They’re eating wings. They’re wearing masks. It’s less than a month until Halloween. What could wrong?
From the very first frame of a new episode of Hot Ones Versus, Slipknot frontman Corey Taylor is gasping for breath from behind his trademark mask, which looks like either a desiccating corpse or a wasp’s nest with dreadlocks. “You can tell that’s why it’s good, because I’m getting hiccups,” he says, his hands outstretched dramatically like Hamlet. His bandmate, percussionist Shawn “Clown” Crahan, just laughs. “You’re not gonna do that the whole time, are ya?” For the next 16 minutes, the musicians then attempt to answer questions about their career while choking down wings coated in throat-numbing hot sauce.
In the episode, Crahan rates the headgear of other masked artists (i.e., Daft Punk, Gwar, Marshmello) and Taylor ranks artists he’s feuded with (Limp Bizkit, Nickelback, and Machine Gun Kelly). That goes pretty well, so next they each attempt to tie slipknots; Taylor fails and on come the hiccups.
“There’s just this volcano in my mouth,” Crahan, whose mask doesn’t have an obvious mouth hole, says after he tries one. “He’s supposed to leave. There’s no heat leaving. … I have a whirlpool happening.”
“I feel like somebody’s putting cigarettes out on my face,” Taylor says.
Notably, Taylor says a number of times during the episode that he’s trying to be a better person and not be such a bigmouth, talking trash on his peers. When asked to name a peer of his that he knows lip-syncs onstage, he chose instead to eat a “death wing” and face the consequences. Also, notable is a green-screen shot of Crahan in his clown mask with the alpine expanse of The Sound of Music stretching out behind him. Things heat up from there, including Crahan explaining why he loves Britney Spears.
Slipknot recently wrapped a North American leg of their Here Comes the Pain Tour, which celebrated the 25th anniversary of their self-titled debut. They played the album and its attendant B sides on every date of the trek, including for a sold-out show at New York’s Madison Square Garden. After an appearance at Sacramento’s Aftershock Festival on Oct. 11, they’ll be touring in South and Central America, Europe, and the U.K. for the rest of the year.
Rolling Stone photographed the MSG show and spoke with Crahan about the experience. “I feel we have a real culture now,” he said. “We have a real life behind our 25 years, and it comes out every night and our fans stay there to the end. They don’t go to their cars. So I’m having a blast revisiting the self-titled. It’s pretty amazing to me.”
