Slipknot just released their sixth studio album We Are Not Your Kind on Friday, and are currently doing interviews to help promote the album. The band recently sat down with the Independent, where in addition to discussing the band’s new album, Corey Taylor voiced some pretty strong opinions about gun control.
“There are too many fucking guns in America. I could walk outside right now and find a gun within minutes. There’s a very toxic gun culture here, it’s a cult, and it worries me,” he told the publication two days before mass shootings in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio.
Taylor also addressed politician’s eagerness to blame music and video games as inspiration for the shootings. “Music is an easy target because [people in authority] don’t understand it,” he said. “There’s a complete lack of effort to try to understand it and a lack of willingness to take any portion of the blame for these events.”
He also added that this attempt to point fingers at musicians has continued since the 1960s. “If you’re looking for a certain kind of rhetoric, whether it’s hating black people or gay people or whatever, there are thousands of sites with people posting about it. We’re seeing the repercussions of a failure to address that. They still wanna blame the fucking music, and it’s been happening since the Sixties to ’85 with Tipper Gore…” The ex-wife of former-Vice President Al Gore, Tipper notably led the movement that introduced parental advisory stickers albums during her time as second lady.
Taylor has remained an outspoken advocate for progressive causes. Last month, he took to Twitter to berate white supremacists and Holocaust deniers, whose “far-right extremist” beliefs he called a “travesty to the memory of the survivors and disrespectful to the people who fought for them.” In 2016, he objected to a Gawker story which implied white supremacists might listen to Slipknot, and later spoke with SPIN about Trump, the Black Lives Mater movement, and the stereotypes metal fans continues to face.
Read the Independent‘s full interview here.
