Classic Album Review : Slipknot - Iowa (2021)
Nu metal is cool again. Sort of. The generation of kids who grew up in these unlikely years and the ones making music now and they’ve been incorporating down tuned guitars and catchy choruses to the sound. Code Orange is a good example of that. I would agree that some nu metal never went out of style, though. Slipknot and more particularly their sophomore album Iowa kind of always kicked ass. We just never fully acknowledged it.
Slipknot is a very peculiar case of nu metal because they never really fit in to begin with. Frontman Corey Taylor was never really interested in rapping. They were melodic, but considerably heavier than everybody else in the genre and most important, they didn’t sound like anybody we knew. To be fair, they still don’t and that difference was never more painfully clear than on the darkest, heaviest record they’ve ever released.
The Songs Everyone Likes
Iowa begins with an intense, hard-hitting series of blast beats from the late Joey Jordison and an inhuman scream by Corey to usher us into the now classic People = Shit. Death metal enthusiasts love to make fun of Slipknot, but their sound’s never been closer to death metal than on this song. There’s no smooth, catchy chorus. Just a discharge of perhaps juvenile, but nonetheless pure anger. It was like smack for my eighteen years old self in 2001.
Expertly building on People = Shit’s momentum, Iowa follows up with one of my favorite Slipknot songs ever Disasterpiece, which is just as single minded and perhaps darker and more intimate. I had many discussions over the years about the opening lyrics:: I wanna slit your throat and fuck the wound/Wanna push my face in and feel the swoon/Wanna dig inside, find a little bit of me. You might find it a little edgelordy (and you might be right) but I believe it encapsulates the very best thing about what they represent.
The opening lyrics to Disasterpiece are, by far, not the most extreme things that were sung in a metal song. Open any Cannibal Corpse lyrics booklet at any page and you’ll find something worse than that. But what makes these lines so striking is how personal they are. They’re not some random, disembodied horror. They’re an angry urge. Something someone would tell themselves to stop from feeling the urge to actually do it. Unlike Cannibal Corpse, it’s relatable.
If you relate to Cannibal Corpse lyrics, you should consult a mental health professional.
Corey’s lyrics are defined by these moments of tortured, angry but ultimately relatable introspection because whoever listens to Slipknot is probably defined by these angry, tortured feelings. I sure shit am.
Iowa is fondly remembered as the album where you listened to everything until song #8 Left Behind on repeat because all of them, except perhaps the ill-placed Gently are so utterly listenable. Not that Gently isn’t a good song, but it feels alien on an album that is so pedal-to-the-metal hard. Along with The Shape, they are probably the two only songs I would leave out of the record if I was the producer.
Other highlights on the album are Everything Ends, which has perhaps the greatest juvenile nu metal burn of all-time for chorus: You are wrong, fucked and overrated/I think I’m gonna be sick and it’s your fault. It’s spoken, sung, growled and repeated like a fucking mantra throughout the whole song. Who cares if it’s edgelordy? Even at 38 years old, it’s fun as hell to sing under your breath whenever someone made your day miserable on purpose. If the persistence of Iowa proves anything is that your teenage feelings never go away. You just get a better grip on them.
I don’t care what you say, The Heretic Anthem is also great. Corey Taylor and particularly Joey Jordison deliver a memorable performance on it. The bombastic drums give the song an energy that transcends its goofiness. This song’s been maligned by memers over the years who made fun of the If you’re 555, then I’m 666 lyric because it supposedly doesn’t mean anything, but personally I’ve taken it as a declaration of difference, you know? A “fuck you, we’re nothing alike” of some sort.
Of course, there’s Left Behind too. One of the crown jewels of Slipknot’s entire discography. Mick Thompson and Jim Root’s guitar riffs and the so-catchy-the-Beatles-could-harmonize-to-it chorus are really the showstopper of the track. It’s one of the most commercial songs on Iowa, but it is so dark and painful that it doesn’t spoil the mood one bit. There’s not a single note out of place on that song.
The dark side of Iowa
But what about the dark side of Iowa? The one half the people who owned the album never even played? I’ve talked about The Shape earlier. I’m not too crazy about I am Hated either, which has another unfortunate occurrence of Corey rapping on it. But it has some tremendous dark cuts on it. Some of you are familiar with brooding, erratic New Abortion witht the anthemic chorus You can’t take my soul away from meeee, but what if I told you there were even better songs on it?
There’s Metabolic, which is a powerful, passionate but conventionally enjoyable Slipknot song. But I think the real showstopper no one is talking about is Skin Ticket. It’s a more industrial, mid-tempo cut that doesn’t seem like it belongs on Iowa to begin with, but that builds up and explodes into one of Corey’s most raw and sincere performances where he screams in repetition: KEEEPING MYSELF ALIIIIVE. KEEEPING MYSELF ALIIIVE. What it lacks in aggression, it compensates for in dramatic build up.
Iowa is fucking awesome from cover to cover. It’s passionate and inspired. There are songs that don’t live up to the best cuts on the record, but no real stinker or filler. It is slightly eclipsed in history by its catchier successor Vol. III: The Subliminal Verses, but Iowa is really where their musical identity became clear. This odd, unlikely mix of radio rock and extreme metal, like music critic Finn McKenty explained.
Slipknot never really fit into nu metal because they were blazing their own path instead of following the trend like every frosted-tip haired weirdo back then. The band itself was too unique and idiosyncratic to start their own musical movement, but they’re good enough to have never really gone out of style in twenty years. Long live Slipknot! Long live Iowa, a true twenty-first century classic.
