Adam Yoe on Slipknot

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Nearly 20 years ago, nine masked misanthropes catapulted themselves not only into the public consciousness, but graced magazine covers, Billboard, and end of year Best Of lists. Slipknot's self-titled debut found itself atop another list: incidentally, one of very little consequence: my shitlist. As is the rite of passage for anyone getting into underground music, I found myself casting my net of negativity as wide as the mainstream would allow. Gatekeeping, as it were, was a foreign concept I’d yet to hear and was years from grasping. As malformed though my gate was, I kept it proudly, shunning bands I haphazardly deemed careerist, as if dreaming of a major label paycheck was somehow a personal slight. If I’m truly being honest, what kept me away wasn’t the band. Ultimately, it was the self-anointed Slipknot superfans lovingly dubbed “Maggots.” The tail-end of the nineties saw the casual Slipknot fan bearing the brunt of pre-meme culture, though we were years from thumbing through social media. Had we the technology, I assure you timelines would have been filled with a litany of jabs at the oft-maligned fans. Imagine if you will, the metallicized Juggalo: the lonely misunderstood outcast, cursing their life sentence of being unwillingly born uninformed in a fly-over state. Frankly, this portrayal of the “false” metalhead was enough to send me running in the other direction. I couldn’t have been more wrong. It's now 2018. I've still never listened to Slipknot. Their debut now imminently in preparation to throw its twentieth birthday bash, perhaps it's time I finally suck it up and listen, as we’re currently in the midst of a reappraisal of sorts. The generation weaned on nu-metal, the most spoiled of all mother's milk, has begun to reintroduce and reappropriate the influence the 'Knot betrothed them all those years ago. Vein's "Errorzone", a hardcore high watermark, is loaded with digital breakbeats and tin-drum snare that shares DNA with nu-metal. Code Orange, whose "Forever" in 2017 mixed their breakdown-heavy stew with Fear Factory's mechanical warfare of a sound, even going to far as to have Corey Taylor guest on a recent EP. There's a litany of current hardcore bands like Sanction and Typecaste openly wearing influence from bands that older heads had readily cast off at the height of their powers. That's failing to mention the crop of straight-up radio ready Nu-Metal Revival acts like Cane Hill or DED (do yourself a favor and don't follow those threads!). Almost 19 years to the date after it was released, I did what any self-respecting adult would do: I listened to the self-titled debut by Slipknot while trespassing in an abandoned paper mill. How is it, you ask? That's a loaded question, but I found that time has forgiven what I first found to be sins of the tallest order. At first blush, it casually and aggressively appeals to the teen that still lives within me. It's rife with vague sloganeering, nihilistic and violent in a way only discarded youth will find common ground with. The album's first wave of songs are anthems not for the marginalized, but for those that think they are, possessing an outsider "ism" that latches onto hormonal detachment brilliantly. Suburban blight and cul-de-sac alienation abound, it treads in waters that Reznor and Manson swam first. I found very little to dislike about it even if it's a complete and total fucking mess of breakbeats, tribal percussion, and turntable theatrics. In much the same way High School is oftentimes a garbage fire of hormones, confusion, and directionless anger; there's a rare and unique romance to music that exists as little more than a middle finger. This time around, I direct that at my past critic. Far too stuffy to give it a chance, I missed the opportunity to indulge the acne-scarred, husky young punk dirtying his fingers in the underground. Slipknot was and is completely necessary. Every generation has it’s stepping stone into the recesses of underground culture. Perhaps that’s the reason you’ll never find me disparaging Green Day, a band I’ll vehemently defend as they did the same thing for me in 1993 that Slipknot did for the next generation. Though it's unlikely I will ever listen again with such intention, "Surfacing" will now be a fixture, it's laughably obscene "fuck it all, fuck this world, fuck everything that you stand for" a jilted rallying cry that I'll gladly pass on to the next generation or the next dejected weirdo that reminds me I was that fuck-up once, too. For a minute, I was a maggot... and I liked it.