Corey Taylor Skewers Trump, Bieber, Hall of Fame in Epic Year-End Rant
“I just want this year to be over with,” Slipknot‘s and Stone Sour‘s ever-stentorian frontman Corey Taylor says of 2015. Even though the year has had its personal highs for him — two triumphant Knotfests, two Stone Sour covers EPs, a book called You’re Making Me Hate You and Teenage Time Killers’ debut LP — the lows that hit America as a whole, from terrorist attacks to Donald Trump, have him ready to put 2015 behind him. “The year is ending with a very real threat to the American way of life,” he says. “I’m nervous. I think everybody is.”
But that doesn’t mean he’s totally worried about the future. “We are working on new music for Stone Sour right now, and Slipknot is going to tour off and on for most of the year,” he says. “We’ve got some Knotfest stuff that we are lining up for next year, expanding the range of that.” He’s also got a few movie roles he’s eyeing, and he’s planning on writing another book. “Next year will probably be a building year for me,” he says. “If I’m not touring, I will probably be writing and recording and working on books. So 2016 will be the highway leading towards 2017.”
But before that begins, Taylor sat down with Rolling Stone in early December to praise 2015’s most exalted pop-culture peaks and damn its face-palming lows. Toward the end of the conversation, when asked what else was on his mind, he simply said, “Oh, Jeez. What else could get me fucking screamed at on Twitter?” Well, where to start?
Let’s begin on a positive note. What was your favorite album this year?
Faith No More’s Sol Invictus, just because I never thought it was going to happen. Then, all of a sudden, we get “Motherfucker” and “Superhero,” and I was like, “Holy shit! What the fuck is this?” Then you get the whole album, and it’s such a great, dark, moving album. It was what I wanted it to be. For them to come back with that much attitude and do it their way and not give a shit what anybody thought, it was beautiful.
What was your favorite movie?
That is a toss up between Avengers: Age of Ultron and Mad Max: Fury Road, to be honest. I say those only because I haven’t seen Spectre yet and [at the time of this interview] Star Wars doesn’t come out for another week. But I loved Ultron. I thought it was so well put together. There was almost an Avengers backlash when it came out, and I’m looking around going, “What the fuck are you people talking about? Let’s not forget: It’s the Avengers. It’s not Shakespeare. We’re not curing fucking cancer. This is a comic-book movie for comic-book fans. Shut the fuck up.” It really, really pissed me off like something fierce. I saw that movie fucking seven times in the theater, like I loved that flick.