Corey Taylor Thinks You Don’t See Artists “As People Anymore”
There was a time where if you disrespected a performing artist by throwing shit at them or not listening to them when they tell you to quit being a dick, they’d come down and pop ya one. Those days, however, are long gone, as fans at recent concerts have taken to throwing shit at the artist. And while Dave Mustaine apparently thinks that’s an appropriate response, Slipknot frontman and philosopher king Corey Taylor worries about how that reflects on fans’ perception of artists as people.
While speaking with Loudwire, Taylor wondered if social media and the anonymity oh the internet has detached the idea that musicians are people with thoughts, feelings, families, and lives from reality.
“Oh, it’s fucking ridiculous. This is one of the problems with social media. Now artists aren’t regarded as people anymore. Even if they never were, they were still regarded as something that is flesh and bone. They were something to obsess about, but at least they were a person.”
“Now, because of the feeling of being even more removed from the human experience, now, you might as well just be a fucking soda machine or a phone booth for fuck sake. You’re an object, and you’re going to be treated as such.”
In addition to the moral problems that being a dick to musicians as they perform can cause, Taylor worried for artists safety as well, since it’s effectively assault and can ruin the experience for other concertgoers in the process.
“The fact that people can’t understand how utterly dangerous it is to do shit like that, how utterly rude it is to treat people like that, how utterly incredible it is to think that you are so special that the show is just about you and not about anybody else around you …. the level of entitlement that is being brought out in people is fucking disgusting.
“Everybody wants to just talk about how wrong it is, but nobody wants to talk about why. It’s because nobody’s looking at anyone as a human being anymore. They’re not looking at the artist anymore. They’re not looking at each other anymore like that. And until we bring the human element back into it, there will be no boundaries. That’s what it is. It’s a destruction of boundaries.
“Now people see that they can be disregarded and they’re going to get a reaction and they’re going to have something that they can tweet about again, it’s just one giant sucking black hole that looks like a massive asshole just sucking the whole universe into it. It’s dumb.”
So please, if you go out to any concerts this summer, think of Corey Taylor and don’t be a dick. In fact, just don’t be a dick in general. Because if you throw anything at someone, I really feel like you should be handed a momentary nap a a second later.
