The disturbing song Slipknot’s Corey Taylor had to explain in court: “The fuckin’ weirdest thing”
While large amounts of metal music are designed to be controversial and confrontational in both its style and presentation, there haven’t been many more acts to have enjoyed widespread success while ticking both boxes as emphatically as Slipknot.
The entire image of the band, with their grotesque face masks and horror-inspired aesthetic, was fully designed to be shocking, and while many people became instant fans of the band because of their novel approach to this facet of their existence, there were also plenty of people who didn’t understand what made this so appealing, and labelled them as being an immoral and satanic group.
If their image was repulsive to some, then the sound and lyrical content was the rusty nail in the maggot-infested coffin. Exploring violent themes that were inspired by serial killers, personal struggles with mental health and general misanthropy and nihilism wasn’t ever going to win over those who were perturbed by their image, and was only there to further drive them away from their music.
However, despite the many controversies that surrounded the band as a result of these elements, neither of these things was necessarily what got them into legal trouble when they came to release their self-titled debut album in 1999.
The Des Moines, Iowa group wrote a song for the record titled ‘Purity’, which was accompanied by the preceding track, ‘Frail Limb Nursery’, which acts as a prelude and is thematically linked. Inspired by the story of a woman who was kidnapped and buried alive that they read on the website, Crime Scene, which presented works of morbid fiction as true stories, the band were led to believe that the story was real, and built the two songs around this narrative.
While ‘Frail Limb Nursery’ uses actual audio samples taken from the website, ‘Purity’ is only inspired by the story and embellished with other works of fiction that frontman Corey Taylor was a fan of. However, the band would later get taken to court by the owners of the Crime Scene website for copyright infringement on both songs, leading to them being removed from future pressings of the album.
Since Crime Scene never had a disclaimer on their site that it was a work of fiction, Taylor and the band were unaware that they were infringing on copyright laws, since they believed they were taking inspiration from a true story. Taylor would later recount the story of how he became embroiled in a legal battle against the court during a 2011 fan Q&A event, humorously reflecting on the absurd nature of the situation.
“I was sitting in the living room of my ex-manager, and I had to do a fuckin’ phone testimony for a judge about a song,” he explained. “It was the fuckin’ weirdest thing I’ve ever been a part of. Here I am, sitting in all my fuckin’ weirdness, right – shorts, Slipknot windbreaker – and here’s this judge saying: ‘Now Mr Taylor, my understanding here is that you have stolen a song from a group of people.’ I’m 26 at that point, I don’t know shit about the fuckin’ legal system.”
Slipknot would eventually win the case, and ‘Purity’ would eventually be released on the 10th anniversary edition of their debut, but Taylor still remained bemused by how they’d ended up in the situation in the first place. “That song has been around for five fuckin’ years,” he added, “And all of a sudden, you’re coming out of the woodwork saying we ripped you off? Which was horseshit, by the way. But that’s why we got it back. We got that fuckin’ song back eventually because we won, and I was very proud of that.”
