The Mouth and the Mask: Corey Taylor Isn’t Hiding Behind Anything

If you’ve had even the slightest interest in American hard rock and metal in the past 20 years, then you know Slipknot frontman Corey Taylor’s name, you know his number (eight, for infinity), and you know several different iterations of his face, including possibly his actual human one. Slipknot—the pride and bane of Des Moines, Iowa—released their self-titled debut album in 1999, nu-metal hellions clad in red jumpsuits and hideous masks, their numbers (zero through eight) far more important than their names. (A.J. Soprano was a fan.) Each member’s mask has evolved dramatically (and grotesquely) in the two decades since, right alongside the music: Slipknot’s sixth album, the wounded and vicious We Are Not Your Kind, is out Friday, and furthers the argument that they’re the most important heavy band of their era.

And also maybe the most grotesque, of course. “We’re all dressed up with nobody to kill / The rhetoric stops tonight,” Taylor screams on a concussive jam called “Birth of the Cruel.” If Slipknot didn’t seem built to last in 1999, that’s only because their apocalyptic sound and vision strongly suggested that nothing would. Their second album, 2001’s especially bleak Iowa, came out two weeks before 9/11; two of the band’s biggest hits, “Wait and Bleed” and “Left Behind,” soon got caught up in the Clear Channel radio empire’s informal ban of more than 150 songs that might offend or inflame America in the aftermath. Vol. 3 (The Subliminal Verses), from 2004, fared much better commercially; 2008’s All Hope Is Gone, which sounded like it, debuted at no. 1 on the Billboard album chart, as did 2014’s .5: The Gray Chapter, whose title paid tribute to founding bassist Paul Gray, who died in 2010.

“For the longest time, people looked at us like, ‘They’re just a band in masks—the only reason you’re popular is because you’re in masks,’” Taylor tells me now. “Well, no. There’s a little more to it than that. There’s a ton of fucking bands that wear masks. There’s a reason we’re at the top.”

Slipknot has weathered various internal calamities and lineup changes, including the departure of drummer Joey Jordison in 2013 and percussionist Chris Fehn in 2019. (The band has a new percussionist, code-named Tortilla Man, but has declined to reveal who or what he is.) But that chaos is its own constant, and so is Taylor, a gregarious and profane Renaissance man who also fronts the long-running hard-rock band Stone Sour and has written four books, including 2015’s You’re Making Me Hate You and, most recently, 2017’s sociopolitical treatise America 51: A Probe Into the Realities That Are Hiding Inside “The Greatest Country in the World.” (“Some of you motherfuckers,” he writes in the first chapter, “are absolute morons.”)

Taylor is as buoyantly black-humored as you’d expect and politically more progressive than many onlookers assume: When a 2016 Gawker post casually linked Slipknot to Trump-inspired white supremacy, Taylor fired back, defending his band specifically and heavy music in general from such stereotyping. Taylor’s very intense Twitter account makes clear that he’s no Trump fan; We Are Not Your Kind takes its title from a line in the band’s 2018 stand-alone single “All Out Life,” an especially anthemic call to arms that is also, in a Slipknot sort of way, a call for unity. This band has always been deeper than you thought, and heavier than you could possibly imagine.

In late July, Taylor and I talked on the phone about being “woke,” wearing masks without hiding behind them, policing the term rock star (Taylor has taken offense to Kanye West’s approach to this topic), antagonizing your fans politically, making peace with your hometown (Slipknot will headline the Iowa State Fair on Saturday night), and churning out apocalyptic music for 20 years in the face of an apocalypse that never quite comes, or at least hasn’t yet. “Guess what,” he says. “The world keeps turning, and I’m going to keep fucking talking.” These are excerpts from our conversation.

Hey, Corey, how’s it going?

Oh, just up to my tits in work. You know how it is.

Well, I’m sorry to hear that, and I’m sorry to add to it.

No, hey, you know what? It’s a damn good problem to have. It’s when everything’s too quiet that I’m like, “Was it something I said again?”

That’s a good point. I’m here in Columbus, Ohio, and it’s like a 10-hour drive for me, but I’m still considering driving to the Iowa State Fair just to see Slipknot, because I think that would be awesome. Will that show be different in some fundamental way than any other show on the tour? Is there an Iowa-specific intensity or camaraderie or animosity still?

I would love to say yes. Des Moines is such a weird microcosm, dude. It’s one of those places where the majority of everyone is so stoked that a band like Slipknot came from Iowa. But then there’s everyone else who was there when it happened who are like, “Well, you can headline Download, but it’s not like you’re playing the fair or anything.” And you’re just kinda like, “What?” It’s like this weird, demonstrative, like passive-aggressive just judgment that happens. And it’s really an Iowa-specific thing. Anyone else would be stoked that we came from Iowa. And it’s such a Des Moines thing, to be honest. And so I go back and people are like, “Oh, oh, you play Rock in Rio. Let me know when you played the fair.”

Yeah.

I’m like, “Rock in Rio de Janeiro, 750,000 people.”

Right.

So in a lot of ways playing the fair is the biggest eff-you to everyone who has talked behind our backs since we left. Mind you, this is not about the fans who are genuinely stoked about the fact that we come from there. The fact that we’re coming home, the fact that we’re playing the fair, for a lot of people—and this is no joke—the Iowa State Fair is hallowed ground, because some of the biggest concerts we ever had were there.

Looking back at reviews of your first few records, a lot of people assumed that you guys really, really hated Iowa, and assumed that most of your music was about how you’d really, really love to get out of Des Moines and never, ever come back. Is that accurate, or is there some projection there?

There’s a little accuracy to it, certainly. And it was a totally different place then. It had more in common with, like, Deadwood than it did with any other fucking metropolis. It was a—God, what’s the best way to say it? It was a small city. It wasn’t exactly a big town, because it was bigger than a big town. But it definitely had a small-town mentality. Everything was very incestuous. There wasn’t a lot of money coming into the state. And they stop big things from coming into Des Moines, if it feels like it threatens their ecosystem. So in a lot of ways it’s insulated from the outside world.

And for us, we were ravenous. We felt caged. And we would have to leave town to go find things. Like, before the big bad internet, you had to drive at least three hours to find entertainment. So we would drive, and luckily, being right in the middle, we would drive to Kansas City, to Chicago, to St. Louis, to Omaha, to Minneapolis—we had to get out to find CDs, for God’s sake. So it was tough. There was very much this feeling of, “We are not meant for this city. We have outgrown this city mentally.” It was one of those things where we hated it for different reasons. We didn’t hate our friends. We didn’t hate our family. We just had to get out of there if we were going to make something.

Are you all pretty much out now? Do you live in Iowa in any meaningful sense at this point?

I still have a house there, yeah. I don’t know for how much longer, though. My grandmother just passed away not too long ago. She was the most important member of my family to me. My kids are getting older—my son’s going to be 18 in a couple years and will probably move away. I spend the majority of my time in Las Vegas. I still have a house in Iowa, so I bounce back and forth, and I still have really good friends there. I still have a presence there. Probably my heart will always be there. But it’s one of those things where it’s like, I appreciate it for what it is. But once those things that I appreciate are not there anymore, then it’ll be time to find a new home.

Part of the message of “All Out Life” is that new music is not necessarily better than old music. I’ve spent 20 years now writing about whether or not rock is dead, or whether or not the idea of a rock star is dead. Does that term, “rock star,” mean something totally different in 2019 versus 1999?

Well, yeah, definitely. The funny thing is that everybody gets so bent out of shape when, like, hip-hop stars or pop stars take the term “rock star.” Everybody gets so, “But they’re not playing rock. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” Hold on a second. How many years did—and this is no offense to anyone—how many years did white musicians appropriate black music? And how many years did those wonderful musicians not get any goddamn credit? And talk to me about you getting pissed because a hip-hop star’s talking about being a rock star. Now you can call yourself whatever you want. You know what I’m saying?

My umbrage came when it was somebody saying that they were the biggest rock star on the planet, when you still got people like Paul McCartney alive. David Bowie was still alive. I was like, “No. Pump the brakes, kid. You are about five minutes old compared to those people. Mick Jagger is still sucking air. You are not the biggest fucking rock star on the planet.” It’s also when people start calling certain types of music rock that just blatantly isn’t. That’d be like calling Slipknot hip-hop. People would get pissed if they called us that. We have every right to get mad when certain people call certain music “rock.” It’s fucking not. You’re not being nominated in that goddamn category for the Grammys, as shitty as that fucking shit show is. But don’t come at me with that. It’s like, you can have “rock star,” I don’t give a shit about that. Because you’re just saying “pop star,” basically. But there is a difference when it comes to the genre.

I think when “All Out Life” came out, you told Zane Lowe that We Are Not Your Kind would be one of the darkest chapters in Slipknot’s history. But you also said that in the studio, there was a lot more positivity in the room than usual. I assumed that the music would be at its darkest when you personally were at your darkest, but maybe it doesn’t work like that. Is there any correlation between—

Oh, I was.

Oh yeah?

I mean, I was. Oh God, yes. I was. Trust me. And trust me, it was a crazy moment where I realized I needed my dudes. I needed my dudes in Slipknot. I’m looking up at my fiancée, but I needed my dudes, I needed my people. A few years ago, I had left a very, very toxic relationship. It did a lot of damage, a lot of damage to me. And it took a considerable amount of time to work my way through that. And luckily I had Slipknot music waiting for me to help with that. It’s taken a lot of therapy to kind of figure things out, but at the same time, I had this wonderful vessel available to me, and I could work it out. So not only was it great to reconnect with this band at a time when we really needed each other, but it was also great to be able to unleash those demons, man. And be able to really say the things that maybe I felt like I had never been able to say in that situation.

And when the chains came off, dude, whoa, holy shit. It was a vitriol. The only thing that didn’t come out of me was the fucking black ooze that you see in those horror movies. It was some serious shit that I had to say. I’m still working through a lot of that stuff. But it was one of those weird juxtapositions where we were all at our most positive. We were really connecting, and it was time to unleash this really crazy pain that I had been holding and waiting to really let go of. And yeah, you’ll hear it. Every time I listen to the album now, I’m like, “Oh, Jesus Christ.” Like, it’s palpable.

You’ve talked about the theme of this record being about wanting to bring people together: We’re all a family. It doesn’t matter who you are, who you love, what you believe. Do you have a sense of what percentage of listeners are likely to get that message? Or is “getting it” the wrong way to look at it?

I honestly—I can’t worry about that.

Yeah.

Because when you start worrying about who’s listening, you start worrying about what you’re saying. And then you start trying to tailor that—no pun intended. It’s honestly, it’s a lot like politics. When you’re tailoring things in certain speeches and whatnot, it’s like you’re going to say this to this group, but this to the other. Fuck all that. I don’t have time for that. Like, to me, the most important thing is that people understand that there is a place where you can come and not have to worry about that shit. And hey, guess what. If you come and you’re the antithesis of what I’m trying to say, I’m going to be against you.

People need to know that. Like, if you come to our shows thinking that you’re going to fuck with people because of how they look or how they are, guess what. We ain’t friends. Because our concerts are supposed to be about the amalgam. Our concerts are supposed to be about the commingling, man. The traveling tribes coming together because they know this is the one place where they can be them-fucking-selves. And I’ve been saying that since 19-fucking-99.

Right.

I don’t know how people miss that. I catch so much shit, too: “Who would have thought Corey Taylor’s a fucking liberal?” I was like, “Are you fucking new? Have you not read my fucking lyrics? Have you not read some of my fucking interviews? Are you an idiot?” Judas Fucking Priest. And here’s the thing: You don’t have to be a liberal to want people to fucking be OK.

It’s the people who try to cut you up because people are different, those are the ones holding us back. Yeah. Duh. Of course we’re fucking different, you mook. We’re born different. Just because you and I are white doesn’t mean we’re the same. It’s the things that tie us together that make us special. We’re already different: Let’s find the things that fucking bring us together. That’s the whole fucking point of this whole goddamn thing.

So that title, that name, that motto, that slogan, “We are not your kind”—really, it was kind of a one-in-a-million shot, for me. When I wrote it, it was really just a chant. And then the more I looked at it, the more I read it, the more I really started to feel it, I realized it’s like, “Fuck, there’s something here.” And if that’s the thing that I leave behind, man, then fuck, I don’t need anything else.

Back when the whole Gawker thing happened in 2016 before the election, you said that you knew that some Slipknot fans had stopped listening to the band because of what you were saying on Twitter about Trump, but you hoped that once things settled down a bit, those fans might come back. Things obviously didn’t settle down. Is that tension still a problem at all?

I don’t know, to be honest. There’s a whole lot of Trump supporters who are very vocal when they’re like, “Keep your fucking politics to yourself.” But they don’t say that to people who agree with them. They don’t say that to artists who are conservative and may or may not support Trump, but they definitely support what conservatives believe in. So it’s like, “Oh, you just don’t want to hear me because you don’t agree with me.” OK, fuck you. That’s not the way this works. The way a dialogue works is sometimes you’re going to hear shit that you don’t fucking like. Sometimes you’re going to hear shit that you don’t agree with. That’s why this over-censorship bullshit that’s going on is fucking terrifying. Because that’s not how freedom of speech works.

Yeah.

Or some people go, “Well, that’s the last album I buy.” Well, the last time I checked, people are still buying Nikes, people are still fucking going to football games, people are still doing 100 fucking things that other people find offensive. And it’s like, “Well, guess what. The world keeps turning, and I’m going to keep fucking talking.”

How did the political climate affect We Are Not Your Kind? Did it?

It really didn’t, because I was coming from such a personal place that to me, I didn’t want to clog it down too much. I don’t want to say “rhetoric,” because it was—to me, it was more about trying to let go of the things that I’ve been kind of holding onto. So I’m hoping that people can listen to this from a personal standpoint, and hopefully, it helps them with situations in their personal life, helps them to stand up for themselves quicker, stronger, helps them get away from situations like that, helps them talk to someone about depression, about something that we’re all seeing really, really kind of come to a head right now. And I’ve always been a very, very vocal proponent for mental health and seeking therapy and talking to someone. And that’s kind of what this album is about. It’s more from a personal standpoint than anything politically.

Every new Slipknot record feels to me like the world is ending, which makes your longevity all the more impressive—you’ve got a 10-year-old record called All Hope Is Gone. Is it hard to sustain that kind of apocalyptic energy? Or is it easier now that we’re closer than ever to the actual apocalypse?

That is a fucking great question, to be honest. Honestly that album, that title was such a reflection of where we were as a band personally. Not from our career standpoint, because it was our first fucking no. 1 album, ironically. And to this day it’s bittersweet because it was our last album with Paul. It was our last album with Joey. It was tough, man. It was so decimated—the creative process was such a stressful time for us. It was so unenjoyable in a lot of ways, and yet it’s got some of our best fucking songs on it. I’m choking on the irony. Like, you’ve got to be fucking kidding me.

So I don’t know. We don’t want to be the doomsayers. We don’t want to be the town criers saying that the sky is falling. We don’t want to be that. It’s just a part of our sound. We set the tone, and yet we’ve always tried to have that positive outlook at the end. We’ve always tried to be the ones to say, “Look, there’s a reason why we’re letting this go.” It’s because we want the light. We want to feel good. So we let go of all this fucking chaos and darkness, and we hope that you let it go too. So then you can feel lighter. And you can find that palpable happiness that people are really trying to find in life.

Do you worry that you have to be miserable to make your best music?

No. Fuck no. Absolutely not. Because some of the best music I’ve ever made was like good times, man. I had such a great time making the Hydrograd album with Stone Sour. And to me, that’s one of my favorite albums. We laughed every fucking day. It was just such an enjoyable time. And we were such goofy dicks about it. That, to me, will break any stigma.

You don’t have to be miserable to make great art. You can. You know what I’m saying? But you don’t have to be, because there’s just as much energy to fucking excitement and to being stoked as there is in being miserable and dark. You’re talking about two ends of the same kind of spectrum that can create the same kind of dominant vibe. It’s when you’re going through the motions that shit stops being relevant, stops being tangible—you can sense there’s no soul to it. That’s when there’s no creative juice. You can be positive or negative and inspire a great sort of art. But if you’re just there to fucking pick up a paycheck, you might as well be fucking slinging burgers, dude.

I’ve always wondered how the masks and the numbers affect how famous you guys feel, or how cohesive the band feels. You’ve had lineup changes like any band, but given all the new masks and the fact that you guys are literally numbered, do you process those changes, and do you think your fans process those changes, the way a normal band does?

I don’t think anybody’s ever processed anything we’ve ever done normally, to be honest. We created such a weird culture for this band. We are very much our own genre at this point. When we put something out, you can absolutely identify us just from the tone. You can tell a Slipknot song just from how the music sounds. Like, you don’t even have to hear my voice. That’s what’s so cool about it.

But there’s just as much excitement behind seeing the visuals as there is about hearing the music. And that is something that I don’t think anybody’s really kind of touched on, is the fact that people anticipate the photos, and masks, and uniforms, and what’s going on with us just as much as the music. It’s a whole fucking culture. And to me, I think that’s one of the reasons why we’re still here, and still climbing, and still getting bigger after all these years, after 20 fucking years, man. In this day and age, that is almost fucking impossible.

It is.

And the fact we’re doing it in such a crazy manner, it’s rad. So I don’t think we process any of this shit normally. Our approach has always been abnormal anyway. That was one of the reasons why we wore the masks, and the coveralls, and gave people our numbers instead of our full names at first. As time has gone on, we’ve adapted, we’ve evolved. Obviously, there’s been reveals with our names and everything. I stepped out with Stone Sour; everybody else has kind of done their own thing. So we’re recognizable now. And yet the masks are still as relevant to what we do with this band as ever. I think if the masks were just a way to cover our faces, people would have been like, “Yeah, we get it.” You know what I’m saying? But because it’s such a part of the art and it’s such a part of the band and the music, people are just as excited today to see the new masks as they are to hear the new music.

I have to admit, I first got into you guys through the Iowa record, right after 9/11. And there wasn’t a lot of subtext there: I was 20-something, and angry, and scared, and that record helped. Did you have a sense at that time of a lot of new fans coming to you like that?

Later. Because you got to remember, we were blacklisted for a while. The album literally came out, what, a week before it happened. So we were gearing up for this massive run. We had already been on the road for what, five months, six months. It was fucking nuts. We did three major tours before the album was even ready to fucking go out. So we were all shocked. And then getting ready to leave, I remember I was packing that day to go on the Pledge of Allegiance Tour. Another fucking crazy ironically named tour. It was a very weird time. And then, we were pulled from radio and MTV, which had put “Left Behind” in heavy rotation—they pulled us from heavy rotation.

What people don’t realize is that as popular as Iowa was, that album didn’t sell. That album didn’t sell at all after 9/11. There was a whole warehouse full of copies of Iowa that sat, and then they fucking destroyed them because they weren’t selling. So when the dust kind of settled, and especially after Vol. 3 happened, and the demand for Slipknot became huge again, all of a sudden, Roadrunner Records, who had been sitting on a warehouse full of fucking Iowa albums, they were like, “Oh, shit, we got to reprint these.” And then they had to reprint them. Without the vellum inserts, without the chromium covers. Like, it was such short-sightedness that it was insane.

We all kind of felt, if you were a heavy band, you felt the heat of what happened with 9/11. So not only were you unable to mourn with your country for what had happened, but now it’s like, “Jesus Christ, what do we do?” Like, the overreaction was almost as crazy as the political overreaction that happened. It was a hell of a time. So as much as we appreciated the new fans coming in who were looking for a voice for that, it was tough, man. It was fucking touch-and-go for a while.

I’ve seen you described a lot as “woke,” which is obviously a very loaded and strange and often sarcastically deployed phrase. Do you take that as a compliment or an insult? Or does it not really affect you one way or the other at all?

Oh, no. One man’s “woke” is another man’s common fucking sense. Really? You got to be “woke”? It doesn’t make sense to just be decent to fucking people to see the problems that are going on, the reason why black people are so fucking angry right now because of all the violence that’s going on against them? The fact that there is absolutely a fucking reason for college athletes to fucking kneel?

Every day, not only is there a fucking video of an innocent black man or woman being fucking—I just watched one this morning. I just watched one where the kid was pulled over, they didn’t give him a reason, and then they told him he was speeding. The kid wouldn’t give his hands up; the police officer fucking held him at gunpoint until backup showed up. The first thing the goddamn backup unit did was basically fucking choke-chop him. And then they both wrestled this kid, who both of them outweighed, to the ground. The kid was not being violent at all on video. And like, you tell me there’s no reason to kneel? Fuck you.

Right.

If “woke” means “common sense,” then you know what? Go ahead and insult me all fucking day. Because if we can’t be good to our goddamn countrymen, then what the fuck’s the point of having this goddamn country?

Right. The Gawker thing was obviously rooted in people stereotyping metal and heavy music as being fundamentally kind of hateful and inarticulate, which is a stereotype you guys have spent 20 years now disproving. Do you think your band and your music are better understood now versus where you started?

Understood? I will say, I feel like we’re more appreciated.

OK.

Just from the fact that all of these artists are coming out of the woodwork and kind of citing us as influences now. And I’m talking about everybody from fucking Ed Sheeran to City Morgue. Just fucking nuts. When you’ve got people like Rihanna saying that we’re their fucking favorite heavy metal band, and then Brian May saying in interviews that he listens to us because he loves to see where our time changes and the arrangements are gonna go, I mean, that will fuck with you. I love the fact that we are finally being appreciated and seen, and that other artists are able to explain to people what we’ve been trying to do.

Because for the longest time, people looked at us like, “They’re just a band in masks—the only reason you’re popular is because you’re in masks.” Well, no. There’s a little more to it than that. There’s a ton of fucking bands that wear masks. There’s a reason we’re at the top. And it’s because we hit on all cylinders. And it’s cool to feel that appreciation coming out now from all types of genres. And it’s not just heavy bands, it’s not just hip-hop. All these different artists are coming out and really kind of showing the world just how different we were.

And to me, I’m grateful for that, because it took a long time for us. There were times when we doubted our own abilities because of it. It was just like, “Well, what the fuck? What are we doing?” At the same time, we still had such belief in it, and we still enjoyed it so much, that we knew that the day would come when the tables turned. It feels like that wave is kind of coming our way.

You guys have been at this for 20 years now, and you’ve talked about your recent spinal surgery—do the masks help, too, with any feelings of mortality or whatever? I see bands that I loved as a teenager, and I’m alarmed at how old they look now, but that’s not really a problem for you guys. Do you feel immortal in a sense, just because of the presentation?

No. Because it’s still a challenge physically. We’re still that band that we don’t just wander around onstage. We’re constantly trying to push ourselves physically, and none of us are getting any fucking younger. Like, we’re all pretty beat to shit. And I’ve had two major surgeries, but I’m the least of the fucking—I’m at the bottom of that totem pole, for fuck’s sake. All you got to do is look at Sid, or at Clown. We’re all pretty bionic at this point. But the good thing is that we’re learning to adapt with our age—with our, I don’t want to say our limitations, but just our physicality. Because we know there’s a certain sense of energy that comes with a Slipknot show.

It’s never going to be like the beginning. People need to get that the fuck out of their heads. What it is going to be like is today. And today is completely different. But we still have that same will, and want to get out there and just fucking go nuts. The reason why I literally came right from the gym to this fucking interview is because I’m trying to keep myself physically there. Because it’s that important to me.