I've never had anyone look up to me and take what I say as gospel. With that also came a level of fame the band were entirely uncomfortable dealing with however, as noted by a disheartened Patton to Spin magazine after bumping into fawning fans. Its commercial ascent had assured their future, cementing their status as one of the brightest stars in the burgeoning alternative movement. The success of Epic turned out to be something of a double-edged sword for FNM. We liked to put our finger on the sore spot a little bit by not playing up to any clique or group." "Maybe some people put us at the head of it but it's something we never championed. "We didn't come up in the funk-thrash thing," Mike Bordin said to Spin in 1990. Rather presciently, the band weren’t entirely comfortable being lumped in with anybody else in the nascent funk or rap rock and metal camps however – something they would later echo when looked at as godfathers for the nu metal movement at the end of the decade. While they were by no means the first to do it, Faith No More helped ferment a new breed of metal that could amorphously move between everything from funk, soul and R&B right up to thrash and hardcore. They aren’t bad songs, but they weren’t us either.” But back then thrash was just a subgenre the biggest songs were Love In An Elevator and Still Of The Night, stuff like that. We also loved Slayer that’s been well documented.
“We really identified with bands like Metallica because they came in with this punk rock energy. “Before Nirvana blew it all up, there were people in the metal community that were holding tight to it all,” drummer Mike Bordin told Hammer. Their idea of what pop is was what helped to make pop different.”
“In their mind Faith No More was pop music, but the reality was that they weren’t they later became part of the pop milieu thanks to the juggernaut that was Epic. “The band definitely thought The Real Thing was more radio-friendly or accessible,” said producer Matt Wallace in 2019. But Faith No More were a different band now gone was the slapdash charm of the Chuck Mosley-era, they were now confident genre-melding masters of alternative metal. To a man, the unanimous choice was Epic, the record’s second song and one which stylistically harkened back to the proto-rap-metal of We Care A Lot, a song which had seen the band chart in the UK four years previous. Lead single From Out Of Nowhere had disappeared without a trace in the US in October 1989, so as the year approached its end the label decided to try a different tactic they let the band pick the next single. But if The Real Thing was Faith No More selling out, they were doing an exceptionally bad job of it.