It’s safe to say that by the time Korn knuckled down to record their seventh studio album in mid-2005, the band was in a serious state of flux. Not only had they changed labels after over a decade with Sony – signing a unique, megabucks deal with EMI and Virgin Records that saw them get a smooth $25 million advance in exchange for a piece of the band’s merch and tour revenues – but they were about to embark on their first chapter without guitarist and founding member, Brian ‘Head’ Welch.
Head had jumped ship earlier in the year, citing years of addiction battles and becoming a born again Christian as his chief reasons for leaving (he’d triumphantly return eight years later). It was a hammer blow to a band that had become one of the biggest things in contemporary metal, but the show had to go on, and go on it did.
And so, the rest of the Korn boys – frontman Jonathan Davis, guitarist James ‘Munky’ Shaffer, bassist Reg ‘Fieldy’ Arvizu and drummer David Silveria – decamped to Jonathan’s home studio in Los Angeles with powerhouse songwriting trio The Matrix, whose heaviest production credit to that point was working on Avril Lavigne’s smash hit debut album, Let Go.
“It felt scary and not right working with them!” Jonathan tells Metal Hammer. “But that was the whole point. This whole band has always been based on doing what we’re not supposed to do. I don’t wanna call it punk rock, because people throw that term around, but it was very rebellious. We’ve based our career on getting out of our comfort zone.”
The result was See You On The Other Side, a fun and musically solid if bloated record, undeniably highlighted by two standout, earwormy bangers: future fan favourite Coming Undone, and the album’s first single, Twisted Transistor.
This whole band has always been based on doing what we’re not supposed to do
Jonathan Davis
Powered by a simple, industrial Silveria beat and a catchy, grinding Munky riff, Twisted Transistor felt ready-made for mosh pits and dancefloors alike. Lyrically, the song is about music as a means of escape, characterised by a woman enjoying her personal radio a little too much.
“It’s about whenever people get pissed off, or you have something bad happen to you, and you just run into your room as a kid, or you’re an adult in your car, and you turn the radio up real loud and it seems to make it go away,” Jonathan explained to WireImage. “I went for that vibe, but I wanted to twist it into dark matter, so it’s about this upset girl who’s actually masturbating with a radio, and the radio’s making it feel good in a couple different ways. You know what I’m saying?”
Subtlety was rarely Korn’s strong suit, to be fair. Regardless, Twisted Transistor was released to the world in September 2005, backed by one of the best music videos of its era. Directed by Dave Meyers, the video features a who’s-who of 2000s hip hop royalty playing the role of Korn: Snoop Dogg as Munky, Xzibit as Fieldy, David Banner as David Silveria and the king of crunk himself, Lil Jon, playing Jonathan.
Spliced with footage of the big name rappers playfully hamming up Korn’s rock star status as they take part in a Spinal Tap-style mockumentary, it was one of the most inventive and consistently funny videos put out in quite some time by a main event rock band, consolidating Korn as a force that still had plenty of surprises left in the tank as the nu metal scene they founded crumbled around them.
“We wanted to do something fun and to screw with people’s heads,” Jonathan told WireImage. “We’ve always been big fans of hip hop, and these [rappers] are our friends. So, we decided to do a video where they took over and played us. It’s all come together really good. It’s really funny.”
He wasn’t lying: even now, over two decades on, David Banner sending up David Silveria’s Calvin Klein modelling campaign, a side-hustle which had drawn some ire from metal’s more vocal corners, is hilarious.
As Jonathan told it, however, the video didn’t just offer Korn and their rap mates the chance to do something different; it gave them a better chance of getting airplay on MTV, which was becoming increasingly dominated by hip hop.
“It came up, like, ‘Why are we doing a video? They only play rap videos!'” he explained. “A little light bulb went off: ‘Let’s get these guys to be us!'”
“We’re just living the rock and roll lifestyle, having a day in the life [of Korn],” Xzibit told WireImage. “They gave me the call, and I couldn’t wait to get here. I don’t envy these guys one bit, you know what I’m saying? They got to do this for two hours straight on stage.”
“I mean, it’s just beautiful,” Lil Jon noted, alluding to the longstanding relationship between hip hop and rock ‘n’ roll. “It all started way back in the day. You can go back to Run-DMC, they said, ‘I’m the king of rock’. They didn’t say rap. They said rock. All of the rock guys are now influenced by rappers, early hip hop. And a lot of us hip hop cats, we grew up on rock. So, it’s always been intertwined.
“It’s a dope video, a different concept,” he insisted. “Nobody ain’t never done nothing like this. And I think the world is going to love it.”
A lot of us hip hop cats grew up on rock
Lil Jon
Lil Jon wasn’t wrong. While the single itself fared decently, notching Korn one of their highest ever chart positions in the US, it’s undoubtably the video that has the longest-standing legacy.
“It was funny as hell!” Jonathan remarks now. “We had so much fun and pulled off the impossible. We knew all those guys really well, so we got to hang out the whole time they were shooting. That was possibly the most fun we’ve had making a video and if you watch the long version, it’s like a mini movie. It was a parody, so good!”
While Twisted Transistor would prove to be a popular track for band and fans alike, it’s been far from a setlist staple over the years. After disappearing entirely from Korn’s sets for over a decade following the end of the See You On The Other Side album cycle, it popped up briefly for a run of Korn shows in 2019, before being put back on the shelf again for another couple of world tours.
The song was dusted off once more, however, for two US festival shows in 2025 – and Jonathan is quick to stress that were it solely up to him, it’d be getting far more plays.
“I’m always the one in the band championing that,” he says. “We got so many records it’s hard to fit it all in…the See You On The Other Side songs are all really fun.”
None more fun than Twisted Transistor, though: the song that gave us a generationally funny music video, and a track that showed that metal and hip hop icons really do make for great tag teams…especially when it comes to relentlessly taking the piss out of themselves.
