Y2K Kids Were the Last to Really Rage With No One Watching

When I stumbled out of my first concert in the spring of 1998, I couldn’t even hold up my head. My 17-year-old ears were buzzing and a trickle of blood ran down the side of my neck from a hoop earring that had been ripped out in the mosh pit where I had left every last scrap of my adolescent rage. Just months after the release of their defining album “Around the Fur,” I was already infatuated with the California nu metal band Deftones.

My mother picked me up from the Louisville brewery where they’d performed, two hours from the Kentucky town where I grew up. She was understandably shocked at the sight of me — and let me know it — but I couldn’t hear a word she said as we drove off.

As a fan of many nu metal, alt metal and industrial bands that reigned at the time — particularly Korn, Deftones, Nine Inch Nails, Tool and Rage Against the Machine — I’d go on to reclaim that sensation over the next few years. I felt baptized in the highly emotional music that candidly examined themes of misery, loss and alienation, feelings expressed in urgent vocals, guttural sounds, screams and growls.