Is Corey Taylor trying to tell us something?

Slipknot’s lead vocalist is not exactly Mr Sunshine at the best of times, and the Iowan nonet’s music and outlook are nothing if not bipolar, but the sheer number of death references and metaphors on 2019’s We Are Not Your Kind album is exhausting. I’m not even sure he knows he did it – a lot of the record seems to be about the breakdown of a relationship while the title suggests alienation. I’ve previously accused this of being teenage angst, but it could well be political in these strange times of ours. Who exactly it is Taylor et.al are still craving acceptance from 20 years down the line, and why they still care, I am not sure.

Well anyway, I’d thought I’d round up all of the references to death and killing. I shouldn’t criticise too much (or at all, really) given I couldn’t write a lyric to save my life (this choice of words was not initially intentional) but I thought it was interesting. Either Mr Taylor is trying to tell us something or perhaps he could branch out a little next time, linguistically, given on this album he did the death metaphor…to death. Ahem.

1. Track 1 – Insert Coin
1. Sole lyric (a reference to the later track “Solway Firth”) “I’m counting all the killers”
2. Track 2 – Unsainted
1. “I’ll never kill myself to save my soul”
2. “this killing field is all grown over”
3. “you’ve killed the saint in me”
4. “how dare you martyr me”
3. Track 3 – Birth of the Cruel
1. “death of the fool, birth of the cruel”
4. Track 4 – Death Because of Death
5. Track 6 – Critical Darling
1. “put faith in a life support”
2. “celebrate the dead”
6. Track 7 – A Liar’s Funeral
1. “December in the summer kills the heart…I guess I have to die to play my part”
7. Track 8 – Red Flag
1. “they’ll eat you alive just to kill you”
8. Track 10 – Spiders
1. “…a martyr’s pet…”
9. Track 11 – Orphan
1. “we take the lives”
2. “the one who killed your world”
3. “dying in a dumpster”
4. “…sell myself to stay alive?”
10. Track 13 – Not Long for this World
1. “Not long for this world”
2. “…tell me how I’m gonna die”
11. Track 14 – Solway Firth
1. “I’m counting all the killers”
2. “I found my bottom line dead on the front lines”
3. “…you taught me how to die”

So there you have it. It turns out that, for once, one of my wild generalisations is actually backed up by the evidence (thanks to genius.com for the lyrics) – 11/14 = 79 per cent (11/13 = 85 per cent if one discounts the instrumental track “What’s Next”) of the songs have some sort of death reference in the lyrics. I tried to avoid listing out minor variations of the same lyric but I may have missed some others.