Jonathan Davis

Jonathan Howsmon Davis (born January 18, 1971), also known as JD or JDevil, is an American singer, songwriter, and musician. He is best known as the lead vocalist and frontman of nu metal band Korn, who are considered a pioneering act of the nu metal genre. Davis' distinctive personality and Korn's music influenced a generation of musicians and performers who have come after them.

Davis co-founded Korn in Los Angeles 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.

Anchored by his personal, passionate lyrics and unusual tenor vocals, Davis launched a successful career which has spanned almost three decades, although his popularity declined in the middle of the 2000s. Davis' 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.

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, piano, upright bass, violin, and the clarinet. 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.

Fourteen of his albums reached the top 10 on the ''Billboard 200'', including ''MTV Unplugged'' and '' Greatest Hits, Vol. 1''. 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. As of 2018, Davis has sold over 40 million albums worldwide.

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.

He has a sister, Alyssa Marie Davis (born February 8, 1974), as well as a half-brother, Mark Chavez (lead singer of Adema; born November 15, 1978), and a half-sister, Amanda Chavez (born July 31, 1981) by his mother. His father was a keyboardist for Buck Owens and Frank Zappa, while his mother was a professional actress and dancer. 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." Davis suffered severe bouts of asthma as a child. Asthma forced him to stay in the hospital every month from the ages of 3 to 10, and he survived a " critical asthma attack" when he was five years old; he said, "My heart stopped, and I didn't see no damn light or hear any music".

He attended Highland High School; however, he was persistently harassed for wearing eyeliner, baggy clothes, and listening to new wave music. He was constantly called homophobic names, which later inspired the Korn song " Faget". Davis' " HIV" tattoo on his upper left arm was also inspired by his experience of being bullied. At the age of 16, Davis found employment as a coroner's assistant and after graduating high school he immediately enrolled in the San Francisco college's one-year program. 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. 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.

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."

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. He also mentioned that she mixed tabasco with his tea. At that time, Davis had sexual fantasies about his stepmother, dreaming of "fucking her and killing her". Though she was later divorced by Davis' father, the Korn song "Kill You" was nonetheless written about her. In an interview for ''The Guardian'', Davis said 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.

Career

Early career

Davis formed his first group with other members in a mysterious formation called Buck Naked, of which only two songs were recorded on demo tapes and distributed to his friends in High School; including New Wave-oriented song "What I Have Done", and a love song "Come With Me". Davis, who worked by day in a mortuary, got free haircuts at a college where guitarist Ryan Shuck was a student. Davis agreed to join Shuck's group called Sexart, which was formed in 1991. Davis described the experience, "I had no clue what I was doing, I didn't know what the hell to do with my voice".

Early in 1993, ex-band members of L.A.P.D. who had started a new group named Creep, noticed Davis at The John Bryant club in Bakersfield, and were overwhelmed by his performance with Sexart. Subsequently, Davis who was already a friend of Reginald Arvizu, was reluctant to join Creep although he was flattered by the obstinacy of the musicians to integrate him into the group. Nevertheless, he only made the decision to audition with Creep after meeting the psychic who told him that it would be beneficial for him to leave Bakersfield, move to Los Angeles and join them. Davis left Sexart in his early 20s after a convincing rehearsal with the four Creep members, he commented: "I was a little torn, because I was doing Sexart at the time, and that was my band. But I wanted to go and see what it was all about, and from the first note I was hooked. It just all clicked." Enticed by the prospect of a musical career, Davis resigned from his employment at Bakersfield judicial police, and moved to L.A. with his girlfriend to live with David Silveria and Brian Welch in the same house in Huntington Beach. Davis proposed the idea of naming the band as 'Corn'—the spelling would be renamed right after as 'KoЯn'—in reference to the horror film ''Children of the Corn'' and a sexually explicit story from his gay friend.

Korn

Solo career

Davis first began working on a solo album in 2007, forming the group Jonathan Davis and the SFA (Simply Fucking Amazings). Although he released two live albums with the group, no studio albums were completed and the band disbanded in 2014 after the death of guitarist Shane Gibson.

In December 2017, Davis began announcing solo tour dates and festival appearances and the launch of his solo album planned for 2018, which would mark Davis' first billed simply as ''Jonathan Davis''. He said of the album in a 2017 ''Louder Sound'' interview: "It's the Jonathan Davis And The SFA record, but JD SFA is no longer. Unfortunately, since Shane Gibson passed, that band's done and it can't be recreated. So this is J.D. right now".

In January 2018, Davis released his first solo single, "What It Is". On January 26, 2018, he released the music video for "What It Is", while the single was included on the movie's soundtrack for ''American Satan''. At that time, Davis said he was "a big fan" of science fiction movies such as ''Blade Runner'' and ''Dune'', and noted being an admirer of Vangelis. On May 25, 2018, he released his debut solo album, '' Black Labyrinth'' on Sumerian Records

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