Korn’s song ‘Dead Bodies Everywhere’ was released in 1998. It was both about Jonathan Davis’ family, which didn’t want him to be a musician and limited the singer to a particular life. The song was inspired by dead bodies seen by Davis, who had worked for one term at a mortuary at the expense of his family. The corpses were even found in the kitchen of the house where he lived at the time, as he told in the last episode of Sing for Science.
“When I worked at the mortuary, my kitchen was overflow for the morgue,” the musician recalled his youth while working for a morgue. “There’s literally dead bodies everywhere [laughing] when the morgue was full. Then we would put some more in my kitchen, which had a little apartment in the mortuary when we had too many, too many bodies or too many, you know, bodies were backed up when waiting for funerals.”
He continued, “After we get done embalming them, we would have to put them on, you know, on the tables. And they’d sit there waiting to get dressed and put in the caskets and all the stuff like that. So, sometimes we’d get a lot of cases in, and my overflow was my kitchen. And literally, I come out of my bedroom, and there are dead bodies everywhere. Decomps are not fun. No.”
Davis was screaming about how restricting his family was in the song. His family preferred him to deal with dead bodies rather than go into the music business, and for a while, they really caused him to be stuck in such a business. However, they obviously could not prevent his great passion.
In the song, he tried to show that he wanted to live his life the way he wanted, and he really did. Jonathan Davis would enter the music scene in such a way that his name would become one of the most memorable in the industry. He would even make a hit song to complain about his family.
‘Dead Bodies Everywhere’ took its place in the band’s catalog as the fourth song of Korn’s third album, ‘Follow the Leader.’ It was also Korn’s most commercially successful record, having been certified five times platinum. By then, they had already proven their place in the scene for metal circles, but this album was their breakthrough, achieving mainstream success.
