The rock legend Corey Taylor held supreme disdain for: “Let me explain to you how bad it is”
Corey Taylor usually knows a thing or two about what it means to suffer for your art. Fronting a band like Slipknot is no walk in the park, and it normally takes a small army to get anyone over the line, even when they aren’t putting their lives at risk onstage. So when Taylor saw one of the biggest rockstars of the 1990s strutting his stuff around during the holiday season, there was no way that he was going to let it get past his bullshit detector.
Then again, Taylor might hold the distinction for taking things too far whenever he plays. Even when he wasn’t onstage, the gruelling hours to create something like Iowa were never going to be easy, eventually leading to one session where he was stripped naked in the tracking room of the studio and smashing glass to cut himself up when making the final screams that are heard on the album.
That doesn’t come from someone unwilling to put themselves on the line, but the genre before Slipknot already knew a thing or two about pain. Before nu-metal saw its rise in the late 1990s, grunge had already paved the way for people talking about their inner torment, but even by the standards of Kurt Cobain and Eddie, Scott Weiland of Stone Temple Pilots was getting some major judgemental looks from across the aisle.
Aside from having the gall to be from San Diego, Weiland was the kind of macho-posturing rockstar that reminded too many people of Jim Morrison rather than Cobain. And when he opened his mouth, his imitation of Eddie Vedder didn’t help most people who thought he was a wannabe.
While those people missed out on some of the greatest rock and roll of the 1990s, like ‘Interstate Love Song’ and ‘Vasoline’, Weiland started to take things in a different direction when he started working outside the supergroup Velvet Revolver, being able to name-drop someone like Slash was already any artist’s dream come true, but his decision to make a Christmas album was one of the most unintentionally hilarious things that Taylor had ever seen.
Though Taylor had considered himself a fan of some of Stone Temple Pilot’s work, he felt that this was the absolute height of selling out, saying, “Let me explain to you how bad it is. There’s a video online of him and singing and he’s very serious, because Christmas is serious. His hair’s slicked back, and he’s in his shitty tuxedo singing ‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas’. It’s not that he’s a bad singer. He’s a lazy piece of shit. It’s all these people who take the little variety they have and take your money and give you nothing back. That’s the real sloth in this country.”
It’s not like Taylor couldn’t outdo Weiland’s Christmas song, either. Even though he is known to absolutely despise the holiday, his song ‘Xmas’ is still one of the most cathartic songs when the holiday cheer starts to grate on someone and would rather throw an elf on a shelf through a window than see another one at a department store.
Even though Weiland would eventually get back on his feet with STP during the final years of his life, this Christmas album is still a sad byproduct of him trying to pass himself off as a crooner and do the bare minimum. Many have tried to cash in like that, but all they need is one keen-eyed look from Taylor to bring them back down to size.
