Celebrating 25 Years of Slipknot’s Iowa

By Kayla Harper

Slipknot’s Iowa is their darkest and heaviest record to date, recorded at a time when the band’s members were enduring grief, addiction, external relationship conflicts, all while trying to navigate the fame that had come with their self-titled debut, and outdo it on their sophomore album.

Named after the nine-pieces home state, Iowa embraces the pain through double-kicks, angst-coated guitars, aggressive screams across it’s 14-tracks. The album opens with “(515)” – the area code of Des Moines – which is composed of reversed and distorted takes of the band’s former DJ Sid Wilson screaming and sobbing “death” over and over after his grandfather passed away.  His way of coping with the loss in-real-time makes the album open on such a raw emotional note that carries through the rest of the tracks alongside late Joey Jordinson’s iconic drumming technique which stands out especially on this record.

Flowing out of the opening track, one of the albums biggest hits, “People= Shit”, is explained to be about how people, “[we] are our own worst enemy…the human race is depleting itself of the simple pleasures in life” (Shawn “Clown” Crahan, Slipknot).  “Disasterpiece” is a revenge anthem in which lead singer Corey Taylor fantasizes about killing his childhood bullies, only to be left with the guilt of doing so, “Withering away, take a look inside, my soul is missing / All I have is dead, so I’ll take you with me.”  Taylor describes the track as one of his favourites to play live because of the heaviness and because the first lyric was voted the worst of 2001, “I wanna slit your throat and fuck the wound.” 

Sonically “My Plague” seeps into the melodic future of Slipknot on albums to come such as All Hope Is Gone (2008) and We Are Not Your Kind (2019). It’s a confrontational track addressing a narcissist in the narrators life, “Your impossible ego-fuck
is like a megalomaniacal tab on my tongue…I know why you plague me / I know why you blame yourself.”

“Everything Ends” is actually about beginnings in a way as it explores the concept of ending a cycle in our lives we don’t want to be in anymore and beginning a new one, “this is the end of everything / you are the end of everything.”  The lead single from Iowa, “The Heretic Anthem” is the albums magnum opus and the bands way of telling the music industry that Slipknot was not going to conform to industry’s standards after a music executive told them, “If this is the future of music, I don’t want to be alive,” and they went on to become one of the biggest bands of all time, shaping a new sonic landscape that would be embraced by millions, “I’m a pop star threat and I’m not dead yet.”

Originally written by Clown, “Gently” originated from the band’s 1993 basement sessions before later being included on their self-distributed album in ’96.  Finally, it would be officially released on Iowa as a track about using substances to forget about pain, “Gently, my mind escapes / Into the relaxing world of pleasure / A pleasure that’ll take my mind / Off the reality of my life.”

The Grammy-nominated track, “Left Behind” is another track that leads into the more experimental and melodic future of the band that would start to take form on their next record, Vol.3: The Subliminal Verses (2004). “Left Behind” explores the way we slowly lose things and people, either through conflict or death, “I’ve known faces that have disappeared in time.” “The Shape” is a breakup track delivered in a classic Slipknot way over fast-paced, heavy guitars and double kicks,  “Too tragic to stay with you / Too static to try for you…separate (I’ve lost my only way).”

“I Am Hated” became an anthem for many Slipknot fans as they wrote the song from a place that criticized the hatred against them and especially their fans. It stemmed from feuds with other nu-metal and adjacent bands who criticized Slipknot before they had even accomplished a portion of their success, “Streamline the sickness, half-assed aggression / You gotta see it to believe it, we all got conned / All the mediocre sacred cows we spawned.”

Nearing the end of the album, “Skin Ticket” is equally as vulnerable of where the album started and speaks to album-making-process as a whole.  Creating Iowa was a hard time for the band’s nine members as they were all going through their own hardships, however, coming together to make art is what kept them going, “Minus the inside and minus the circle / Inhabit the riddle and fill in the hovel…keeping myself alive.” 

“New Abortion” is another track Taylor, wrote with his fans in mind, “Everywhere you look, it’s like they know
Their fingerprints are hidden by control / This is where the line is drawn, see / You can’t take my soul away from me, yeah.” In the track he is discussing kids who were born into more unfortunate worlds where the only thing they seem to have is a hard life to endure. Taylor describes the following track, “Metabolic” to be one of the most personal songs he’s written because it’s about his father whom he never knew or met and his fears of becoming the terrible man he imagines his father to be, “Who are you to me? Who am I to you?
Is this a lesson in nepotistic negligence?”

The final track on Iowa is the album’s title track and the longest Slipknot song, clocking in at 15 minutes, Taylor recorded the song naked while cutting himself with glass.  He describes “Iowa” to be about being with a dead corpse, one whom the narrator is stalkerish about and obsessed wtih to the point he has killed her to be with her forever, “Relax, it’s over, you can never leave…You are my favorite, lay you down to sleep…I will kill you to love you.”  

“Iowa” wraps up Slipknot’s darkest and heaviest record yet. An album that not only became a coping mechanism for many fans, but was a lifeline for the band while recording it.  Iowa is definitely one of the best heavy metal albums of all time.