SlipKnot (1999)
Produced by Ross Robinson at Indigo Ranch, Malibu
Engineered by Chuck Johnson, Rob Agnello, and Steven Remote
Mixed by Ross Robinson, Chuck Johnson, and Joey Jordison (except ‘Spit It Out’, mixed by Kevin Miles, Sean McMahon, and Joey Jordison)
Mastered by Eddy Schreyer
‘People think we’re egotistical. I don’t give a shit.’ — Joey Jordison
By 1999, Ross Robinson was sick of nu metal, as he told Metal-is.com: ‘‘…at the time it was OK, but now it’s not cool for me. I don’t think it’s good any more at all. Anything I can do to destroy that genre today I will, ’cause any band that copies it is pure garbage. Total garbage. I’m done.’ He went on: ‘I’m kind of embarrassed of my past. If I would do anything like that today, it would kill me. Now it’s time to fucking destroy it, man. Wreck it!’ This gave him a bit of an identity crisis, as he told The Peer Pleasure Podcast in 2022: ‘I felt like being ‘Ross from Korn‘ was just over. I didn’t know who the fuck I was, because I was that identity for so long and believed it.’
Nonetheless, he didn’t immediately abandon the genre. At first, he just dialed up the extremity. Enter SlipKnot, a band from Des Moines, Iowa — a band that remained publicly anonymous at the time, identifying themselves only by numbers. In the beginning, SlipKnot’s creative core was drummer Joey Jordison (aka #1), bassist Paul Gray (#2), and percussionist Shawn ‘Clown’ Crahan (#6). Their independent debut, MFKR (Mate. Feed. Kill. Repeat.) also featured guitarist Josh Brainard (#4) and two members who left right after the demo — vocalist/percussionist Anders Colsefni and lead guitarist Donnie Steele.
The band’s sound at that point was far more funk-oriented — the Mr. Bungle influence was obvious and massive, and they even included some jazz breaks. The members switched roles a good bit while the lineup was forming — Clown was originally their drummer, but moved to percussion after Jordison joined. Donnie Steele left the band after recording M.F.K.R. due to his Christian beliefs, and was replaced by Craig Jones (#5). The band were having trouble reproducing all the samples in their music live, so Jones switched from guitar to sample triggering and Mick Thompson (#7) joined as their second guitarist.
Colsefni then left the band, prompting vocalist Corey Taylor (#8) to join, who became the band’s fourth creatively contributing member. Clown, Jordison, and Thompson came to the sex shop that Taylor was working at and gave him an ultimatum, as Taylor told Kerrang in 2021: ‘They basically told me if I didn’t join the band, they’d kick my fucking ass.’ His audition led Jordison to proclaim ‘If we don’t get this guy, we’re gonna have to kill him.’ Taylor agreed, in his typically cocky way: ‘I knew I was the best singer in town.’ The band then got to work on a new 5-song demo. The percussion slot left vacant by Colsefni was filled twice before the band settled on Chris Fehn (#3) as a more permanent second percussionist.
DJ Sid Wilson (#0) rounded out the 9-piece band which appears on their debut, which is essentially divided into a core 5-piece band and 4 auxiliary members who contribute to the stage show and provide a lot of ear candy. The band were not initially interested in having a DJ in the group, but evidently Sid Wilson attacking Clown is what sold them, as he told Revolver Magazine: ‘I was on his ass like a fucking Jedi Knight. I grabbed him by the head while he was still on the stage. I counted to five and headbutted him on six, which is his number. He fell down on his fucking ass. It almost knocked him out. He went back to Joey and said, ‘I don’t care what anybody in the fucking band says, that dude’s in.’’ Wilson then joined the band and proceeded to get peed on one night by a drunk and oblivious Chris Fehn, who was sleeping in the bunk above him.
Unsurprisingly, the band wanted Ross Robinson to produce their album. He was unimpressed with their demo, but their rather extreme stage show changed his tune. The band hid their identities by wearing jumpsuits and masks — a look and approach stolen directly from Mr. Bungle in the early ’90s, who were also anonymous and performed in jumpsuits, even using some nearly identical masks. SlipKnot sometimes projected videos of pornography and actual death and suicide behind them, which alienated some of their fans. The band did their best to match that extremity with what they were doing on stage.
Jordison would set his drums on fire, and once accidentally set himself on fire (unsurprisingly, he later ended up accidentally nearly burning down Indigo Ranch). Taylor’s performances were committed in a way that put him on a fast-track to wrecking his voice: ‘There were a lot of times when it was so hot and I’d been raging so hard that I’d throw up in my mask and have to eat the puke because there was nowhere to spit it. Also, I broke my mouth so many times coming up too hard on the mic. I went from having to swallow blood to puking and having to swallow that.’ Wilson once played a show with broken ribs after he jumped off a balcony and the audience didn’t catch him.
Beating the shit out of each was normal for this band. Wilson recounts: ‘We did a warm-up show for Ozzfest, and right before ‘Eeyore,’ I did two good head-butts into Clown’s beer keg, then the lights went out, my knees buckled, and I hit the floor. When the lights went back on, I couldn’t get up and blood was gushing down my face and pouring out of the mask. Our security guy got me backstage to our dressing room and I looked in the mirror. The wound was wide open and I could see my skull, but there was a song coming up that I had parts for, so I put a towel on my head and strapped the mask on tight to try to stop the bleeding. Then, when I go back out there, Clown’s giving me this look that says, ‘You look like a fucking idiot.’ So, he punches me in the head right in the gaping wound. I pushed him away and crawled over to Corey because he had never beat on me. But he grabbed my head and banged it on the floor to the beat of the music. I went to the hospital after the show and got 16 stitches.’
The extremity of what they were doing was a bit beyond any band Robinson had previously produced, and so he felt they might serve as a good way to up the ante when everyone was trying to imitate his style, as he told Louder Sound in 2022: ‘They were my response to everything that was just blowing up. I think [Limp Bizkit’s] Nookie was out and Korn had massive success without me, and I wasn’t a part of that; I was kind of pushed out, for some reason. So, I was like, ‘This is what I feel like,’ and they were like, ‘That’s what we feel like, too.’ They knew what they were, and I knew what they were, and it was something to wipe the slate clean and start over, and ‘Here it comes, here comes the pain’, ha ha ha!’
And so they settled in at Indigo Ranch. Robinson recounts: ‘Those guys were like soldiers. They came out to record before their deal was done, they had no money and they refused to take any financial help. They were starving and eating dog food recording that album. Mick’s tooth had to be pulled and he didn’t say anything. There was no support. It was just me and them and they were there to absolutely rip. That album was everything to them. Everything. It was Slipknot or death.’ Clown agreed: ‘Ross told us we were the hungriest band he’d ever witnessed. We did all the drums in three days. We were just so hungry for this album, because we had been so fucking sick of waiting to be signed.’
Despite their refusals, Robinson gave them plenty of financial help. He believed in the band so much and was so eager to record them that he ‘fronted all the studio time. I put a deposit on the studio myself. I sent Mick to the dentist and paid for it all [laughs.] Like whatever it was, rehearsals, the rehearsal place, whatever it was, I fronted everything until almost till we started mixing. We were in the process that long after pre-production. It didn’t feel like we were supported or cared about. It’s like we were completely alone on our own island and that’s what it sounded like: furious.’ They finally got signed by Roadrunner Records, who had former Gentle Giant vocalist Derek Shulman as their president at the time. He gave them a seven album, $500k deal.
Robinson made the band watch Harmony Korine’s Gummo, telling them he wanted to create the musical equivalent of that film. He was determined to remove anything he deemed extraneous from their sound. According to Chris Fehn: ‘He cut off lots of parts of the songs, that didn’t really keep it driving, that didn’t keep it moving along. You know, like the funky parts in the old one. He just cut them out, took out a couple of guitar solos that weren’t needed and stuff like that. Just keep it straight forward, a heavy album.’
Robinson asked Taylor to go through the meaning of his lyrics and tell his life story in great detail. Taylor recounted growing up without a father, being shuffled around between family members in different states, being sexually abused by a neighbor boy at age 10, stimulant addictions and overdoses, and multiple suicide attempts. He wasn’t the only member of the band with a traumatic upbringing — Clown’s uncle had been murdered in a gang initiation ritual — and Robinson was determined to harness all of their pain.
The band’s existing inclination towards violence gave Robinson the opportunity to dial up his own violence in the studio. Fehn told Kinda Muzik in 1999: ‘While we were recording the album, Ross is in there with us, slamming and throwing things at us. Just going crazy. You can nearly tell that on tape. It’s a very raw album. Ross is a very spiritual person. He’s there for everybody all the time.’ Robinson threw food at them, body slammed, punched, and kicked them while playing, and tried to knock instruments out of their hands while yelling ‘You can play that shit harder!’. He made Fehn drink two gallons of water so he could play his bloated stomach with a mallet.
Clown recalled recording ‘(sic)’ to Kerrang in 2012: ‘All of us were in the same room when we recorded this. It was hilarious. Everyone had their headphones tied to their head so we could all slam and go crazy while we played. Ross was throwing potted plants at Joey. It was the most insane thing I’d ever seen.’ Robinson eventually drove Taylor into the ground: ‘By the end, I was literally broken completely in half and wide open and bawling and I couldn’t stop crying. I was throwing up all over the fucking place. At one point, the vocal booth smelled so bad.’
The resulting album is as chaotic as you’d hope for — it’s what you might call ‘extreme nu metal’. Joey Jordison is an extreme metal drummer, displaying a strong death metal influence with plenty of double kick, busy tom fills, and even the occasional blastbeat — all with a very loose feel that makes everything feel like it’s on the verge of falling apart. This especially excited Robinson, who clearly wasn’t paying any attention to the underground metal scene: ‘…nobody was doing double bass at the time, like nobody — I think Slayer even quit doing double bass at that time. It’s crazy. It was considered like old ’80s kind of lame or something in music at that moment. And there it is like ‘Let’s fucking go double bass. Let’s get it on, Let’s go super metal. Eat it alive, bring it back and show the power of it.’’
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Corey Taylor truly gave his all here — an approach that ended up being unsustainable, as he ultimately needed to get vocal lessons and change his approach to avoid destroying his voice. His performance here is thus completely unhinged in a way he was never able to replicate. The guitarists mostly just play half-step Roots-era Sepultura riffs at high tempos and some cool noise leads, which works out well — they’re not the main event here, so they can better play support by keeping things simple.
As with Roots, the main focus here (aside from Taylor’s vocals) is really the percussion. Jordison’s drumming is busy enough as is, but add two extra percussionists hitting kegs and giant toms on top of that and you’ve got a straight up percussion assault. Add samples and DJ scratches on top of that, and you get pandemonium. This album is ear candy central, and yet it has a suitably raw production sound that’s just clean enough to allow all of the parts to be audible. It’s a very sonically satisfying record that passes my vibe check.
The first half of the album is stacked with bangers and quite well paced. The album’s intro features a sample (‘The whole thing, I think is sick’) which changes pitch and speed over some guitar noise. The opening song, ‘(sic)’, takes the main riff from the song ‘SlipKnot’ on their MFKR demo, speeds it way up, and makes it hit a lot harder. ‘Eyeless’ is a clear album highlight, with an Amen break sample, the epic chorus lyric ‘YOU CAN’T SEE CALIFORNIA WITHOUT MARLON BRANDO’S EYES’, and a breakdown guaranteed to make you smash shit.
Lead single ‘Wait and Bleed’ features a rare melodic chorus. The band pulled a clever trick on this one — Taylor tracked both singing and screaming for the verses, allowing Robinson to make the screamed track dominant for the aggressive album version and Terry Date to make the sung track dominant in his more polished single mix. It’s a song about a man slashing his wrists. Taylor describes: ‘The song’s about that switch in your head that can go at any moment. You go from being a civilized human being to someone who can commit terrible acts. I’ve always been fascinated by the fact we represent ourselves as civilized when, at any moment, we can become animals.’
‘Surfacing’ is where the fun guitar noises start — the verses have killer textures, and the chorus is a knuckle-dragging screamed anthem. It’s no surprise it quickly became a live staple. The second single, ‘Spit It Out’, is actually the demo version from their 1998 demo — they tried recording a new version for the album, as is evident in the bonus ‘Hyper’ and ‘Stamp You Out’ versions, but didn’t feel they were able to recapture the magic of the demo — particularly the clanging, industrial-tinged bridge. It works surprisingly well here — you’ll definitely notice that the guitar tone changes and the drums get quieter, but they did a good job integrating it. Taylor raps his way through the intro and second verse, which provides some needed variety in the vocal textures. While his rapping could still easily be accused of being white boy cringe, he’s a much faster and more deft rapper than Durst or Vanilla Ice.
The album calms down a bit and goes moody for the next 3 tracks. ‘Tattered and Torn’ is a noise jam, updated from their M.F.K.R. demo. ‘Purity’ started from a demo called ‘Despise’, but Robinson had the band almost entirely rewrite the music. He may have stripped most of the dynamics out of this band’s sound, but he turned ‘Purity’ into the album’s most dynamic track — the only song here with spooky quiet verses and a melodic chorus. It feels like the centerpiece of the record. The song (and its intro ‘Frail Limb Nursery’) was based on a story about a woman named Purity Knight who got kidnapped and buried alive.
It turned out the website they got the story from was presenting fiction as true crime with no disclaimer, which meant these tracks were potentially infringing on a copyright. Reissues of the album thus removed these tracks and replaced them with the fast and brief b-side ‘Me Inside’. This change removes the break that ‘Purity’ gives you and makes the album a lot more relentless, drastically changing the flow and arc of the record. It doesn’t help that I don’t particularly like the melodic chorus of ‘Me Inside’ — it signals the direction the group was about to head in.
Guitarist Josh Brainard quit near the end of this album’s sessions over disagreements with the band. ‘Purity’ and ‘Me Inside’ were the first tracks recorded with his replacement, Jim Root (#4), who was Corey Taylor’s bandmate in his other band, Stone Sour. SlipKnot started to sound more and more like Stone Sour (i.e. buttrock) over time as the two of them became increasingly large creative contributors — you do the math.
The second half of the album is undeniably a bit less memorable, but it’s still got a lot to offer. There are two longer and slower crushers, ‘Prosthetics’ and the 8.5min closer ‘Scissors’. Both songs feature slowly building intros, starting with one band member and adding the others one at a time until all 9 are playing together. It’s a fun trick. ‘Scissors’ naturally features Taylor on the verge of crying — obligatory on the closing song of a Robinson record.
The other 4 songs are all fast and brutal. The bridge of ‘Liberate’ features some light polymeter and metric modulation, destabilizing the groove in a really exciting way. ‘No Life’ and ‘Only One’ (the former evolved from their demo ‘Interloper’, while the latter originally appeared as a much slower track on M.F.K.R.) feature much stronger hip-hop influences than anything else in their discography, with more of Taylor rapping (following Colsefni’s lead, in the case of ‘Only One’). It’s probably wise that he stopped rapping after this album, but it works pretty well here — the verse of ‘Only One’ is especially fun thanks to its slinky chromatic riff. Being a ‘90s album, there’s also some hidden material — an audio recording of the band watching some scat porn, in which Clown repeatedly pukes, followed by the short and fast hardcore-influence ‘Eeyore’.
The lyrics here have fully given into the sort of vague sloganeering that Bad Plus drummer Dave King so eloquently roasted in an episode of his Rational Funk webseries — the record is peppered with repeated phrases like ‘YOU CAN’T KILL ME CUZ I’M ALREADY INSIDE YOU’, ‘FUCK ME, I’M ALL OUT OF ENEMIES!’, ‘ONLY ONE OF US WALKS AWAY!’, and ‘THIS IS NO KIND OF LIFE’. It’s unclear exactly what the band is mad about for much of this record. Taylor talks about his absentee father in ‘Eyeless’ (‘I am my father’s son, cuz he’s a phantom, a mystery, and that leaves me NO-THING’), but even that more targeted track features lines with vague rage like ‘How many times have you wanted to kill everything and everyone, say you’ll do it but never will?’
There’s a bit of a serial killer fixation in tracks like ‘Prosthetics’ and ‘Purity’, and ‘Scissors’ is about drug addiction and self harm, but most of the album is much less specific. What are they even trying to say in the chorus of ‘Surfacing’, often announced by the band as ‘your new national anthem’? ‘FUCK IT ALL, FUCK THIS WORLD, FUCK EVERYTHING THAT YOU STAND FOR! DON’T BELONG, DON’T EXIST, DON’T GIVE A SHIT, DON’T EVER JUDGE ME!’. What are we supposed to take away from that, exactly? What’s clear is that these guys have a chip on their shoulder, as may be requisite for being in a nu metal band.
To quote Tiny Mix Tapes writer Joe Hemmerling again: ‘Most people cranking Korn’s self-titled album had not been sexually abused themselves, but the rendering of Davis’s experiences in such emotionally excruciating detail couldn’t help but open us up to empathizing with his condition. As nu metal grew and attracted a bigger audience, that particularity was gradually replaced with a more generalized anger against unspecified aggressors or authority figures. Songs like “Daddy,” “Five,” or “Filthee” elicited compassion from their audience, as well as anger. Limp Bizkit’s “Break Stuff,” Slipknot’s “Surfacing,” and Linkin Park’s “One Step Closer,” by contrast, only sought to reflect and magnify the listener’s own sense of anger and victimhood while placing no demands that the audience consider experiences apart from their own.’
Luckily, you can’t understand half of the lyrics, anyway. Given the sonic density of this record and the way it’s mixed, you’re not likely to be focusing on the content of the words most of the time. It’s a very effective sonic assault — one of the genre’s strongest offerings, and certainly one of Robinson’s strongest, as well. The band never managed to equal this record in my book. They may have known they couldn’t sustain it from the start, as Taylor recalls: ‘I distinctly remember sitting outside of a hotel room on the East Coast with Clown and Joey specifically talking about the fact that we should just tour the album and then break up. To this day I wonder if we made the right choice by continuing. I sometimes think how wonderful that would have been.’
Unlike the work he did with bands like Limp Bizkit and Soulfly, Robinson still stands by this album, as of 2022: ‘…I knew that if can blast the mind shut, like blank, and the heart just goes [makes exploding sound] and the tears come down, for me, as a listener [makes deep breath sounds], ya know, just fed. Then one person that might hear it may not kill themself. Or feel listened to. Or feel loved with all our hearts, everything. No toughness, no ego, no… all that bullshit. It’s just ‘hard is lame’ and it’s the fucking heaviest thing probably I’ve ever done — that first album.’
‘I was so into it and everything about it was just food. And I was so hungry and so ready to start something new. And that album was me, Ross, being reborn, starting all over again. And the fury inside my heart to capture and push, it was beyond words. The inspiration inside was just exploding, just ‘raaahhhh’. And it made the foundation, it’s like the core foundation of their whole career. Anybody can just live off that first record and watch them play that first record today and be happy. It’s that powerful.’
