Korn lead singer Jon Davis wrote the lyrics to "Freak On A Leash" about the music industry, which he compares to an owner walking a dog. While he's this freak being paraded around, corporate America is making all the money... and it's taking a part of him.
Korn's alloy of metal came into vogue in 1998 when the
Follow the Leader album - the band's third - was released. "Freak on a Leash" was one of just two singles from the set ("
Got The Life" was the other). The album was released in August 1998, but the "Freak" single wasn't issued until spring 1999. It bubbled under at #106 on the Hot 100 on May 1, which wasn't bad considering how few radio stations played Korn. The album, however, went to #1, selling over 5 million copies in America at a time when CDs were still selling for around $16. In a twisted irony, Korn's song about music industry exploitation enriched their corporate overlords.
The video, directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, won two MTV Video Music Awards, one for Best Rock Video and another for Best Editing. It features a bullet speedily traveling through scenes of children playing and in school, among other things. It was based on an old public service announcement about gun control.
Korn share songwriting credits, so the entire band are listed as composers. Brian "Head" Welch, who was their guitarist at the time, told Songfacts that the song came together quickly. "Korn's biggest singles came pretty fast like that," he said in
our 2013 interview. "We were just jamming and it kind of fell together."
Korn won their first Grammy for this song when it won Best Short Form Music Video of 1999. They won another Grammy three years later when "
Here To Stay" earned Best Metal Performance.
"Freak On A Leash" is Korn's most popular song, streamed more than any other and almost always in their setlists. Their next album,
Issues, was released in 1999 a little over a year after
Follow The Leader. It went to #1 its first week and spawned another very intense Korn klassic: "
Falling Away From Me." Korn deserves credit (or blame) for popularizing rap metal and paving the way for Limp Bizkit, which was huge from 1999-2001. Korn didn't put out their next album,
Untouchables, until 2002, when listeners looking for subversive music were more likely to find it with Eminem or Disturbed.
"Freak On A Leash" has a distinctive beatboxing bridge courtesy of Jonathan Davis. Actually, "scatting" or "vocalizing" is probably a better term for it, since he's forming words, just not real ones. He does something like this on several other Korn songs as well, including "
Balltongue," "
Twist" and "
Wicked."
A clean version of this song was issued as the A-side of the single and distributed to radio stations. The clean edit runs 3:46, while the album version is 4:15.
Korn had a big internet presence in 1998, when only about 25% of America was on the web. They didn't get much attention from traditional media, but there was no shortage of Korn discussion in AOL chat rooms and other forums. They leveraged this new media with a web series on korntv.com called "After School Specials" that took fans behind the scenes and showed them working on "Freak On A Leash" and the rest of the Follow The Leader album. A surprising number of fans were thrilled to watch the pixilated video and maybe have their questions (sent by chat) answered by the band. This was an example of how Korn made very strong connections to their fans. Even though they were selling millions of albums, they still seemed like outsiders who understood their nontraditional audience.
The cartoon in the beginning of the video was drawn by Todd McFarlane, who also made the video for "
Do The Evolution" by Pearl Jam.
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Suggestion credit:
Elliot - St. Louis, MO
Korn performed "Freak On A Leash" when they were musical guests on the November 19, 2005 episode of Saturday Night Live. They also played a newer song, "Twisted Transistor."
In 2006, Korn recorded a live acoustic version of this song with
Amy Lee of Evanescence for an MTV Unplugged special. This version was released as a single and charted at #89, besting the #106 showing of the original.
When Korn and Evanescence toured together in 2022, Lee would join the band on the song.
Although this is the second song on the album, on some versions of the CD it's listed as track 14. On these copies, the first 12 tracks are made up of a few seconds of silence each.
"Freak On A Leash" was used in commercials for Puma after the band signed an endorsement deal with the athletic outfitter. Korn's deal with Puma lasted just a few years: they signed with Pony in 2001 and later teamed up with Adidas.
The song is specifically about the exploitive music industry, but for Jonathan Davis, it runs deeper. "It's about how I feel like I'm a f--kin' prostitute," he explained. "Like I'm this freak paraded around, but I got corporate America f---in' 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. I'm not just talkin' about the record business. Everything's involved. I've lost something. I'm not all there anymore. I love what I do, but I wish I could have it all back. It's like the 'Peter Pan syndrome.' I wish I could still fly."
The song plays during a scene in the 2007 The Simpsons episode "Stop, or My Dog Will Shoot!" when Santa's Little Helper goes on a search for Homer in the corn maze. It also shows up in the 2015 movie Dope.
In the UK, a "maxi single" was released with five different remixes of this song. In addition to the album version, these are:
Dante Ross Mix (by Dante Ross and John Gamble)
Freakin' Bitch Mix (by
Butch Vig)
Josh A's Beast On A Leash Mix (by Josh Abraham)
Lethal Freak Mix (by DJ Lethal)
On October 28, 2022, Jonathan Davis launched his line of horror and rock-themed pet products. It was called, of course, Freak On A Leash.
