Albums That Changed My Life

Slipknot – Self Titled (1999, Roadrunner Records, Produced By Ross Robinson)

At a time when anger, hurt, anxiety, and hormones were all threatening to derail my life, I was searching for a soundtrack to my life. I had never heard any heavy metal in my life outside of cheesy 80’s hair metal that didn’t interest me, and the closest music I could find to use as an outlet for my emotional state was the bubblegum pop-punk styling’s of Blink 182, and NoFX. Yet one day while skipping school in the basement of a friend’s house I experienced an epiphany. That epiphany came in the form of the lead single from Slipknot – Spit It Out.

My friend had created a sampler CD of sorts that included, amongst others, Fear Factory and Sepultura, but it was the pure rage that almost poured out of the speakers when Spit It Out started to play that captured my attention. Here was a band that seemed like they had taken my feelings and put them to music. And not just any music, but music imbued with so much emotion that it threatened to slit your throat.

Needless to say, I was hooked. I had to find out “who is that band, and where can I get the album?” The next day, I hit the record stores to try and find the album, and once I found it, I raced home and blasted the whole thing countless times from the stereo, until I was so tired from jumping around my bedroom, I collapsed in a pile on my bed and fell asleep.

From the opening of (SIC) through to the final notes of closing track Scissors, it felt as though this was a band who felt the way I felt, and had decided to do something about it. It was official; I had caught “the sickness”.

In hindsight, the best thing about this album is not the music, or the fact that it was an outlet for all the negative that had started to take over my life, but rather that it introduced me to a new form of music. Simply, this album introduced me to metal. In essence I can almost credit this album with making me who I am today. Up until the point that I found this album, music was just something to break the silence. Now it became an obsession, and outlet, and a massive part of who I was, and who I was to become. Not only that, but through my immersion in the world of heavy metal, and later hardcore, my ideals, my values, and my sense of self started to be shaped. There were, of course, other factors involved, including my upbringing, and my environment, and other images that were forced upon me by the mass media, but it was music that was mainly responsible.