A Year of Blind Spots: Slipknot

Joe is working through a list of albums that he considers "blind spots," i.e. albums that he's never heard but feels like he should.

1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die:

Slipknot came out of nowhere (well, Des Moines, Iowa) in 1999 to unleash this concussive album of the world's metal fans. It features a vocalist who can rap, sing, scream, or growl, alongside the brutality of a thrash-metal band with extra percussion, plus the versatility of a DJ and a sampler. The music—a dense mixture of sledgehammer drums (a kit plus two sets of percussion), avalanches of guitar, turntable noise—may have been too hardcore for a mainstream audience, and the band was overlooked by the masses, save for their imposing physical presence: Slipknot were nine psychopaths in jumpsuits (numbered, to distinguish them) and horror masks, who brutally assaulted their chosen sonic weaponry, and often each other, in a cacophony of measured mayhem.

Unsurprisingly, Slipknot took off like a rocket (platinum in the United States, gold in the UK). After a brief opening sample (an elderly woman opining "The whole thing... I think it's sick"), "(sic)" violently sets the tone for the album. "Eyeless" mixes a drum 'n' bass loop with merciless guitar riffage; "Surfacing" alternates piercing feedback with scratching; "Spit It Out" is speed metal meets rap. It was the softer sections of the single "Wait and Bleed" that first grabbed at an audience beyond regular metal fans, though. And the music's close association with extreme sports such as freestyle motorcross and skateboarding also gave the group an immediate avenue into a wealth of fans both young and old.

Joe:

Five years is a long enough time. I am seeing that now. I didn't do this on purpose, revisit another Slipknot album almost exactly five years after crassly laying out my opinion about this music in Record Club during that strenuous COVID-haze summer of '21. This album found me. I was paging through 1001 Albums, as one is wont to do, and saw Slipknot, and said something along the lines of: "Huh." Saying that I like this self-titled debut from these fucking freaks would be fucking boring. I'm a boring person, and predictable.

Isn't it fascinating, though? It always seems to be moving in the same direction. I move from not liking to liking. The appreciation grows, either from uncaring to caring deeply, or hating unconditionally to recognizing distantly. Always in the direction of optimism, at the very least. How often do I spend this much time contemplating something and find that I like it less than I did before? Rarely. That's just not how it works. I'm glad the unfair Slipknot review set a baseline extremely low, and gave this band and this sound plenty of room to grow. I liked listening to Slipknot this week.

The only thing that's changed is this normal, boring growth. I didn't realize anything about Slipknot that I didn't know before today. The quality of the music is static. I basically don't disagree with any observations I made in that review from a half-decade ago, beside the grade halfway down the page. I am challenged by this sound, I find solace in what it means to people, I could always and have always engaged with it through the lens of artistry and not anything else. That's still all true. The only thing that's changed is me. That makes all the difference, but of course, again, it also makes things boring. I'm boring in ways that Slipknot never manages to be on this album.

I feel like I have some more to say about "what it means to like Slipknot," but perhaps those thoughts don't have a place here, or it's not the time, and are too familial or political or something. I focus instead on the sounds, the quality of the music that this column is ostensibly built to address. I think about the high-pitched squealing hook that keeps returning to "Surfacing," as just one example of many. How it creates an unease that is finally released when the vocals crash in with "Fuck everything! Fuck this world!" and so on. Slipknot manages to break through the silly and into the profound. Occasionally.

I was explaining the "new music literally hurts the brain" theory to a friend the other night, and I think that this theory is the thing that might adequately explain why I had such an adverse reaction to Slipknot five years ago (other competing theories: living in a vacation home with family members strains my relationships with them temporarily; I am an alcoholic). I was not in tune with what Slipknot was/is doing, and it hurt my brain, and I lashed out. But through pain comes strength, and here I am, not appalled but instead utterly fascinated with the debut album of a band that seems custom build to appall. I'm good now. That's just how it always goes.