Corey Taylor Won’t Curb His Political Views for Trump Supporters
Charging that Slipknot fans may sometimes "hear shit that you don't fucking like," frontman Corey Taylor recently spoke out about the unfiltered nature of his political discourse.
The issue came to a head shortly before the 2016 United States presidential election, when a Gawker article circuitously deigned Slipknot listeners as being aligned with "the face of resurgent mainstream white hatred in the United States." (The former gossip blog later issued an apology to the band.) Speaking to Spin around that time, Taylor lamented that some fans had stopped listening to Slipknot "because of what I’ve said about Trump" in the face of that criticism and beyond.
Asked last week if that tension was still a problem, the musician recalled the hypocritical nature of many dissenters who took him to task for his political talk, while affirming that he won't stop talking anytime soon.
"I don't know, to be honest," Taylor replied to The Ringer. "There's a whole lot of Trump supporters who are very vocal when they're like, 'Keep your fucking politics to yourself.' But they don't say that to people who agree with them. They don't say that to artists who are conservative and may or may not support Trump, but they definitely support what conservatives believe in."
He continued, "So it's like, 'Oh, you just don't want to hear me because you don't agree with me.' OK, fuck you. That's not the way this works. The way a dialogue works is sometimes you're going to hear shit that you don't fucking like. Sometimes you're going to hear shit that you don't agree with. That's why this over-censorship bullshit that's going on is fucking terrifying. Because that's not how freedom of speech works."
Elsewhere in the interview, Taylor asserted that the political climate in the U.S. didn't affect the making of Slipknot's new album We Are Not Your Kind, which was released last Friday (Aug. 9).
"I was coming from such a personal place that to me, I didn’t want to clog it down too much," he explained.
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