Slipknot (25th Anniversary Edition)

I don’t know about you, but I’ve felt the hate rise up in me. Not a hate to be processed or sublimated into something useful: It just rose, like a wave of nausea or a tumor, something that needs to be purged immediately. This is the best way to understand the endurance of “Wait and Bleed” and really everything else about Slipknot’s 1999 self-titled debut. It’s hate with no beginning and no end in a style of metal with no nostalgia for the past, no hope for the future, just a pure grasp on the here and now. It’s pretty zen stuff for an album so monomaniacally misanthropic that the only way to top it was with a song called “People = Shit.”

This isn’t the first reissue of Slipknot, but it’s the first trying to class up the joint—arriving with a slick new cover of “the nine,” dozens of demos and alternate tracks justifying a 6xLP box set that costs $250. Needless to say, that one is sold out, but for $4, you can get a used copy of the original in “acceptable” condition that will provide the truest experience of Slipknot in its day: pulling a scratched CD from a CaseLogic binder and fast-forwarding through all five minutes of silence after “Scissors” to get to the hidden tracks. Still, that vinyl comes in a “blood spatter” variant, so it’s not too classy to contradict the sentiment of this fall’s “Here Comes the Pain” arena tour. This, of course, refers to the Carlito’s Way sample that introduces “(sic)” as if it were “Des Moines’ Finest”.

Beyond mobilizing the Maggot Dollar, the 25th anniversary edition of Slipknot argues for legacy, a critical significance that doesn’t come from being one of the select few metal bands of the 21st century that gets nominated for Grammys almost every time they drop. This day arrives for all A-list nu-metal artists: Korn is actually a harrowing trauma response to Jonathan Davis’ childhood bullying and the guitars embrace an avant-garde atonality that could’ve passed for Sonic Youth if they grew up listening to Cypress Hill. System of a Down’s politics and Deftones’ art-rock pretensions put them on the right side of history (except when they weren’t). Even Limp Bizkit can be appreciated as a kind of hyper-heteronormative camp.

Slipknot comes with the most baggage, quite literally—which part of “guy from Iowa in a clown mask and orange jumpsuit headbanging over a turntable” soured the deal for you? Nothing about Slipknot—the costumes, the actual rapping over downtuned metal riffs, the Iowa of it all—can be separated from the whole. Especially the Iowa part, which was as much of a symbolic anti-hero on Slipknot as New York City would be for the Strokes or Interpol. Slipknot’s aimless Midwestern anguish was not tied to a specific industry or politics as it was in John Mellencamp or Bob Seger songs, nor was it the landlocked blues emerging from Big Ten and Big 12 college towns around this time. The Everly Brothers and Arthur Russell were from the Hawkeye State, but even the most generous reading of history will find not a single note of impactful pop music produced by anyone actually living in Iowa prior to 1999.

In their first Rolling Stone interview, Slipknot are introduced as a band completely at odds with their message: “Few of the members’ parents are divorced, and, with the exception of a dark period or two, all have led wholesome American lives.” Without the trauma or politics, Slipknot could simply home in on the emotion, the kind that’s so ridiculous that it makes more sense when it’s expressed by nine guys in clown outfits. “I’m hearing voices but all they do is complain!” Corey Taylor yelps during “Eyeless,” and Slipknot stays on message for 50 minutes, pushing each other to be all aggro, all the time. The only excuse for the tempo to relent is bringing back the nasty tremolo riff, but slower.

In fact, Slipknot is best understood as the first post-nu-metal album; not in the sense that it transcended the genre, but because it’s the first that emerged entirely from it. Flash back five years: Korn’s 1994 self-titled album was an even greater existential threat to metal than Nevermind because the call was coming from inside the house. No matter how many bands swapped spandex for flannel, grunge was still rock music and everyone could at least agree on Sabbath or Led Zeppelin. Meanwhile, Korn notoriously claimed that their influences dated back no further than Faith No More and Red Hot Chili Peppers, all while integrating production tricks of Dr. Dre and DJ Muggs.

But at least those were popular acts. Slipknot will tell you that their riffs were derived from death, black, and thrash metal, that their samplers and turntables were used for abrasive texture rather than as beatmaking tools. There is absolutely some pop in Slipknot. Craig Jones splices the “Amen” breakbeat into “Eyeless,” inventing Vein.fm and probably 90 percent of modern-day metalcore. Taylor’s vocals are intelligible (except for the “Liberate,” which really does sound like a cantankerous Donkey Kong singing “liberate bananas”) and, in the case of “Wait and Bleed,” actually melodic—a compact pop-punk anthem getting the worst locker-room beating of its life.

The jumpsuits and the numeric aliases could be viewed as a metaphor for the dehumanization of American culture, but en masse, the uniforms made them look like a football team, a bank heist crew, or a military regiment. Though gawked at as “the first death-metal jam band,” Slipknot were the product of strict discipline and, when needed, hazing. Ross Robinson had already made a name for himself as a nu-metal whisperer for outsiders like Sepultura and Vanilla Ice, and Slipknot solidified his rep as the nu-metal drill sergeant, the guy who relied on enhanced emotional interrogation to win the Loudness Wars. “(sic)” had been kicking in various forms since Slipknot’s earlier incarnation as the Pale Ones, and it required Robinson throwing flower pots at drummer Joey Jordison to really make it pop.

Those two were accomplices more than enemies, though; Robinson amplified the demands Jordison made of his bandmates as nu-metal’s first master technician. Slipknot had sheared off most of the instrumental excess that came with coming up in Des Moines’ death metal scene (home to band names like Modifidious, Vexx, and Inveigh Catharsis), but not Jordison. His kick drum could replicate the sound of a jet engine or an industrial thresher. And then it gets punctuated by the sound of a guy bashing a steel shipping container or a beer keg, a perfect merger of virtuosity and dumb violence; I imagine this is what Lars Ulrich thought he was hearing during the St. Anger recording.

Though Slipknot is a nearly flawless execution of a single idea, Slipknot, the band, were still figuring some things out. “Tattered & Torn” and especially “Prosthetics” are Slipknot’s “experimental tracks,” showcases for Jones and turntablist Sid Wilson that argue for an alternate history living out their earliest dreams of signing to Ipecac and touring with Fantômas or Mr. Bungle. “Spit It Out” lives on the complete opposite end; this is the song that got the interest of Robinson and Roadrunner Records and sounds like Static-X in a Spirit Halloween. When Taylor remembers that Slipknot are a metal band, they sound like the subject of a congressional investigation. When he raps, he sounds like the backpacker you’d avoid in the school cafeteria.

The most revealing document of Slipknot figuring it all out comes not from the bounty of demos and live cuts, but the official video for “Wait and Bleed.” Though Slipknot are playing in front of a dazed, crazed crowd of thousands, it doesn’t look glamorous, because it’s not; the footage is from Mancow’s Lazer Luau II, a 1999 shock-jock radio festival at Ankeny Airfield in Des Moines. The video is overlain by a hazy scrim, like the camera was sitting on the tarmac in the oppressive Iowa summer. Compare that to the live clip for “People = Shit,” off their 2001 follow-up, Iowa. In “Wait and Bleed,” Taylor mutters, “This song is called ‘Wait and Bleed.’” Before the beat drops in “People = Shit” he hollers, “Let me see your fucking hands in the air, London!” They now have higher-end, custom-made gear, they do crowdwork, they headbang in unison instead of flopping all over the stage. Even if you still get them confused with Insane Clown Posse, there’s no denying how incredible it looks.

Yet by 2001, there was a lingering sense that this style of music was on its way out. Korn’s Issues, Limp Bizkit’s Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water, “Back to School,” all of it was still doing numbers, but the returns were diminishing; Linkin Park proved that nu-metal was more likely to merge with their TRL competitors than vanquish them. I distinctly remember leafing through an issue of Rolling Stone with Slipknot on the cover and a four-star review of the Strokes’ Is This It, and thinking it could be a cultural turning point à la Guns N’ Roses and Nirvana duking it out at the Video Music Awards. The next issue was their 9/11 tribute; Clear Channel stations banned songs ranging from 311’s “Down” to Drowning Pool’s “Bodies” and Jimmy Eat World had to temporarily self-title their breakthrough album. No one knew what America needed to heal at that time, but it probably wasn’t “People = Shit.”

Yet Slipknot didn’t just survive, they somehow got bigger. Despite being even more extreme and abrasive than its predecessor, Iowa debuted at No. 3 on the Billboard charts in America and was even more of a sensation in the UK (note where the “People = Shit” video was filmed). Slipknot were an arena rock band developing arena rock problems (drugs, intraband fistfights, shady management), and they never looked back.

Slipknot is being reissued at a time when their influence can be traced to actual hip-hop, ranging from Rico Nasty to Rxk Nephew, while the most popular bands in metal wear masks. But where Ghost and Sleep Token evoke theater and prog-rock as a means of escaping everyday drudgery, Slipknot reveled in it, like a low-budget slasher flick or backyard wrestling league or a shock-jock street prank—the things bored and angry kids created in the ’90s because there was nothing better on TV.

Isn’t that the problem with Slipknot, though? Wasn’t that the problem with Ozzfest and Woodstock ’99 and nu-metal in general? Is it any wonder that AJ Soprano, one of the most entitled and annoying characters in television history, rocked a burgundy Slipknot windbreaker? The aggression on Slipknot is indeed a luxury item; why else does Taylor rhyme “malevolent” with “decadent” in the very first song? Slipknot’s entire lyrical syllabus is contained in the chorus: 1) Fuck this shit, 2) I’m sick of it, 3) You’re goin’ down, 4) This is a war. Not necessarily in that order. Much like AJ Soprano, Slipknot recognized the dysfunction and façade of every American institution and struggled to articulate it any more artfully than “that’s dicked up.” That doesn’t make it any less true.

Slipknot: Slipknot (25th Anniversary Edition)

$40 at Rough Trade

$40 at Amazon