999, 926: Slipknot - People=Shit

You ever have one of those days where your teacher makes you re-write your stupid English paper, your boss at Subway makes you clean the bathroom and your old man just WON’T GET OFF YOUR CASE? Few songs perfectly capture the feelings of that day better than Slipknot’s Nü-metal anthem “People=Shit.” Perhaps, with their horror movie costumes and gory stage shows, Slipknot meant this song to be a portrait of the mind of a psycho-killer, what with lines like “come on motherf***er everybody has to die!,” but to me it really just sounds like the angry rant of somebody having an annoying day. It could just as easily have been titled “Traffic=shit” or “My Cable Provider=shit.” It’s about being fed up with every day life.

But Slipknot aren’t just irritated. They’re two pounding drummers, a wall of de-tuned guitars and inobtrusive late-nineties record-scratching-irritated. And oddly enough, they’re also, as they admit in “People=shit”, “not afraid to cry.” I guess that’s what makes today’s angry metal heads different from the heavy-metal parking lot Judas-Priest-fan types of the 80’s. They’re in touch with the entire range of human emotion. Just a minute or so after confessing, at the top of his lungs, that he’s willing to let a solitary tear pour down his cheek, clouding his chamomile tea ever so slightly, Mr. Slipknot brags that he’s “sitting at the side of Satan” so “stop your bitchin’.” It’s enough to make me want to put my arm around singer Corey Taylor and say, “People don’t=shit. It’s not believing in yourself that=shit.”