Nü Metal Nürsday, Issue One: Iowa Nice through 25 Years of Slipknot

Weird day, huh. More ways than one. Yep. I don't want to talk about it; you don't wanna talk about it. We both kinda wanna talk about it. Yeah. Hmm. Well. You know.

That's right–it's Nü Metal Nürsday! The first edition of my many recurring ramblings on the genre we all owe so much too. And today, I want to talk about these guys that wear crazy masks and play some real wild and wacky tunes. They also came up in Iowa, just a couple hours from me. They are our number 1 cultural export in my humble opinion (eat shit, John Wayne). That's right, I'm talking about Slipknot.

Last Friday, September 5th, the nu-metal titans and faces of most of my t shirts from 2008-2013 released the 25th Anniversary Deluxe edition of their self-titled debut album. I'm not a hundred percent sure why, as the album was released in the summer of 1999, which was 26 years ago. They were just letting it cook, I guess? Maybe this is typical and I just haven't been paying attention? I don't know. Nonetheless, they made this cool web-1.0-style site for it, and that was nice of them to do. It looks very nice. Good job, Slipknot.

Over the weekend, I gave the reissue a few listens. And I think we should really get into it. The dual guitars sound crunchier than ever, and they really found the right balance in the mix for the DJ and audio samples. I was surprised by the nuances found in the Wall of Sound and...Nah nah nah, I'm messin' with you, I'm not actually reviewing it. I actually don't think this was even remastered or remixed at all besides some bonus stuff. Could you imagine talking like that. About music?? I don't know, man, I like a lot of the songs on there. There's a few I don't care for as much. The remixes and demos don't do a lot for me. But overall, I had a good time re-listening to these songs, because I usually do. You probably know by this point in your life if you would like to listen to Slipknot by Slipknot. If you don't, find this album and listen to "Eyeless," "(sic)," "Wait and Bleed," and uhhh "Scissors" and see what you think.

I am much more interested in writing about Slipknot for what they represent as a cultural entity and what they represent to me. Because, yes, I have lived a life where Slipknot represents something to me and the least I can get for that is some poems and newsletters.

My relationship with the band has ebbed and flowed throughout the course of my life, but it goes far enough back that I genuinely do not remember a world without Slipknot. I remember getting scared over their posters on my cousins' bedroom walls at a family gathering when I would have been four or five. I remember being six and seeing their bit on Conan when I stayed up too late one night. Hell, I remember their cameo in Rollerball (2002).

The peak of my Slipknot fandom, though, my Maggot Days, if I may, started in the 8th grade and stayed strong through most of high school. My uniform for a lot of those years was one of my 22 Slipknot T shirts (yes, I counted) and one of three pairs of baggy, torn carpenter jeans. It is really really cool and awesome and very, very sick that I was into all this in the late aughts and early '10s, which is now looking like apparently the only stretch of time that everyone hated all of this shit and thought it was very uncool? Oh well.

As a teenager, the contrarianism was the point for me anyway. If they were at peak popularity, I don't know if I would have fallen in love with the music the same way I did when I stole my older brother's iPod for a day in 8th grade and listened to their third album on repeat for the first time. This was about a decade into their career. They had released 2008's All Hope Is Gone to commercial success, but tepid reviews that alleged the album to be too radio-friendly. They were firmly cemented as an institution in heavy music by this point, but that music in and of itself had returned to the margins by then. The band then went on hiatus in 2009, the year I really had just hopped on the broken down bandwagon.

We don't have to get into Trauma, or anything like that (no free trauma sorry, that's what the poems are for), but my teenage years could have been better–could have certainly been worse, but could have been better, and let's just say that Slipknot is great music for when you're not having too too good of a time. I think it can be great music for when you are having too too good a time too, but it really does particularly hit when your hormones are all crazy and you're up til 2 AM doing your homework every night because of your 30 hour weeks making minimum wage at K-Mart and also you don't really know how to connect with other human beings yet. It was abrasive in the same way that I had discovered the world or the universe, or I guess just people, could be abrasive. Towards me, towards others. Songs with titles like "The Heretic Anthem" or "The Virus of Life" or of course, "People = Shit," felt like ways of getting back at those vague powers that may be, even if they ultimately weren't. It felt meaningful to proverbially or maybe just literally scream at the sky a little bit and try to ask God what the heck is up.

The bio of my MySpace page when I was 13, for a short time, read "I'm not pretty, and I'm not cool. I'm fat and I'm ugly and I'm proud. So fuck you." And while that was really hard to admit and type out and will make it very hard for me to hit publish on this, it's a lyric that really was and honestly probably still is the essence of what drew me to the band. It comes from the song "I Am Hated" on their album Iowa, and, to me, is also one of their most Iowan lyrics. This term wouldn't have been contemporary with the release of this album, but the line feels, to me, like a response to the passive aggressive obsession with decorum inherent to the oft-referenced "Iowa Nice" crowd. Iowa Nice, maybe real and good in some ways but defined largely, to me, by gritted toothed smiles and emotional and social repression. The line is a refusal of pretense. In interviews I remember watching feverishly on Youtube in the computer lab in high school, the members of the band often described Iowa as a dismal, hopeless place (and I haven't seen Rihanna here one durn time). In a 2002 interview, lead singer, Corey Taylor said that the band is, "is all about reacting to Iowa," and described the state as, "a very bitter, bleak place, basically the worst part of the Bible Belt" that is, "run by old people who make sure that there is nothing for young people, so they end up fucking and taking drugs for something to do."

And let me tell you, as someone who has been in Iowa for 30 years, he ain't totally wrong, not now or then. And I think the pretension and repression that the band's lyrics decry, and that I think is inherent to what we refer to as "Iowa Nice" is largely to blame for a lot of this.

And so, of course, I wrote a poem about it, written in a new, Slipknot-themed poetic form I have invented, called the Duality. I may tweak this with some more constraints, but right now, what it is is an 18-line poem, made up of 2 9-line stanzas. These two stanzas must mirror each other in some way while also hitting a sharp jump or shift or volta. Wish I could say happy reading, but it's a bummer.

Thanks for reading this edition of Nü Metal Nürsday! Talk to you next week about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990). And if you missed last week's post on my beloved Chicken Run, check it out here!