How Corey Taylor was musically “knighted” by Ozzy Osbourne
This might sound weird to say two and a half decades after Slipknot crawled out of Des Moines, Iowa, but there was a time when the masked nine-piece were truly terrifying.
As brutal and intimidating to look at as they were to listen to. Their immortal look, seemingly ripped straight out of the concept art books of a Rob Zombie-directed Power Rangers movie, would have made them a gimmick if the music didn’t suit it. However, their anvil-heavy, plutonium-powered blend of groove metal, thrash and industrial more than proved their credentials.
Trust me, I was there at the time, and only Eminem, arguably the biggest and most notorious pop star in the world at the time, felt like more of a genuine threat. Not that they’d come to your house and menace you in person, you understand, unless you were a literal child at the time. In which case, what the hell were you doing watching that much Scuzz at that age?! No, the threat that Slipknot posed seemed more insidious. They wouldn’t come to your house in the dead of night, but they might inspire a bunch of impressionable teens to don masks of their own and do it.
I’m sure this all sounds just precious today, like hearing about how people genuinely thought computers wouldn’t be able to handle the switch from 1999 to 2000 and the world would end that very moment. However, I don’t think we’re just smarter or more savvy now. A cursory glance at the world shows we’re just as susceptible to moral panics over nothing than we ever were. Thus, I think the blame for the descent Slipknot made into cuddliness comes as much from the band themselves as anyone else.
I mean, how does a band retain any sense of danger or counter-culture cred when its frontman keeps popping up in episodes of British panel show QI? Or videos by the cringe-worthy YouTuber Nostalgia Critic? Corey Taylor once raged his way through genuinely disturbing tracks like ‘Iowa’ and ‘Scissors’, and now he’s making content? Surely this is something you do when middle age, family and money take their toll on hellraising rock ‘n’ roll youth, right?
How did Slipknot mature?
Well, not necessarily. The truth is that from the moment Slipknot broke into the mainstream with their debut album, the heavy metal aristocracy absolutely loved them. There’s more pushback from the metal elder statesmen on the likes of Sleep Token and Bring Me the Horizon than there ever was for Slipknot. I very much don’t think this was their intention. One listen to their debut album shows this was a band convinced they’d spent their careers touring with the likes of Fantômas and Mr Bungle and not literal Ozzy Osbourne.
That’s not an exaggeration, by the way. Slipknot made their Ozzfest debut before they’d even released their debut album. Before they released their second album, they’d moved from a mid-afternoon slot on the second stage to the main support slot before Black Sabbath themselves. As an interview with Corey Taylor showed, this wasn’t simply Sharon Osbourne going with what was hot with the kids. Ozzy himself was all in on ‘The ‘Knot’.
When asked about the first time he met Ozzy Osbourne, Taylor said, “It was Ozzfest ’99, I was sitting at a table with Sharon, and Jack, and a couple of the guys in the band when, outta nowhere, here comes Ozzy. She introduced us, and he goes, ‘Oh, you’re in Slipknot?’ He’s like, ‘There’s nine people right? I want to be number ten!’ He gave me a huge hug, and it was like being baptised and knighted all at the same time.”
As passing of the torch moments go, the ‘Prince of Darkness’ himself asking to be in your band doesn’t get more on the nose than that. To this day, Osbourne goes down in Slipknot fan lore as the band’s unofficial number ten. Perhaps that was the moment where Slipknot realised they could go from being loathed and feared to loved. It’s what we all want in the end, isn’t it? No matter what literal or metaphorical masks we might wear during the day.
