an interview with nu metal CEO Holiday Kirk

Today in The Molly Zone…..an interview with CEO of nu metal Holiday Kirk!

Holiday was an interview rec via Jacqueline Codiga, and once I saw the full scope of what he’s been working on recently, I was all the more hype to talk to him. It is safe to say Holiday’s writing, social media presence, and general content creation/curation has greatly helped in refurbishing the reputation of the once-maligned genre of nu metal. A handful of years ago, nu metal was shorthand for a certain kind of toxic musical masculinity; now the nu metal sound and aesthetic are very much part of…dare I say…THE ZEITGEIST. When megadesigner Marc Jacobs does a collab with Deftones, you know a sea change has happened.

Beyond his music writing, Holiday runs the vibrant and occasionally controversial “crazy ass moments in nu metal history” Twitter account, hosts a nu metal podcast called The Nu Metal Agenda, DJs, throws nu metal events, streams on Twitch…he is very busy forming a nu metal-themed empire, and I shouldn’t have been at all surprised that our conversation ran far beyond the typical “ok when did you first start listening to nu metal” type of beats. We discussed AI productivity hacks, unethical corporate social media behavior, the future of independent media, and the ever-ongoing struggle of monetizing one’s creative work. It’s a great chat and I won’t dilly dally any longer so let’s get to it.

MO: Would you start by introducing yourself and what you do?

HK: I'm Holiday Kirk. I am the CEO of nu metal. I livestream, DJ, produce, edit, do communications…I have the conversation a lot with people around our age where it's like, man, wouldn't it be nice to do just one of those?

MO: Totally.

HK: Did you hear my episode with Nothing,Nowhere? He’s signed and very successful, but he still has to know how to do, like, six dozen things.

MO: When did you start working in these capacities, and then when did it specifically turn into the nu metal sphere of focus?

HK: I've been doing music journalism in various offs and on since 2012 or something. I started in Chicago rap journalism, and it was a very crowded field when I hopped in there. And then I did music videos for a really long time. That’s part of the deep Kirk lore. But I didn't figure out the nu metal stuff until 2019. When I got there, it was vacant property. Nobody was talking about it or writing about it.

I'd fallen in love with the genre and was listening to this music all the time, and thought, wow, there's this huge cultural void where somebody should be doing something. So I wrote a list of the 100 greatest nu metal songs of all time, and that got some nice attention. And then I did the 50 greatest nu metal albums of all time. Then I started up my Twitter account. There was this influx of “crazy ass moment”-type accounts. So I did one for nu metal because nu metal is very friendly towards moments you could consider “crazy ass.”

And it blew up fairly quickly. Then I got laid off at the end of August and was like, well, I don't want to get another job, so I'm going to figure out how to make this into a full time gig — which I have not done yet, to be very, very clear. I need to get more shameless, need to get greedier. I've had too much integrity so far. Someone on Twitter once called me a grifter. And I’m like, Well, I'm doing a really bad job of it.

MO: Grifting is definitely one of the most misused words on the social internet. I would say at least 80% of the time when people say something is a grift, it's simply someone making something that people like.

HK: People definitely do grift. The main thing I do is run a gimmick account, right? When you run a gimmick account and you want to make money, you accept promotional opportunities. So you promote vibrators under your posts or you boost OnlyFans accounts or something. And I haven't done any of that…BECAUSE I HAVEN'T BEEN OFFERED! So if you're listening and thinking, oh this guy’s too good for that. I would like to just be clear: I don't know if I am. With the right number, maybe we could work something out.

MO: No one has slid into the weird section of the DMs saying “$10 for this vibrator promo?”

HK: Unless I’ve somehow missed it, even when I've had tweets do hundreds of thousands of faves and millions of views, nobody's ever asked me. What the fuck?

MO: Well, you don't have to answer this if if you don't want to, but: ideal brand alignment for your Twitter? The perfect sponsor that you would feel honored to subsidize it.

HK: I really need to DJ that Sick New World event, like an afterparty. That’s the nu metal festival that I made possible through my dedication and efforts…and I feel like because I'm being interviewed, I can say things like that.

MO: Yeah, you can!

HK: When you write this, do you edit it into a feature?

MO: It's Q&A format but it's edited and "condensed for length and clarity."

HK: Ah, that sucks, I've always wanted a feature. I've always wanted someone to write, “He took on a great distance in his eyes as he answered the question.” Something that makes you look cool and deep. You ever read “Frank Sinatra Has A Cold?”

MO: I just podcasted about it! Listen, we can do that. We can go postmodern. I can switch it up mid-feature.

HK: You would like to? Writing a feature takes so much effort.

MO: Hey, I majored in English! I'm down for this kind of thing.

And indeed, I am down for this kind of thing. Let’s pull back in a New Journalism style and check out our surroundings. It’s no ring-a-ding-ding smoky Vegas lounge I am currently observing Holiday Kirk in, nor a backroom poker game, nor a palm tree-studded Los Angeles boulevard where a custom Ghia (a $25k car, worth $241,000 with inflation in modern dollars) is waiting at a stoplight. This is because I am talking to Holiday Kirk through the gift and curse of the striving journalist (pronounce it joinalist): ye olde Zoom window. Hard to catch a vibe on these things, but let’s do our best.

Sitting in a neutral-colored room in front of a professional microphone, flanked by guitar cases and office-type flotsam, possessing a head upon which a shock of blonde hair sits, as well as a face currently equipped with glasses with bold black frames, Holiday Kirk is thinking about money, as we all seem to be these days. In a world where established music publications offer paltry sums for longform features (“It’s really humiliating to be asked to fill out a 1099 for $100”), figuring out how to monetize the nu metal-boosting business while dodging the grifter allegations seems to be top of mind for him.

He brings up the problem of scaling the scope of his biz. “I want to hire people to take care of certain things, but that costs money if you're trying to be ethical. And I don't have money. I don’t know if the kids still fall for internships anymore.” I say that they must, though Gen Z’s attitude toward work in general seems to have veered, if all the thinkpieces have anything to say about it, toward a healthy skepticism. I’m delighted by the turn in conversation to something I’ve been thinking a lot about, which is nothing less than The Future Of Media. I ask Holiday if he thinks independently and individually funded media (Substacks, Patreons, etc.) will be the only way to get paid for creative work going forward, or if there might be some kind of secret third thing that isn’t the Substack grind or big-pub underpayment.

“When I first got laid off I thought, Oh, I'm going to do a Substack. If I get 800 people to subscribe at $5 a month that’s…” He pushes his glasses up onto his forehead and wearily squishes his eyeballs with one hand. “I don't know.” He reaches for his phone to open the calculator app. “I didn't move to L.A. to do math. Nobody does.” Calculations made, the resulting number is $4,000 a month — a nice hypothetical sum. “I was like, how hard could that be? Well, it's really fucking hard. And writing is really difficult.”

This leads us to another trending topic, that of AI and using the internet’s nascent AI tools to help with the slog of content creation. Holiday is bullish on it, at least for the tough work of simply getting writing started: “Personally speaking, with writing, the hardest thing most of the time is putting that first word on the page. I'll generate a paragraph on ChatGPT ‘in the style of Holiday Kirk’ and put it in a Word document and then build the bones out from there.” We discuss the ethical side of AI. “If I got on ChatGPT and was like, write in the style of Jayson Greene or Ian Cohen, that would be fucked up,” Holiday says. “But if I style it as me, then, you know…maybe? Those of us on the left side of things need to come up with a better way of grappling with AI technology than ‘ban it, kill it, make it illegal’ because, I don’t know what to tell you, it's here.”

At this point in the conversation I am thrilled at where we have ended up — using the framework of a nu metal Twitter gimmick account to discuss the future of media and the ethics of AI really defibrillates my newsletter-writing heart. I will say though that Holiday was correct about features taking a lot of effort, and so I have to (as they say on the TV show Alone) tap out and revert to Q&A format — my respect for Gay Talese and his ilk only burnished by this experiment.

MO: What would you say is the general vibe of the audience you are cultivating?

HK: I've spent a lot of time trying to make it a fun and healthy and safe place to interact and meet like-minded people. Did you see Jordan Peterson post that Korn song?

MO: Oh, yes.

HK: I made my response to it, like, I see what he’s trying to do, but he can go fuck himself. When I first started the account with like 20 or 40,000 followers, I used to post stuff like, “if you have a problem with transgender people, do not follow me.” The account's too big for that now. You’ve got to pick your moments to make those statements and chase away the people you don't want to be a part of your audience. And I want to cultivate an audience that is open to new sounds and open to new ideas, and that takes work and diligence.

MO: What is the biggest misunderstanding about nu metal?

HK: People think that nu metal is very masculine and very misogynist and very straight and it's not. Nu metal was always a lot gayer and a lot more feminine than people gave it credit for. Korn has a song called “Faget,” and Jonathan Davis and Fred Durst would throw around the F slur — I can’t justify them doing that, but I know that my LGBTQ+ audience has found it to be either funny or empowering or both, just in the way they did it, which was always something tongue-in-cheek rather than something meant to damage.

Most of the biggest nu metal acts had a real feminine side to them in terms of the way they would dress and the way they would act. I'm not saying that they were the most enlightened and woke individuals ever, but a lot of this music has aged better than, like, Motley Crue's “Girls, Girls, Girls.”

MO Totally. So you mentioned that Sick New World Festival. How do you feel about the nu metal revival happening with events like this?

HK: It's great. The whole idea here was to tell people about nu metal and spread the gospel and expose people to new bands and reupholster the legacy of the older bands. I can't be upset that a festival would be like, oh there’s a market here and people want to be part of this — because it's all a part of the same idea. I have heard rumors that there are people at whatever corporation put Sick New World together who used my Twitter feed as reference for booking acts.

MO: No kidding.

HK: In entertainment, and every industry, really, there’s always a million people that aren't getting paid anywhere close to what they're supposed to be getting paid, and then there’s four people that are getting paid way more than they deserve. You have a festival like Sick New World — why would they hire me for ideas when they can just go through my Twitter feed and pull all the best ideas from that? It's really tempting to be bitter about it, but it’s not worth it.

When I first realized that nu metal was this giant vacant lot with an oil well under it, the thing that I was constantly anxious about was that I wouldn't be able to make a name for myself in the genre before someone got to it and capitalized on it. I was scared that Emo Nite or some big music YouTuber would pivot to nu metal. But that's not how it worked out. Now when people think of nu metal, they can find me really quickly. It's just a matter of staying focused and being warm and openhearted and nice to everybody, because that's how I got to this point.

I gotta get greedier. I'm going to be on the street with only cell service so I can keep tweeting, like, Man, I should have grifted more. Do you have a Patreon?

MO: I do not!

HK: I way overpromised on my Patreon and I feel bad about it all the time, but I also never really post about the Patreon because I feel embarrassed…

MO: Oh man, destigmatize Patreon-ship. I also believe that people should just be able to contribute pledge money for vibes alone. The reward system is kind of a scam.

HK: When I first made the Patreon, I thought, I'll make these great reward tiers. People are going to love that. And I'm pretty sure the majority of people that have signed up for it are just trying to support, because I haven't been able to come through on…yeah, we hit two goals, and I've delivered on neither. But nobody's come at me about it.

I once had someone sign up for the $100 a month tier, and that was crazy. You never feel more like an imposter than when one person is paying you $100 a month. “Here’s another podcast episode!”

MO: Are they still subscribed?

HK: You know what? They downgraded their membership, and imagine if I got mad over that.

[Molly laughing]

HK: Imagine if I lashed out. “How dare you.”

MO: That's got to be an honor in its own way, even if it is stressful. Okay, I have to ask about the seemingly contentious decision to post an At The Drive-In video on the Twitter. Can you please comment on the controversy?

HK: Friction is so productive, and it’s so important to have people coming at me and being like, How is this nu metal? Explain yourself. Fuck you, die. Every time I post post-hardcore music, there's always people that come around and they're like, “You can't do this.”

This time, because the AI tech was taking off, I wrote my own bit of script and also copy-pasted people's tweets about it, and staged it as one of those meme arguments between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. That does really good numbers, and it makes it all the way to Ross Robinson, who produced that At The Drive-In album, as well as the first two Korn and the first two Slipknot albums. He posts the video, and doesn't give me credit. I jump on his Instagram and say, Hey, this is me. He edits it, gives me credit. And I'm like: standing invitation, you want to come on the podcast? And we interviewed him yesterday.

You’ve gotta generate that friction because that’s how you expand, that's how you meet people, that's how you come up with new ideas. If I wanted to be a grifter, I would just post System Of A Down, Limp Bizkit, Korn, Deftones, all day and night. Here's “In The End” by Linkin Park, again. I want to make more of a cultural impression than that. I want to keep digging. And I've parlayed it into lots of opportunities and lots of good times, but not MONEY! We'll get there.

MO: Do you believe in, like, getting a money plant? Some woo-woo shit?

HK: I'm going to go to Buffalo Exchange and sell a bunch of clothing tomorrow.

MO: What about crypto, web3…throw around some buzzwords and try to get some loose investor money. Someone who has a taste for nu metal that has an extra, like, $2 million.

HK: I feel like if you put me in the right room with someone, I could be like, What we need to do is pivot to experiential. I did the Nu Metal Night event. It sold out and did great. But it was never about the money. Every time I had to talk to my partners about money, I hated it. They were asking me, how much do you think you're owed? Well, let’s see. I did a month and a half of intensive promo. I DJ'd the event. I hired someone to film it. I livestreamed it. I should be paid a lot, but I don't want to be paid a lot, because that's not what I was doing at all. Those dueling impulses are tough.

MO: You’ve gotta outsource it. Like a band has their manager — at the end of the night, they go into the back room and they talk to the venue guy, and then the venue guy tries to stiff him, and then they threaten the venue guy…you need one of those. You need a goon.

HK: I need a goon. I should just hire myself a goon. But I can't pay the goon! I'm gonna hire the goon on an internship.

MO: A goontern.

HK: "I'll help you break into the goon world."

MO: Okay real quick — what would you like this nu metal business, of which you are the CEO, to eventually become?

HK: It’s gotta be about putting new bands on and building a scene for musicians to make their own money. That’s the funny thing about all this. I actually just want to empower bands that want to make this music now to make their own money and quit their own jobs.

And I want to make my own money doing more events. Hire me to DJ more events. I can DJ and I can tell a hundred thousand people about it, so hit me the fuck up. That's how I would like to make my money, because that’s what I enjoy the most.

All I care about is showing people new music. And also drinking a lot and not having hangovers. I want to show people new music, I want to get drunk and never be hung over, and I never want to wake up before 10 a.m. Those are my top three. And then number four is never do math. But I'll have to do that every once in a while.

Holiday’s got links. The Twitter. The Instagram. The Patreon. The Twitch. The Podcast. His personal Twitter. His website. Oh and he’s doing some more Nu Metal Nights on the West Coast. Hire him to DJ your next event.