How About That Thing?

Ah, nu-metal. AKA, rap metal. AKA, post grunge. AKA, divorce metal. AKA, angry white kid from California metal.

Nu-Metal has kind of become a bit of a punching ag in recent decades, and… Well, It’s not exactly complicated to see why. Especially since the genre let guys like Fred Durst and Limp Bizkit act as the spokesmen of the movement. Also, it only makes sense the current generation makes fun of my generation’s music. After all, my generation used to make fun of how gay hair metal used to be. Like, not gay as in “gay is interchangeable with stupid”, but gay as in everybody ripped off Rob Halford’s style with no idea Halford was legit gay and that look came from the gay bar. But I digress.

I do like a lot of bands who got their start in the nu-metal scene. IE, Disturbed, Linkin Park, Rage Against the Machine, etc. However, one of my favorite nu-metal bands of all time is actually a bit of an obscure act. Maybe you’ve heard of them, maybe you haven’t. Either way, one of my favorite bands in the genre to this very day is a one-hit-wonder by the name of 3rd Strike.

I remember first hearing about 3rd Strike weeks before their debut album was set to drop. They appeared on a radio show that played on Monday nights on KQRC. Along with hearing some of the tracks, I got some insight on the band’s brief history as The Dime Store Hoods, and the origin of their name being the three strikes law in the US.

SIDE NOTE: The three strikes law basically says if you get arrested and found guilty three times in a row, you go to prison for life. It’s one of those laws that sounds like a good idea on paper… But then you see a kid get life in federal prison because he stole gum and it happened to be his third offense.

I ended up buying the album when it came out, and I’ve never let go of it since. True, I don’t listen to it nearly as much as I did when it was new, but I still have my original physical copy buried amongst all my various other CDs, and every now and then, I’ll pull it out and listen to it on my BOS player, or in an older game console with CD playing capabilities. Because I’m a dinosaur, and firmly believe that just because you have a subscription to Tidal or Spotify doesn’t make the copy of that album in your digital library YOUR COPY. But that’s a rant for another day.

If you’re familiar with the rap metal genre, there’s nothing especially new here. The beats are hip hop influenced and generally fast paced at times, the guitar riffs are simple, and the vocalist raps. Some tracks are fast paced and brutal, where as others are slow and meaningful. In the case of the latter, the vocalist, Jim Korthe, tends to sing rather than rap. And honestly, Korthe was a pretty good singer.

Some of the lyrics were pretty politically charged. Not to the level of Rage Against the Machine, but beliefs in mistrust in the government and outspokenness against gang violence were far from subtle. I definitely didn’t feel like I was being pandered to at any point in the album.

Honestly, the only black mark on an otherwise excellent album is probably their attempt at covering “Paranoid” by Black Sabbath. Not going to lie, listening to this very cover right now, as I’m typing this out here in 2024… Yeah, that did NOT age well.

The rest of the album, however, is fantastic. It’s just a shame it had to come out in 2002 of all years.

In 2002, nu-metal’s popularity had more or less peaked, and 2003 was when I noticed a lot of the more popular nu-metal bands beginning to distance themselves from the genre as a whole. Papa Roach, for example, stopped rapping. Another example would be how Disturbed started dropping nu-metal elements from their sound. Newer bands were finding out the hard way they’d joined the nu-metal fad late, and were often panned the moment they showed up. We ended up with a generous amount of one-hit-wonders whose attempts at a follow-up went unnoticed at best, and outright flop at worst. We also saw a bunch of debuting bands disappearing into obscurity the moment their first album was released.

I remembered having really high hopes for 3rd Strike when their album debuted… But unfortunately for me, they fell victim to the decline just as much as everybody else did. “No Light”, their single, was on Kansas City radio for a grand total of a week, and then you never heard from them again. And this was about five or six years before someone in charge of all the rock stations out here, classic and newer rock alike, developed a massive boner for AC/DC. Don’t even get me started on that tangent. We’ll be here all day.

Possibly as a result of this, the band ended up breaking up in 2004. Back in the old days, when X and Facebook didn’t exist, and everybody had to build their own websites from the ground up in order to announce tour dates, album releases, and the like, I remember logging on to 3rd Strike’s site, and seeing nothing but white text on a plain black background announcing that the band had broken up. It didn’t say why they’d broken up, but simply that they’d broken up. That was disappointing to say the least. Especially considering the 2004-2005 school year was a bit of a dark time, and hearing about one of my favorite bands calling it quits so early was one of the last things I probably needed to hear.

Years later, the band did try to reunite… Only for Jim Korthe to pass away rather abruptly. I never found out what happened exactly, but Wikipedia, in all of its glorious semi-trustworthiness, pointed out he hadn’t been in the best of health to begin with.

So yeah, 3rd Strike will probably be one of those bands that sadly drifts into the ether of obscurity. No nostalgia tours, no new albums, nothing. Nineteen-year-old me was probably bummed out about that… But thirty-eight-year-old me, a man living in a world where new ideas are panned in favor of digging up corpses and trying to recapture nostalgia, has no problem with the band staying in obscurity. Not in that hipster “I was totally into this band until more than three people found out they exist” sort of way, but in that way where if they’d survived the decline, stayed together, and had, like, ten or eleven albums by now, they probably wouldn’t be as special.

Last time I checked, you could find the album on Spotify. You can definitely find it on Tidal. Either way, if you get a chance, I recommend giving it a listen.