there's not much i listened to as a kid that i'd claim i "grew out of". conversely, i think i grew up so fast that it's acted as a handicap on my social skills. it's hard to relate to your peers when you....can't relate to your peers. that makes it very hard to live, generally, whether the topic is getting along with people at work or trying to network academically. as a teen, i wasn't able to relate to much of what was marketed to me because it all seemed so vacuous and childish. so, i mostly spent the mid 90s exploring music from the 80s that people ten or fifteen years older than me were into. the little bit of contemporary rock music i did like is largely looked at as classic rock at this point, leaving me with little to really be actively embarrassed about. but, korn is the one glaring exception of something i cannot understand why i liked, but did like, and did connect to, despite being mostly appalled by it now.
nor can i think of much of anything else that i dropped so quickly or comprehensively. billy corgan hasn't done anything i actually like since roughly 2000, but i still check out his new releases. in contrast, i haven't heard a new korn record since "follow the leader". like, honestly. a song here or two, sure, but haven't bothered to sit down and listen to a full record. it was almost like i had some kind of epiphany: this actually sucks. there's literally no trace of korn in anything i recorded after about 1997.
there is, however, a noticeable guitar influence in my earliest demos. it doesn't come entirely from korn. nirvana did the same kind of riffing, as did white zombie. i'd learn later that it ultimately comes from swans, mostly via melvins and/or black flag. at the time, though, in my fifteenth and sixteenth year, it was those three sources that defined the chugging style: korn, nirvana and white zombie.
there's a secondary influence in the flanging, but that itself is more reasonably pulled out of something like nin, specifically the fixed ep.
(relevant tracks: fire, several tracks on the first two punk/emo/industrial/noise demos that are available at bandcamp but are not uploaded to youtube)
