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Hammerstein Ballroom, New York City October 31, 2000 By C. Bottomley There isn't a band around that can suck the soul out of a building as quickly as Iowa's Slipknot. The horror-core group is all surface and no feeling. Each of the nine members wears a mask that could have been stitched together by Ed Gein, and the band uniform is a boiler suit cut to fit cinematic psycho Michael Myers. It makes the brood anonymous enough to pass as a metal Menudo: there's probably another branch of the franchise touring Singapore as you read. Perfect entertainment, then, for Halloween, the holiday that teaches our children it's better to demand candy than to lob rotten eggs. With their onstage pandemonium yawping even louder than their music, Slipknot are the band for today's youth, who are disaffected precisely because there is nothing to be disaffected about. The carnage starts before the band even takes the stage. While a country singer trills, "Get thee behind me Satan and push," the crowd on the mezzanine - some dressed in the band colors, others as characters as disparate as Superman and Snow White - are already vaulting over the barriers to spill onto the floor 15 feet below. Isn't there a good war to send these kids off to? Slipknot's music itself is a negligible pastiche of death metal bands whose concept of stagecraft was to cover themselves in flour and whirl their Samson-like locks to a noisy grind. Singer 8 - to have a name would be superfluous - introduces each song as "bleahurghgle from our motherf*ckin' album." VH1's Rock Show won't play their latest single anytime soon, but they do know how to give good stage. Despite the pentagrams projected on the stage curtain, Slipknot are better versed in the philosophy of P.T. Barnum than Satan. Their racket's aggression is made all the more forceful by its contagiousness among the band members themselves. During "Tyranny," the surplus percussionists - Nos. 3 and 6, for those keeping score - pause from battering trash cans to throw themselves off the Marshall stacks into the crowd. Even the band's DJ descends into a mosh pit like Patton in a gas mask to command the entire audience to leap as one. To anyone who saw them on this year's Tattoo the Earth crusade, the routine was getting stale. On cue 8 lets everyone know that they are privileged enough to have been filmed for "the new home video," just as he's done every night this year. "For anyone who's ever been let down by a pussy-ass rock star, this is your new national anthem," 8 grunts to introduce their finale, "Sick of It." The show ends with exploding flash-pots and the band disappears into the blood red-lit void. They leave behind the society of voyeuristic children - bruised, confused, and schooled in the lesson that life is often more trick than treat. |
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