Freak on a Leash: Korn’s Leash Song, Charts, and McFarlane Video

In adult images and fetish culture, a leash and a collar are ordinary power-exchange hardware. Korn’s “Freak on a Leash” is one of the tracks that carried that image into the mainstream. It comes from the 1998 album Follow the Leader. Guitarist Brian “Head” Welch glossed the title as Davis being a freak on a leash, “sort of a kinky dominatrix thing.” Singer Jonathan Davis read the lyric as a rant at the record industry and said he felt like a prostitute. The double charge is SM restraint imagery plus fame as prostitution. That is why the song sits on BDSM maps even though the actual target is the music business.

The song was written in 1997 and recorded in May 1998 at NRG Recording Studios in North Hollywood. The studio cut runs 4:15. Dissonance, distortion, and guitar effects give it the pressure. David Lloyd, a scholar at the University of Alberta, called Davis’s vocal a “nonsense-utterance”: scraps of English inside gibberish, a voice refusing to be shaped from outside. The mood swings among anger, drama, and sarcasm. On 9 December 2006 Davis recorded an acoustic duet with Amy Lee of Evanescence at MTV Studios in Times Square, for Korn’s acoustic set. That version later charted on its own in some markets.

The video came out on 5 February 1999, directed by the comics artist Todd McFarlane, with Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris assisting. Animation and live action share the clip. It opens back on the cliff from the Follow the Leader cover, with Korn members in cameos. A policeman breaks in. A gunshot sends a bullet out of the cartoon and into live action. The bullet wrecks things and hits nobody. At the song’s middle break it goes into a Korn poster. When Davis shouts “Go!” a girl in red catches the bullet and gives it back to the cop. A loose “No Trespassing” sign is the setup for the later “Falling Away from Me” video, from the album Issues.

The single was reissued more than ten times worldwide: three times in the UK, twice each in Mexico and Australia, and once each in Germany, France, the United States, and Switzerland. It reached number 10 on Billboard’s Mainstream Rock chart, number 6 on Alternative / Modern Rock, number 89 on the Hot 100, and number 24 on the UK Singles Chart. Australia certified it gold, more than 35,000 copies shipped. Lloyd called it Korn’s most popular song. By late 2024 the main YouTube upload had passed 343 million views. It was the ninth video retired from MTV’s TRL, on 11 May 1999, after ten non-consecutive days at number one.

The song and video took about half a dozen major awards, including Best Editing and Best Rock Video at the 1999 MTV Video Music Awards, and the Grammy for Best Short Form Music Video in 2000. Metal Edge readers named it Music Video of the Year. Loudwire in 2019 put it first among the 50 greatest Korn songs. Kerrang in 2021 put it fourth of 20. Nominations also came from MuchMusic, the Dutch Edison awards, the California Music Awards (the Bammies), and Spin’s readers’ poll, a spread that covered teen pop television, craft awards, and metal fans.

Commentary from the iTunes era credited producers Wright and Thompson with a brighter, sharper sheen that helped make the track a huge hit. David Fricke described Davis’s caged-animal babble as a Busta Rhymes-in-Bellevue outburst. Critics treated it as both a radio weapon and a psychological self-portrait: the leash is fame, and the freak is the singer who will not stay polite inside it. Outside the record, the song turned up in a 1999 Puma Super Bowl ad, a 2007 episode of The Simpsons, and the 2008 game Guitar Hero World Tour, so the leash image kept moving past nu-metal listeners.

The BDSM overlap is the collar language. Someone holds the other end of the leash. The “freak” is proud of that hold and trapped by it. Davis aims the image at managers, the media, and the fame machine. Radio’s demand to cut the noisy middle, the guitar break the band called “the Biohazard part,” is part of the same picture. They voted 4–1 to cut it. Davis was the only no. The trapped bullet in the video, and Davis’s collapse into nonsense syllables, play containment and release. Leah Furman wrote in Korn: Life in the Pit that the song revolved around the mixed blessings of fame. For listeners who have never been in a leather bar, the track still put the word leash into mainstream rock’s sexual vocabulary: anger, ownership, and erotic spectacle.