Corey Taylor Talks About Alienating Trump Supporters in Band’s Fanbase
Corey Taylor has been one of a small handful of prominent metal musicians fearlessly willing to use his platform to speak up against our racist, misogynist, bigoted and generally hateful administration, and doing so has often put him in the crosshairs of his band’s fans, whose political views run the full spectrum.
But Taylor, Dio bless him, doesn’t care what they think. In a recent interview with The Ringer, he spoke about the chatter amongst his band’s more conservative fans who might not be so fond of his political outlook:
Back when the whole Gawker thing happened in 2016 before the election, you said that you knew that some Slipknot fans had stopped listening to the band because of what you were saying on Twitter about Trump, but you hoped that once things settled down a bit, those fans might come back. Things obviously didn’t settle down. Is that tension still a problem at all?
“I don’t know, to be honest. There’s a whole lot of Trump supporters who are very vocal when they’re like, ‘Keep your fucking politics to yourself.’ But they don’t say that to people who agree with them. They don’t say that to artists who are conservative and may or may not support Trump, but they definitely support what conservatives believe in. So it’s like, ‘Oh, you just don’t want to hear me because you don’t agree with me.’ OK, fuck you. That’s not the way this works. The way a dialogue works is sometimes you’re going to hear shit that you don’t fucking like. Sometimes you’re going to hear shit that you don’t agree with. That’s why this over-censorship bullshit that’s going on is fucking terrifying. Because that’s not how freedom of speech works.
“Or some people go, ‘Well, that’s the last album I buy.’ Well, the last time I checked, people are still buying Nikes, people are still fucking going to football games, people are still doing 100 fucking things that other people find offensive. And it’s like, “Well, guess what. The world keeps turning, and I’m going to keep fucking talking.”
Whether or not Corey has turned off some of his (now former) fans, he is absolutely correct that a whole lot of them don’t seem to care, and the numbers prove it. Either that or the band’s profile has grown so large that the voices of any fans lost have been drowned out by those of newcomers.
We here at MetalSucks are obviously quite supportive of Corey’s political outspokenness and would be very, very sad if he ever backed down. But he’s not gonna back down. So stop asking.
