Metal Hammer recently caught up with vocalists Corey Taylor (Slipknot, Stone Sour) and Randy Blythe (Lamb Of God) to talk metal. Following is an excerpt from the discussion.

Q: What do you think of where metal is at right now??

Corey: "I think it feels healthier than it was a few years ago. It used to seem like everything was sullen and a little too mapped out. A little too rigid, too stiff. That’s me, though; I don’t listen to a lot of new shit – or I didn’t! Now I’m getting into a lot of the newer bands like Code Orange, Knocked Loose, All Pigs Must Die, Nails..."

Randy: "All that stuff is coming out of the hardcore scene."

Corey: "Right! But it’s a different style. There’s an inherent violence there that I just love. Randy, we were talking about Code Orange yesterday. Watching them made me wanna play!"

Randy: "When I saw them, I was telling my band and a bunch of other people, ‘Don’t sleep on this shit. Get up early and see these guys.’ There was no one there watching them but they still brought it so fucking hard, and you can see that they mean it, which I haven’t seen for a while, you know? No one cares how technically proficient you are, how fast you can noodle, your outfits, whatever, nobody gives a fuck. If you mean it, that’s gonna translate, and those kids mean it."

Q: What do you think of the way the scene has become so fractured?

Randy: "I think the endless sub-categorisations are ridiculous. As soon as you put something in a category within music – and it’s often not the bands that do this, it’s journalists or fans... like, I’m supposedly one of the leaders of the ‘New Wave Of American Heavy Metal’. I always got asked, ‘How do you feel about being the leader of the NWOAHM?’ I’m like, ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’ As soon as you categorise a form of music, and it gets a little Wikipedia article, and people start going, ‘Hmmm, these are the codified rules, I better follow these if I want to be a part of bananacore!’ then you’re just fitting yourself into another little uniform to wear."

Corey: "Plus, you put an expiration date on it. I mean, you mentioned the NWOAHM – there were people that put Slipknot in that, but there were also people who put us in nu metal, just really because of the year that we came out and the stuff that we were experimenting with."

Randy: "I think you guys were your own thing."

Corey: "I’m gonna be an asshole here, because that’s what I love to do, but it’s the pretentious dickweeds who sit at tables and argue this shit, who come up with these fucking categories. They’re not the ones who just buy it because they want to hear it – they need to ‘understand’ it. Sometimes, you don’t need to fucking understand it – you just need to feel it!"

Go to this location for the complete interview.

Photo by Jeremy Saffer