By this, I refer to recent events with Slipknot.
I will lay my cards out on the table here - I'm not a fan of them. Now, before anybody starts to get on their high horse I did buy their so called ‘début album’ (which, was actually ‘Mate Feed Kill Repeat’ and not their self titled album) and I gave it a fair go. Granted, it was musically interesting for a short spell of time but to be honest I got bored of them very quickly - in fact, bored of the album in the space of a week and then sold it on. I give many bands a fair ‘crack of the whip’. and I've even checked out things like Bring Me The Horizon and Suicide Silence (which I also dislike) as I am a Metal fan who does give a new band I've never heard of a fair chance before I declare and out and out dislike of them.
The thing that done it for me with Slipknot, was the fact that the band appear to be a bit of a quasi-engineered gimmick; the whole thing of band members with a strange identity had been done before (like Kiss for instance). Also, at the time when I was into metal (which was a good few years by the time that album came out) the whole Metal world for me had changed for something that was worse - as I got into Metal at a time when Metal was (before Nu-Metal, Skater stuff and things like Blink 182, Green Day, Offspring, Korn and such); and this particular band (amongst a slew of stuff that popped up) was one that left me cold.
Metal had become a completely alien place in some respects, and so I dutifully carried on and missed this particular bandwagon. I use the term quasi engineered due to the fact that ‘Mate Feed Kill Repeat’ was a very individual and interesting piece of work, and Ross Robinson had heavily stylised their sound for the Nu Metal generation, effectively muting the guitar solos and making the band sound like a radio friendly unit shifter. This was made more prevalent with their later albums when they involved more dynamics and variety into their sound; and I always felt that Mushroomhead were far superior, pre-dated Slipknot and were often overlooked.
As much as I don’t like them, they appear to strike a chord and ‘the feels’ (as the kids say) for many people. One thing that I will acknowledge is the fact that they are clearly influenced by some of the more extreme areas of Metal and are nevertheless responsible as an important ‘gateway band’ that got more people into Metal and also gave people a thirst for this glorious form of music and got them into even more bands, made new friends, and became part of a collective they felt they belonged to when mainstream society had otherwise left a cold taste in their collective mouths with bland manufactured pop music. This, is also something worthy of commendation.
From what I interpret of recent news, the departure of Joey Jordison and the feelings about this is probably going a bit too far overboard; many bands have drummers or guitarists leave with randomly variable results; some bands it makes no difference, some bands it can affect them dramatically - for worse or for better. From what I understand, the band members have a lot of different things going on and naturally they are finding it difficult to progress due to the death of Paul Grey (as did Metallica when Cliff Burton died). Therefore, I believe that it won’t necessarily be the end of the band as of yet (at the time that this blog was originally composed) and people going as far to say they are ‘mourning’ the departure of a band member is somewhat overkill.
Sadly, in the ‘information age’ you could be forgiven for thinking that any polar opposite opinion is strictly ‘verboten’. Don’t get me wrong, I love my music and I love being a part of the alternative scene but I feel that there has been some over the top fanaticism that is lacking perspective which can ruin it for everybody else - which should be left to the likes of Justin Bieber fans, or whatever is popular this week to ‘The Normalloes’. I have genuinely lamented the departure of bands, band members and the death of band members, notably the deaths of Chuck Schuldiner, Terje Bakken, Quorthon and Pete Steele hit me particularly hard and I will actually go as far to lay my cards on the table and admit to shedding a tear about the news.
But there is ONE thing for certain - if somebody disagreed about it I didn't go shoving it down their throats and calling out the ‘Hate Police’ like some people on the Internet have done because I dared to challenge what I believed to be their ‘Tin Gods’; one person’s tin god is someone else's sacred cow - and not everybody can be expected to hold the same opinion. Therefore, as a consequence I will never fashion what I stand up for to suit anybody else. In fact, the more something appears to be a bandwagon the more that I am inclined to challenge it, as herd conformity should not be a default pattern of life.
Otherwise, we might as well become North Korea Jnr and be done with it. And that, isn't the best way of doing things, is it?
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