With The Meaningful Album Series, I want to share why and how an album made an impact on me in my life. Today I will talk about one of the first CDs that got me into the more extreme side of metal: Slipknot's self-titled album.
First encounter:
I bought this album at the Free Record Shop in Leiden on a Saturday in the summer of 1999. I was captivated by the artwork and at that time, I never heard of Slipknot, I did not know what it meant but without listening to it, I instantly bought it.
The most vivid memory of this album:
I remember cycling home that same day, like a madman. I was so curious what these masked maniacs would sound like. I went to my bedroom and listened to it. I sat there on my bed with my mouth wide open. Everything I felt was represented through this record. The anger, the frustration, the chaos, I totally understood it. Besides the knowledge that I was not alone feeling the way I did, this record gave me so much power in a time when power was something I honestly lost for a while.
My parents divorced when I was 14 and my sister was 11. The entire time they were together they never had an argument. Until that day in 1998 when they told us that they were not in love with each other anymore. My dad stayed at the house and my mom was trying to look for another place to stay. But that took a while.
My sister and I lived in that broken home for half a year. During that time, I remember many arguments between my parents. They threw a lot of things at each other, there were terrible silences during dinner, which was unknown to me, I never experienced a fight between my parents. I felt divided. I was torn between two parents who I loved.
In the middle of all this, my mother never talked bad about my father. I wish I could say the same about my dad. In short, he was trying to manipulate my sister and me into thinking my mother was having an affair with almost everyone, our next-door neighbor, a colleague from her work, or his own brother. He was projecting his paranoid thoughts on us. Fortunately, I was 14 and I knew my mother was doing everything she could to keep our family from falling further apart. My father's scheming did not work on me, at least not the way he would have wanted it to.
At last, my mother found another place and we finally moved out of the house. We left my father alone in a house full of memories of his children and his ex-wife. I felt a lot of guilt for my dad, but I also felt a huge load lifted off my shoulders. But that weight only shifted to another place.
During the weekends we had to go to my father's house, and I did not want to, but I was afraid to tell him. So, I went to him anyway and he continued his manipulative ways, and I absorbed all his paranoid thinking and kept it all inside. I developed a stutter.
We moved again to another house. My sister moved with us again, but my fathers 'work' eventually paid off and she wanted to live with my father. My father gave her cigarettes and told her she could get a piercing. She left me and my mother, who was now almost completely broken. But she carried on. And so did I. Well, I tried to. And then I bought Slipknot.
The day after I bought the album, I started punching my folding bench which I folded out and put it up against my bedroom door. I kicked and punched that thing for hours. Every day when I got home from school I listened to Slipknot and beat the hell out of that thing. When I was done, I just read the lyrics and to this day I still remember them.
Finally, on one weekend when he started to rant about my mother again, I spoke up to him. After some harsh words, I stormed upstairs to get my stuff. He went after me and threatened to punch me. 'I'm leaving, dad,' I said. I knew he could not punch me for real and I knew he would not stop me from leaving. And I left. Just before the next weekend, I called him up and said that I do not want to see him for a while.
What it meant to me:
Slipknot helped me to use my suppressed anger to stand up for myself and to direct it to a folding bench instead of anything or anyone else. If it wasn't for this record, I definitely was not here typing this. I would have for sure hurt myself and put myself in harm's way.
So what does Slipknot the album mean to me? Protection. From negative thoughts, my dad put in there that were bubbling up and try to stick on the walls of my brain and find a way to my inner self. Before they did any damage I slammed my fist in that bench and I would hear Corey scream over and over again:
And I did. Now I am here, typing this story, which means I made it. Not totally unscarred but, scarred enough to never let that happen again.
Tracklist:
742617000027
(sic)
Eyeless
Wait and Bleed
Surfacing
Spit it Out
Tattered & Torn
Frail Limb Nursery
Purity
Liberate
Prosthetics
No Life
Diluted
Only One
Scissors
Me Inside*
Get This*
Interloper (demo)*
Despise (demo)*