‘Surfacing’: The song that “encompasses everything” about Slipknot
Any metalhead who first copped Slipknot‘s 1999 self-titled debut will remember its arresting liner notes. When folding out its inner leaflet, a washed-out panoramic of the nine masked Iowans sporting black boilersuits skulking up a grimy alley like some horror-themed gang from The Warriors would greet you underneath the scrawled message: “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”.
Quoting ‘Surface’s chorus as the album’s anchoring sentiment, it’s clear that Slipknot saw their debut’s fifth track as a key window into their warped world. A dense pummel of blistering metal attacks, corroded turntablism and frontman Corey Taylor’s signature throat-shredding growl, ‘Surfacing’ stands alongside their second single ‘Spit It Out’ as the ultimate confluence of their collective backgrounds.
With the various members all scattered around the early 1990s Des Moines metal scene, their respective roots in thrash, funk metal and death metal all were crushed into Slipknot‘s sonic maw, wielded by Korn producer Ross Robinson.
While a mainstay of Kerrang! TV and one of the leading poster bands of the early 2000s nu-metal wave, Slipknot had little in common with the likes of Limp Bizkit or Linkin Park. Coming from a much purer metal tradition, the associations became a blessing and a curse for the band: overseeing a global pop conquer that hadn’t been possible since metal’s early 1980s MTV heyday, yet lumped in with the glossy dross that, for many, spelt metal and rock in general’s frosted-tipped nadir.
While the whole scene crashed and burned, splintering off into emo, pop punk and metalcore—in Linkin Park’s case swapping nu-metal crunch for widescreen angsty pop—Slipknot grew from strength to strength, soldiering through a trend they never belonged to in the first place and becoming of metal’s biggest selling stars.
Beyond the Grammy Awards and Rick Rubin collaborations, Slipknot remains at heart nine spotty Iowa metalheads who wanna wear creepy masks and make one hell of a racket, which they’ve more than succeeded.
Yet despite their achievements, percussionist Chris Fehn—the one with the zip mouth and long, phallic nose—still looked back at ‘Surfacing’ as a seminal milestone for the band. “It basically encompasses everything,” he told Songfacts in 2007. “Kind of encompasses the attitude of the band and the attitude of how we feel about life: Don’t judge me. Everything that you think that you know about the world, and about Slipknot, and about your own life, might not be the case. Like if I was thinking, ‘Oh, Carl is this and Carl is that’, well, you’re not, you know. So I think it’s just openmindedness and just be cool”.
“Just be cool” is as good a motto as any. Watching Slipknot live is an exercise in authenticity, an unwavering confidence in a band on stage and performing exactly the music they were destined to make in exactly the presentation that’s natural to them. Celebrating their 25th anniversary with a bumper tour last year, Des Moines’ biggest cultural export looks set to do their thing for many more years yet.
