Jonathan Howsmon Davis (born January 18, 1971), also known as JD,[1] is an American singer, songwriter, and musician. He is the lead vocalist and frontman of nu metal band Korn, which is considered a pioneering act of the nu metal genre.[2][3] Davis’s distinctive personality and Korn’s music influenced a generation of musicians and performers who have come after them.[2][4]
Davis co-founded Korn in Bakersfield in 1993 with the dissolution of two bands, Sexart and L.A.P.D. He had led Sexart during his years as an assistant coroner. Davis rapidly gained notoriety for his intense and powerful live performances with Korn.[5]
Anchored by his personal, passionate lyrics and unusual tenor vocals, Davis has launched a successful career which has spanned almost three decades, although his popularity declined in the middle of the 2000s.[6] Davis’s vocals, which alternate from an angry tone to a high-pitched voice, switching from sounding atmospheric to aggressively screaming, have been the trademark of Korn throughout the band’s career.[7]
From 2000 to 2001, Davis and Richard Gibbs wrote and produced the score and soundtrack album of Queen of the Damned, his first work outside the band. He began his side project called Jonathan Davis and the SFA in 2007 and continued to experiment with musical styles. He released his first solo album in 2018.
He has collaborated with various artists over the course of his career, ranging from metal to alternative rock, rap, world music, and electronic music. Davis is a multi-instrumentalist musician who plays guitar, drums, bagpipes,[8] piano, upright bass, violin, and the clarinet.[9][10] He is also versatile in many genres, mixing tracks and performs DJ sets with his alter ego JDevil. For decades, Davis has been passionate about visual arts, horror films, comics and video games.[8]
Fourteen of his albums reached the top 10 on the Billboard 200, including MTV Unplugged and Greatest Hits, Vol. 1.[11] In the U.S, he was awarded fifteen platinum album certifications by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). In Australia, he received eight platinum album certifications by the Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA), and in the UK he received six gold certifications. He won two Grammy Awards out of eight nominations throughout his career.[12] As of 2018, Davis has sold over 40 million albums worldwide.[13][14][15]
Early life
Jonathan Howsmon Davis was born in Bakersfield, California, on January 18, 1971, the son of Holly Marie Chavez (née Smith; May 6, 1949 – February 25, 2018) and Ricky Duane “Rick” Davis (born December 14, 1948). His parents married on February 27, 1970. He is of English, German, Scottish, and Welsh descent.[16]
He has a sister, Alyssa Marie Davis (born February 8, 1974), as well as a half-brother, Mark Chavez[17] (lead singer of Adema; born November 15, 1978), and a half-sister, Amanda Chavez (born July 31, 1981) by his mother.[18] His father was a keyboardist for Buck Owens and Frank Zappa, while his mother was a professional actress and dancer.[19] His parents divorced when he was three years old. He lived with his mother at first, but, after experiencing bad situations at that home, he moved in with and was raised by his father and former stepmother in Bakersfield, but was made to feel like he “came in and ruined their perfect little family.”[19][20][21] Davis suffered severe bouts of asthma as a child.[22][23][24] Asthma forced him to stay in the hospital every month from the ages of 3 to 10,[24] and he survived a “critical asthma attack” when he was five years old;[25][22] he said, “My heart stopped, and I didn’t see no damn light or hear any music”.[25]
He attended Highland High School; however, he was persistently harassed for wearing eyeliner, baggy clothes, and listening to new wave music.[26][27] He was constantly called homophobic names,[27] which later inspired the Korn song “Faget”.[28] Davis’s “HIV” tattoo on his upper left arm was also inspired by his experience of being bullied.[29] At the age of 16, Davis found employment as a coroner’s assistant;[30] after graduating high school, he immediately enrolled in the San Francisco college’s one-year coronary program.[30] He enjoyed his time in San Francisco, where he spent his days poring over embalming textbooks and his nights living and working in funeral homes.[30] Nevertheless, he dropped out after two semesters to apprentice at a mortuary closer to home, in the Kern County Coroner’s Department. He was also a professional embalmer for a funeral home.[30]
Davis commented in Kerrang!:
“I had post-traumatic stress from seeing dead babies, and young kids that had died after finding a parent’s stash of drugs – shit that I shouldn’t have been seeing at 16 or 17 years old. I had to have a lot of therapy to make the nightmares go away, but I got through it and it made me appreciate life a lot more.”[31]
He did not get along with his stepmom and has accused her of harassing him and doing things like giving him tea mixed with Thai hot oil and jalapeño juice to drink when he was sick.[22] He also mentioned that she mixed tabasco with his tea.[9][32] At that time, Davis had sexual fantasies about his stepmother, dreaming of “fucking her and killing her”.[33] Though she was later divorced by Davis’s father, the Korn song “Kill You” was nonetheless written about her.[22][21] In an interview for The Guardian, Davis said that he left home when he was 18 because he felt like “public enemy number one”, since his stepmother—quoted as “twisted and sadistic”—hated him, and his own father was too embarrassed by the situation to do anything.[34]
There’s one song in particular that stands out in Korn vocalist Jonathan Davis’ mind as the worst one he’s ever done. In an interview with Metal Hammer, Davis said Korn’s 1998 single “All In The Family” featuring Limp Bizkit vocalist Fred Durst is “the worst song ever.” Davis adds that everyone was drunk while recording it and, while it was a fun time at the time, has not aged well at all.
“‘All In The Family’ is the worst song ever,” Davis tells Hammer. “It’s horrible. We were all drunk in the studio and I was trying to rap. At the time, we were having a good time, but now I just cringe. I’ve got nothing against Fred, it just sucks! We were out of our minds drunk! It shouldn’t have made the record.”
Davis has previously called the song “the dumbest fucking track Korn ever did” and is “what drugs and alcohol will do to a motherfucker,” which is fair – the reception to the single when it came out was equally harsh. Despite the song, Follow The Leader has still sold over 5 million copies in the United States. Anyway, please enjoy the below performance of “All In The Family” at the UNO Lakefront Arena in 1998.
