Once upon a time, when the current century and millennium were just getting started, I was a middle- and high-school band director in my mid-20s. In the months after 9-11, I met another band director in her 20s, Jenny, and we went out on a few dates. I had a lot of first dates over the years, a few second dates, and Jenny and I probably went out eighteen times or so, making our dating relationship fairly memorable in the context of my history. Since I mostly don’t keep in touch with old girlfriends, and we never knew each other in any other setting, we’ve long since lost track, but Jenny was the last person I dated seriously before I met my wife, Becky.
Naturally, I suppose, a few anecdotes about Jenny and me are official canon in my family, including the “Slipknot still sucks” story.
It happened something like this:
I took Jenny to a minor league hockey game for our first evening date. Not because we were huge fans or even knew much about hockey… it was my idea of something to do. As the game progressed, we talked about likes and dislikes, as one does, and we fell to talking about music, as one does. We both shared an interest in rock music, and we may have even been talking about classical music, for all I remember at this point: we were both conservatory grads and school music teachers.
At some point, Jenny noticed that the teenaged boys in front of us kept turning around to look, and she thought they were snickering about our conversation. I don’t know if they were amused by our musical preferences, or wondering what it was like to be dating as adults, or genuinely shocked that someone like her would talk to someone like me. For whatever reason, they weren’t minding their own business.
I don’t know where the next part came from. I felt relaxed and just happy to be out and about: I always enjoyed dating, for the most part. I wasn’t happy in my job, but I had a decent group of friends, and was always welcome at my parents’ house. I had been living in Springfield for a little more than two years, and was really feeling comfortable there and in Dayton, where I had met Jenny when we both brought students to an honor band at the University of Dayton. I was feeling a confidence I hadn’t always felt, and I was on a second date with someone who seemed like a real prospect.
The kids in front of us turned around to sneer again, and I said, loud enough to be heard, “yeah, yeah, Slipknot still sucks.”
The kids probably reacted with more snickering, but I don’t really remember, because Jenny cracked up laughing, and I felt like I had actually said the right thing for a change.
It was a moment when a couple of snooty, sarcastic Young GenXer musicians bonded over the superiority of their shared musical tastes vis-a-vis a few Elder Millennials at a minor-league hockey game in Dayton, Ohio–not exactly the Algonquian Roundtable, but it felt good.
Really, that’s all I remember from that date, a couple of decades on: a dis on a few kids who were the same age as the kids I was teaching at the time.
The dirty truth? I had never listened to Slipknot. Not knowingly. Not one song.
It was the era before streaming, before iTunes even, so it wasn’t a simple matter of pulling Slipknot up on the app (I wouldn’t have a cell phone for another three years). I was still building a classical CD collection, and picking up a few classic rock CDs here and there. My radio diet was mostly NPR, which I had discovered in college, and some classic rock radio. I had recently adopted a TV that my parents had replaced, bringing the number of sets in my apartment to one, but I didn’t have cable, and barely ever turned it on.
My students listened to Slipknot–at least some of them–and that’s how I knew the name, from their t-shirts and the graffiti on their binders. It was around this time that I knew of Eminem and Insane Clown Posse, but I hadn’t heard them, either. I also hadn’t watched Fear Factor, or Survivor, and I had even lost track of The X-Files, which had been must-see TV for me in college and just after. I was much more in a bubble than I am today, I think, ironically at the very age when the proton pack of mass culture was aimed straight at my face. I read books, and I went to movies, and I thought about classical music, with my social life centered around being in a concert band and a brass band.
Jenny and I didn’t last much into the New Year, 2002. I left Springfield the next summer, and started dating Becky: we were serious by Thanksgiving, engaged for the Blackout of 2003, and married in 2004. This post was almost an email to Jenny, but I don’t even have that anymore. My Outlook contacts lists an AOL account for her, and that seems, well, unlikely.
But I thought Jenny–or the void I shout into–might appreciate the collision of worlds that has happened recently.
Noah, my thirteen-year-old son, is into music, and was talking about bands one day. At some point, unprompted, he mentioned Slipknot, to which I replied with a quick, “Yeah, yeah, Slipknot still sucks.”
I don’t usually use that kind of language around the kids, although I’ve gotten a little more free with it when it’s just Noah and me. I think he was probably also surprised that I would just dismiss any music in that way: I’ve always wanted him to have his own tastes, and explore what he’s interested in. Besides, I bit my tongue for his obsessions with Kid LaRoi, Lil Nas X, and Billie Eilish when he was in late elementary school, and they passed. Mercifully.
My little quip about Slipknot, though, was cause for discussion. First, I had to explain why I had said it: as a catch-phrase, mostly, from a time I wanted to impress a woman on our second date. I didn’t tell him it was also a reminder of a moment when I felt loose, and free, and confident in the midst of a time that I rarely felt those things. A reminder of a time when people my age were tastemakers–for better or for worse–and could enjoy our first opportunity to lord our good taste over our juniors.
Then, the inevitable:
“But Dad, have you really listened to Slipknot?”
I don’t lie to my kids (although I omit freely and without compunction): I admitted that I hadn’t, not knowingly.
Noah then appears to have taken it on himself to become a Slipknot expert. Not all at once, but it has gotten to the point where he is annoying not just his mother and me but also his friends with his interest in a band from two decades ago. He can’t be bothered to remember slope-intercept form, but if Slipknot sang it or did it, he wants to know.
Of course, Slipknot’s entire oeuvre and all the information one might want to know about Slipknot is right there, ready to be beer-bonged straight from his smartphone into his brain, in a way that wasn’t really available to me in late 2001 even if I had been of a mind to determine the band’s overall level of suckiness. I’m sure some Slipknot fan or a hundred dedicated their Geocities page to them, or there were glossy fan magazines on the rack at Big Bear, ready to cure my ignorance of what, for all I knew, might be the greatest act since, I don’t know… Barry Manilow?
So now, a mere twenty-two years after my initial assertion in a moment of colossally-hubristic snark, I am faced with the music that I once denigrated without hearing a single note. Noah streams it whenever he has the chance, and he sings along with Slipknot in the shower. He argues that it is “real” music that takes “real” work, unlike the processed drivel on the Top 40. They wear masks! They once played drums sideways! One of them speaks Klingon! Slipknot built the Pyramids, and beat up Kublai Khan!
You, reader, may be worried for me: Do I now have to tell Jenny–or absent that, the world–that I was wrong? Has that moment when I felt like I had a handle on things actually been built on an untenable assumption, and does one of the bright spots in a frankly difficult part of my life turn out to crumble?
More importantly, am I just some kind of a**hole with none of the cultural credibility my generation holds so dear?
Well, I’m here to tell you, having considered it more closely:
Slipknot still sucks.
Thank God.
Post-script: Things mentioned in this post that still suck:
- Slipknot (Duh!)
- Slope-Intercept Form
- 9-11
- The Blackout of 2003
- Big Bear (or rather, the fact that Big Bear no longer exists)
- Fear Factor and Survivor
- smartphones
Post-post-script: Things mentioned in this post that don’t suck:
- Becky
- Noah
- Minor-league hockey
- First dates
- Dayton
- The X-Files
- Showers