Much was said recently of Deftones frontman Chino Moreno‘s comments earlier this year regarding how the band tried to escape the nü metal genre back in the day by avoiding playing with bands like Korn and more. The creative team behind Banger Films, who put out the 2011 metal genre docu-series ‘Metal Evolution‘, went back to their archives and earlier today (June 27th) uploaded the following raw footage of their 2010 interview with Moreno that was shot for that series.
In it, Moreno expressed much of the same viewpoints he recently came under fire for from some corners of the metal world. Speaking on if the band felt like they were part of the nü metal scene during its initial breakout, Moreno replied:
“A lot of the press wanted us to—you know obviously they put us in the category [of nü metal.] Our first instinct was just to kind of it push it away ’cause you know to me when they called it nü metal for one, I was like well if it’s nü, you’re putting the word new in it, it’s gonna be old in a couple years.
And then again it’s hard for us to get… You look at these other bands and there’s some great bands in that movement—or whatever it was. But to each was his own. I always felt like we were our own kind of thing and we weren’t put together under any kind of preconceived thoughts of what we were gonna be. We just are who we are, so I wanted to be Deftones. I didn’t want to be a part of this other thing.”
When asked about how he felt about being categorized with Limp Bizkit during the nü metal heyday, he offered:
“I used to hate it, you know? I think people were gonna do it anyways. But yeah, I used to… We did a lot you know? And I think we hurt a lot of feelings in the meantime, because we turned down so much stuff with Korn and Limp Bizkit at the time—I don’t think a lot of people knew that.
They’re our friends obviously, we’ve known them for a lot of years. And they’d ask us like ‘Hey, you wanna go on tour?’ and we’d be like ‘Nah…”. And it wasn’t because we thought we were better, but we wanted to… Especially, for instance when our record first came out, “Adrenaline” came out, Korn‘s first record was already out for like a year I think
So, people were calling us like ‘baby Korn‘ when we first came out and I was boggled by that, you know what I mean? And right away that just made me want to separate myself even from them more. It was kind of tough back then. Now I don’t really care, whatever.”
He further said Limp Bizkit‘s success:
“Here’s another story, I remember we got asked to do this Spring break thing and, it was like a Spring Break, some MTV Spring Break thing. We declined it. We were like at the time… I think “Around The Fur” was out for a minute and we turned it down and we were just like… we’re not really a Spring Break brand I guess.
And Limp Bizkit ended up doing it and that’s when they… I remember watching it and I remember the weeks and months following them just exploding. I remember us going like ‘alright, well what do ya do?’…”
