Slipknot |

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Slipknot is a nine-piece american musical group from Des Moines, Iowa , formed in 1995 and currently signed to Roadrunner Records.
Their albums and home videos have achieved Platinum-sales status, with Grammy award nominations in the "Best Heavy Metal" and "Best Hard Rock" categories for songs from three of their four albums. They recently won the 2006 Grammy for Best Metal Performance for "Before I Forget".
The band is also known for its peculiar image: the members wear matching uniform jumpsuits, and custom-made masks inspired by facets of their respective personalities. In the past, their jumpsuits have featured large UPC barcodes printed on the back and sleeves, which is the same barcode as on their first album, Mate.Feed.Kill.Repeat. The members' masks are typically altered or presented in a new form with the advent of each new studio album.
Initially, the group's members desired to preserve their secret identities, refusing to be photographed maskless, even to the point of conducting interviews or posing with fans while wearing their masks (or at least obscuring their faces in some other way). Aside from their real names, members of the band are also referred to by numbers 0 through 8.
Today most members of the band have now been openly photographed without their masks, largely as the result of their work outside of Slipknot:
In the video for "Before I Forget" they performed without their masks; however, the band members' faces are shown only as brief glimpses (mainly close-up shots on their eyes and mouths), with the camera mostly focused on their hands and instruments.


Categorization

There is much disagreement on the issue of how to classify Slipknot's music. Those who consider Slipknot to be nu metal argue that the lyrical themes and instrumental styles of Slipknot, most notably the rarity of guitar solos, the use of three drummers, turntables, sampling, and rap-reminiscent vocals place the group squarely in the nu metal camp. On the other hand, those who do not consider Slipknot's music to be nu-metal note that much of their music does not have the rap-based lyrical influence common in nu metal.
With the release of Slipknot's latest album, Vol. 3: (The Subliminal Verses), fans felt that the presence of solos on their albums would end the debate on the band's genre and label them heavy metal. However, it can be argued that this is simply another financially conscious move given the mid-2000s "retro-metal" renaissance, that the style of vocals still have more in common with nu metal than heavy metal and solos alone do not specify a genre. Some others think that the presence of solos in their latest album is only due to the change of the producer, pointing to the presence of solos in songs released before they signed with Roadrunner. In a Guitar World interview, Root reported that Ross Robinson, who produced the self-titled and Iowa albums, had denied Slipknot the use of guitar solos at all, in order to align them with the then-prevailing trend in metal.[citation needed]
Bassist Paul Gray stated in an interview "We're not 'rap metal' or 'new metal,' We're metal metal. We want to be lumped in with bands like Pantera and Slayer".[9]
Some of the genres commonly applied to Slipknot include:



Members


Current members

Former members