PressSlipknot: Vocabulary VigilantesBy Joe D'Angelo Slipknot could have just as easily named their forthcoming single "Bright Red," but that wouldn't have been very Corey Taylor. Instead, Taylor, who is prone to peppering polysyllabic quatrains throughout his songs, titled the song that's expected to surface at radio next month "Vermillion," which essentially means the same thing. Elsewhere on the band's latest album, the listener encounters "pariah" (on the song "Three Nil"), "idiosyncrasies" ("Opium of the People"), "meconium" ("Welcome"), "bucolic" ("Pulse of the Maggots") and similar SAT-worthy vocabulary. The demanding lyrics are enough to warrant that a page or two of the album's liner notes be reserved for a glossary, but, to Taylor, that would be taking the easy way out. "There are lots of kids who come up to me and say, 'Man, I didn't know what the hell "loquacious" was until I looked it up,' or 'I didn't know what "thalidomide" [from Iowa's "Left Behind"] meant,'" Taylor said. "So it's very cool to be able to do that and pass down the knowledge." In the interest of not distracting readers with pesky reference books like dictionaries and thesauruses, loquacious means talkative and thalidomide, or C13H10N2O4, was a hypnotic sedative that was taken off the market when it was found to cause severe birth defects. It was also prescribed to treat leprosy. Big words are hardly a novel revelation to anyone with a predisposition for self-referencing themselves a maggot. Take "protectorate," found in the song "Confessions," from the band's self-released first album, 1997's Mate.Feed.Kill.Repeat, for example. It takes a real, hardcore fan to know that the word refers to the relationship of a superior power over a dependent entity. "I'm so sick and tired of feeling like these generations are so ignorant," Taylor said. "I'm sorry, but there aren't a lot of smart people out there. And I try to throw in as many polysyllabic words as possible because [when I was younger] I wanted to learn on my own. School wasn't going to teach me. I went out and read every book I could, voraciously. And it got to the point where I was having conversations that nobody could understand, and [my vocabulary] made its way into my writing." At the risk of sounding pretentious, Taylor said he doesn't incorporate challenging vocabulary purely for the sake of upping his syllable count; it has to mean something. He'll use no bon mot out of context or simply to impress those who think that anyone choosing to voluntarily wear a latex mask and full coveralls in 90-degree summer heat can't be all that bright. "I try to be poetic to the point where it's blatant. If you can't find a message in somebody's writing — no matter what that message is — then they're not doing a good enough job. Whether it's blatantly coming out and saying, 'I want to suck face with a chick and then suck down a bottle of beer,' or coming off as poetic, I try to sit on the fence and do both." For a full-length feature on Slipknot, check out "Slipknot: The Ties That Bind." |