Rockstar hair and the art of clickbait

As 12-year-old Tye Trujillo fills in for Korn’s bassist, the Internet goes OTT with the headlines

Every now and then, metal makes it to the mainstream news. The same old clichés are still pretty evident — that it’s for the boorish, unintelligent lot who like to pump their fists and shove each other around.

With the case of nu-metal, the urge to call it music for the boneheaded goes a level deeper. So when one of the genre’s earliest leaders, Korn, announced via Facebook that they were roping in 12-year-old Tye Trujillo to join them on their run of South American shows, there was a lot to read into for not just metal press, but international media and social media as well.

Tye is the son of Metallica bassist Robert Trujillo. While there are “unforeseen circumstances” that caused Korn’s founding member and bassist Fieldy aka Reginald Arvizu to step out of the tour, a 12-year-old replacement — albeit with his own band — was certainly a bold move for Korn.

Going by the video footage from their first show in Bogota, Tye is fitting in just fine, flashing a living-the-dream smile on stage and windmilling his hair as he digs into the breakdown on songs like ‘Right Now’. Meanwhile, fans have been reacting with amazement to intrigue to humour to the Korn update. One of the first jokes to emerge talked about how Korn songs were easy enough for a 12-year-old to play.

As with anything that breaches a certain level of viral-ness, news publications weren’t far behind on picking up on the scent, scouring the first search results on Google and just running with the story. There were entirely different angles in the headlines, with nearly a majority of them making him ‘Korn’s new bassist’ when he’s only, at most, a supersub. When you’re misrepresenting right from the headline, it’s probably best not to get on with the rest of the story.

Vogue — who probably never covered Korn before — noted that Tye had “talent and the ultimate rock-star hair” and proclaimed that he will be “shaking up the beauty aesthetic of Korn”(!)

Us Magazine was equally careless in calling Tye the new bassist for Korn, but also made it obvious that they thought he got the gig because of his father’s clout.

Then, of course, were the writers who were ready to take this as an opportunity to say Tye was the best thing to happen to Korn, painted as a failing, has-been metal band. If you heard their 2016 album The Serenity of Suffering , then you know that Korn only got angrier and more primal than ever before, and sold over 100,000 albums in the US.

So when Mashable was happy to take a dig and note to their readers that “Korn still exists” in their article’s headline, you know they’ve mastered the art of click-bait. And lo, the rest of the headline alluded to his Metallica dad and crammed in “has amazing hair” in a three-deck headline. Talent? Well, that only gets a mention in the last line. Another website, Fatherly, posited how a 12-year-old would get along with “40-something former-MTV staples” (because MTV is still apparently relevant) by hoping there’d be a PlayStation 4 console on their tour bus.

As for the metal publications – Blabbermouth and Loudwire, two among the most-read by metal diehards – explained entirely in their headline that Tye was standing in for Fieldy, genuinely noting the founder-member’s importance in the band. While Blabbermouth dug up a great quote by Robert on his son, Loudwire elaborated why Tye was a good choice, for his experience playing with his band, The Helmets at festivals like Kidzapalooza in Chicago.

In true metal style, however, Blabbermouth noted Tye’s outlier attitude that all metalheads have towards pop music, by quoting an interview with Billboard where he says, “We hate pop, we despise it. It’s all the same sound.” That sounds like the stuff that should have made the real headlines. Spoken like a true headbanger, amazing hair, famous last name and all be damned.

Anurag Tagat is a Bengaluru-based writer and critic who is into everything from metal to trip-hop and tweets @anuragtagat.