me to Reddit, specifically r/adhdwomen. I read a post titled “Has Wellbutrin/bupropion made your hyperfixations worse?” It only received a couple of responses, both of which were deleted. Great. Other posts in the subreddit about Wellbutrin were all variations of the same question: “Do you use Wellbutrin for ADHD?” The comment sections were filled with people praising it as a miracle drug or calling it an absolute flop.

There were few mentions of Wellbutrin and hyperfixations, and certainly nothing of the nu metal variety. I’m left to assume that I have nothing and nobody but myself to blame for this Korn K-hole.

Nu metal is a funny genre. It’s maligned by the metal purists and is seen as a relic by everyone else, a product of a brief window in time when combining hard rock with some hip-hop influences was seen as cool, not cringe, and had a lot of mainstream hype. But by the early to mid-2000s, garage rock revival and emo became the rock genres du jour, and nu metal’s decline was steady from there.

I wasn’t a massive fan at its peak, but I did play the hell out of that first Linkin Park CD in sixth grade.

There’s been talk of a nu metal revival for a few years now, which might very well be happening, but I’ve only seen it in the form of Gen Zers getting into Deftones (taste). And, sure, there have been reassessments of the genre, which mostly boil down to, “Hey, were we too mean?” Maybe, but I can’t pretend that watching a white dude with dreads scat rap over a heavy guitar riff isn’t a little goofy. Listening to “Break Stuff” by Limp Bizkit rules when you’re in the mood to break stuff, but it’s also hard for me to take seriously.

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I appreciate the approach my buddy Kirk, who runs Nu Metal Moments, has toward it. His ethos is summed up in a shirt he sells that reads, “I love nu metal, it sucks.” It’s a point of pride to acknowledge the cringe and shrug it off. “Whatever, I like it anyway.”

But what struck me most from my weeklong Korn obsession was exposing myself to people’s earnest adoration for the band through YouTube comments.

YouTube comments under any music video or live performance are rife with people bloviating about how music today sucks or shit like “STILL WATCHING IN 2021.” But when you brush past all of that, you get some real human tenderness: People talking about how these songs made them feel less alienated in high school, reminiscing about being young and in the Korn pit at Woodstock ’99… And then there was this comment from a mom whose deceased son loved Korn in the comment section for “Got the Life”:

A mom in her 50s listening to some rap scatting white dudes with dreads to feel closer to her son who is no longer with us is incredible, actually.

My weeklong Korn era might not have been the result of taking an antidepressant—I honestly wish it was, it would be easier to explain to myself—but I’ve learned some valuable lessons: Korn can warm the heart, I really need to start going to bed before 4 am, and somehow Jonathan Davis isn’t Latino.²

1. Be warned that if you watch this, you’re going to see a lot of bare boobs.

2. I cannot be the only one who thought he was…