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Who are Slipknot’s fans?
We head down to Slipknot’s Here Comes The Pain tour in Manchester to meet the Maggots that had their lives changed forever by nine masked men from the cornfields…
During a fan Q&A on the ShipRocked cruise, Corey Taylor went back over last year’s feud with Machine Gun Kelly: “He maintains that I started it. The truth is he started it…”
While it seemed as though Corey Taylor and Machine Gun Kelly's 2021 feud had died down, the Slipknot frontman revisited their infamous falling out during this month's ShipRocked cruise.
As part of a fan Q&A, Corey went back over the origins of their beef, which – according to him – began when he turned down a collaboration for MGK's Tickets To My Downfall album: "I won't fill you in on the whole fucking story because you can go online and look it all up," Corey began. "However, I will say this: he maintains that I started it. The truth is he started it."
Both have differing opinions on that, with Machine Gun Kelly previously stating that he rejected Corey's collab because "it was fucking terrible" and then "he got mad about it, and talked shit to a magazine about the same album he was almost on", prompting the feud. Corey, meanwhile, said at the time that he "didn’t do the track because I don’t like when people try to ‘write’ for me".
At ShipRocked, the ’Knot vocalist explained (transcribed via Blabbermouth): "If you don't know, they asked me to do a tune with him. They sent it to me. I didn't dig it. And I tried to do something with it because of my respect for Travis [Barker, TTMD producer], because he and I worked together before. They sent me these really weird notes and they wanted me to sing his words. And I just said, 'I'm not gonna do it.' And I sent an email. I posted that email. And I didn't hear back from him. And I thought it was done.
"Fast-forward about eight months, and Machine Gun Kelly is doing this weird Instagram Live interview with [Allison Hagendorf] from Spotify. And he goes off on this fucking rant about rock stars and comfortable shoes. It sounds as smart as you think it is… I mean, spit was coming out of his face. And I'm watching it and I'm going, 'You fuck. You've been here for five minutes, basically, and you're gonna fucking run your mouth about bands that have been doing this for 20 fucking years, like in the mud, in the dirt. They're gonna wear whatever the fuck they want. You're gonna walk in here with your fucking black tongue and try to talk some shit on some bands that would fucking circle your ass? Fuck you.'
"So when I had my opportunity to say something, I did," Corey continues, adding that he "the only reason I said what I said is because he said what he said".
"You don't get to walk into a genre with the history, with the work… The fact that this genre really doesn't get the fucking respect that it deserves. You don't get to walk in as some weird substitute teacher and pretend that you can tell us what to wear – boots, shoes, house fucking shoes, slippers. Why don't you suck every inch of my dick? You don't get to do that. And these are bands that maybe I don't even fucking know, but guess what? I fucking respect them because they get on fucking stage and they fucking give every fucking thing they've got."
Watch the full rant below: