Slipknot - True children of the corn
by C.J. Cain

Yeah, sure, Iowa is the land of bountiful cornfields, but it is a vast wasteland when it comes to music. The state's dismal place in the annals of rock is being the site of the Buddy Holly plane crash and home of the Everly Brothers. Iowa is a state where anhydrous ammonia is still also used for its intended purpose - to fertilize farm fields. Until recently, the hardest thing to come out of Iowa was the Iowa Test of Basic Skills, and personally I was too always too wired to spend all day filling in dots, so I colored in patterns or dirty words. My parents wondered if I was a problem child because my scores said I should be dropped back about three grades. Nine equally wired children have recently emerged from the Iowa cornfields, but unlike the movie, where the adults from a small fictitious town are done away with, these lads have a wider focus. They are real, they are Slipknot, and their message to society, according to their own lyrics, is, "You're goin' down, this is a war!"

How does a path to world domination begin in Iowa? "No. 6," also known as custom percussionist Shawn Crahan, explained, "We got tired of going to bars around Des Moines and laying down serious money to see some f**kin' cover band. That's bullshit, getting paid for playing other people's music. When we got together we always knew we were going to play what the f**k we wanted to play, not the current trend." What were the reactions of people who came into a bar or club not knowing about Slipknot? "They knew right away that it was a f**kin' war!"

The stage is a virtual battlefield, with the nine-member band unleashing an unrelenting barrage of heavy artillery. The percussion batallion consists of No. 6, along with No. 3 (custom percussionist Chris Fehn) and No.1 (drummer Joey Jordison). Nos. 7, 4 and 2 (guitarist Mic Thompson, guitarist James Root and bassist Paul Gray) provide the armor-piercing riffs; Nos. 0 and 5 (DJ Sid Wilson and sampler Craig Jones) fire from the latest high-tech weaponry, and No. 8 (vocalist Corey Taylor) delivers the verbal onslaught. Did you read that right? Did that say a sampler and DJ? That immediately removes the band from the heavy genre and makes them rappers, right? DEAD WRONG! When asked how the band classifies its music, when everybody else wants to put them in a genre, Shawn vehemently stated, "It's Slipknot. It's not any f**kin' genre. Sure we incorporate parts of many types of music into our own, but we still play what we want to play."

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