So you’re 12. You’ve got braces and bad hair (raise your hand if you had a rat tail or sausage bangs), you’re tired of your O-Town album and you have a newfound desire to piss off your parents. You find a band that looks hardcore (so you think) and one that top-40 radio deeply embraces, like one of the slew of non-confrontational metal/hardcore bands flooding the scene, possibly Adema or Alien Ant Farm.

You decide to don JNCO jeans, XXL black-band t-shirts and maybe even add some glue to your hair, but veer away from piercings ’cause that’s just gross.

And guess what? Alien Ant Farm, Adema, Apex Theory, Earshot, etc. are playing Sno-Core 2002. What have you got to lose?

The Herald recently threw caution to the wind and caught up with new Arista Records sensation Adema, (a Bakersfield, Calif. band with a name based on a skin disease, with a genre-fitting misspelling).

Adema is hot, if you listen to top 40/ hard rock (92.1 FM) radio. Their lead singer/rapper is a stepbrother of Korn’s Jonathan Davis. The group is on “Now That’s What I Call Music, vol. 9,” which is sure to hit platinum. It just received a gold record. Guitarist Tim Fluckley detailed the members’ celebration while chilling on the band’s stretch tour bus: “I think we just got wasted or something. ‘We just got a gold record, time to hit the bong.'”

Monday, the Sno-Core tour stopped in Madison. Let it be noted that after leaving the four-band bill in the midst of “Hope Diggy” by Apex Theory, allowing ample time for anyone to return to the Barrymore theater, this reporter was unable to give the remainder of his tickets away to anyone on his speed dial (we called at least 20 people, one of whom was heard to ask his roommate “Do you wanna go see Alien Ant Farm? Yeah, it’s got that annoying guy that dances really bad.”)

However, it must be conceded that the guys from Adema are cool — at least the ones who had the courtesy to talk with us for the entire interview (Dave DeRoo, bassist, and Fluckley). We cannot disrespect the character of the bassist and the guitarist. And the drummer had cool tattoos (You think you’re hardcore because you can take a beer bong? Try getting your armpits and genitals tattooed).

However, lead vocalist Marky Chavez, seemed to believe that he was all cool like Fred Durst, a man the other members weren’t as fond of, mostly based on their distaste for the Guitar Center tryouts to replace Wes Boreland. Chavez, however, defended Durst’s business skills and vocal stylings as one defends his/her role model.

When asked about his writing influences, in particular discussing one of the “great American novels,” “On the Road”, by Jack Kerouac, Chavez claims he “likes things more fast-paced, things that keep my attention. Like, I love Dean Koontz.” However, not all members of Adema are as caught up in being rock stars as Chavez.

The other members of Adema joked around about the music business, like garnering the rights of calling Linkin Park “Linkin” or going to parties with fellow Arista Records recording artists –who happen to be primarily soul/hip-hop artists like Pink and Usher. Adema doesn’t particularly care who its demographic is. The members embrace anyone who can relate to their music, which seems to be a continually younger audience.

Adema is a new band, which may be reflected in their name. Fluckley described the process of choosing the name: “Everything went so fast, so we were just kind of like ‘F*ck it, let’s be Adema’ and then we all got the tattoos [of the name Adema].”

The current members of the Adema posse were only together three or four months before they signed their major label deal with Arista. They are not as near to O-Town as one may think, however; they played together in different capacities for nearly six years, and had known each other for 12. The band actually materialized haphazardly, by just making music.

Recording a demo and getting signed was apparently an afterthought and not the goal. “We were just going to tour up and down the West Coast like we always did or whatever, but then we didn’t have to, obviously. We got lucky,” said Fluckley.

The band’s record is particularly new, serving more as a demo or calling card than a masterpiece. According to Fluckley, “It was no problem writing the songs. We had written like 17 songs in two months, and recorded about 15 and chose 12.” As a band, the members have experienced playing to crowds of nine people followed by playing to 1500 the next night. Adema toured for four months in a van prior to the release of its album, so the group has paid its dues to some extent, but more as individuals than as a band.

Adema claims its chief influences as everyone from Slayer to The Cure. And unlike other bands of recent memory, it profess it fell into success. When asked when their houses would be on MTV’s “Cribs,” the members replied with a definite “never.” If fate were ever to match Adema with “Cribs,” Fluckley says, “My crib would be f*cking 30 seconds, dude. My crib would be worse than Moby’s.”

In reference to current MTV darling Creed, a band Fluckley is “tired of,” he complained, “I read in Rolling Stone the other day that Creed was saying. ‘We just want to be that band that their song is played 20 years from now,’ and I just wanted to go, ‘Who f*cking doesn’t want to be the band who’s being played 20 years from now? I want my sh*t to f*cking die and fall off the face of the earth, I want to be that band that’s forgotten quickly!'”

Residing in Los Angeles, Adema has brushed shoulders with many new stars as well as old, forgotten ones like David Lee Roth. Apparently, Roth, along with the members of Adema, frequent rock-star haven Crazy Girls, a strip bar in L.A. Deroo detailed the time he met Diamond Dave: “He came in and had a puffy shirt on, with his chest hair all hanging out and chains on. And he had this f*cking washed out hair that’s all ratty and slicked back, with like a one-inch ponytail in the back. He was all red and looked like he’d been in a tanning booth forever. He had this stupid sh*t-eating grin on his face.”

As one may have noticed, the rock market is saturated with nu-metal pop bands singing about bad childhoods, which leads one to seriously re-evaluate the term “shelf life.” Speaking on the tendency toward the “woe is me” lyrical stylings of Puddle of Mudd and Staind, Fluckley replied, “I think if you do that to sell records, that’s kind of stupid. You have to write about what you know, and that’s not all that they write about either. That’s one thing that we try to do. We have positive songs and negative songs.”