You have to be a terrific snob not to see the appeal of Slipknot

Every development in heavy music is derided by mainstream critics. When Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin emerged in the late 1960s, they were sneered at for their lumpen, troglodyte stupidity. A decade on, AC/DC were reviled for precisely the same reasons. When Metallica and Slayer helped lead the thrash metal movement in the mid-1980s, it was at first only enthusiasts for extreme noise who cheered them on. The disdain never lasts. People who grew up listening to those bands became critics or editors or broadcasters or musicians, and each of them was absorbed seamlessly into the rock canon.

That’s precisely what’s happened to the Iowa band Slipknot, too. The nu-metal movement with which they were linked — all downtuned guitars playing riffs that were based more on rhythm than melody, growled and unintelligible vocals, and interpolations, vocally and rhythmically, from hip-hop — was widely regarded as some kind of remedial class for the idiots too slow to process anything other than the most brutish noise. A couple of decades on, and the most notable of the nu metal bands are now revered — White Pony by Deftones crops up on best albums lists outside the specialist press, and Slipknot are hugely influential and hugely popular. How popular? Before Christmas, in Kathmandu, I saw a Nepalese group who had copied Slipknot — horror masks and all – so completely it was like watching a tribute band.

Watching Slipknot play to 20,000 people, it was easy to work out why they and their like were so derided. This is music you either sign up for wholeheartedly or recoil from in disgust: no one is likely to say, ‘Well, I like “New Abortion”, but “People = Shit” just doesn’t have quite the same subtlety, for me.