Slipknot‘s Shawn “Clown” Crahan has hit out at politicians who are quick to link mass shootings to popular culture.
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The percussionist’s comments follow those made by bandmate Corey Taylor, who last week said music is an easy target because people in authority “don’t understand it.”
“You know, I don’t pay that any mind because art can’t be touched,” Crahan told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “Freedom of speech, you know? Basically, Slipknot’s my religion, if you want to go that far. You can’t touch this. You can’t fundamentally come into this, because this is my life, this is my spirituality, this is my religion that I worship.”
He continued: “A lot of times, when they divert the plan, the strategy, to things like music, it’s just because they don’t know what the hell they’re doing. They created all these laws, and now they can’t overturn them or even adjust them. They can’t find a happy medium. They can’t compromise. And so, when it’s like that, they’re always going to blame some fraction. And I’m the fraction.”
Earlier this month, a gunman opened fire at a Walmart on August 3 leaving 20 people dead and 26 injured. Hours later, a mass shooting in Dayton, Ohio, left at least nine people dead and 26 wounded.
Commenting on the aftermath of the shootings and how easy it is to push the blame on music, Slipknot’s Corey Taylor told The Independent: “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 ’60s to ’85 with Tipper Gore… Just get the fuck out of my face with that shit!”
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Taylor also aired his frustration at the easy availability of guns. “There are too many fucking guns in America,” he said. “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.”
Released last week (August 9), the metal band’s sixth studio album is “an astonishing record: a roaring, horrifying delve into the guts of the band’s revulsion, a primal scream of endlessly inventive extreme metal and searing misanthropy,” according to NME writer Jordan Bassett.