In a recent interview, SLIPKNOT and STONE SOUR frontman Corey Taylor spoke about his decision to remove himself from social media. He said, “[I stopped posting] I think just about coming up on a year. My last post was actually a zoomed-in shot of the ‘live long and prosper’ emoji — that was the last thing I posted on my own. It might have been September of last year — right around the time I stopped eating meat too.”
Asked if he has been tempted to jump back on social media since 2020 hasn’t really offered us an opportunity to interact in real life due to the coronavirus pandemic, Taylor said: “No. If anything, it’s reinforced me staying off of it. Honestly, I don’t even have the passwords anymore. I have somebody who I use to run my sites. Every once in a while, I’ll tell them something to post on there. But the interaction is such garbage on there.
“I think it’s one of the reasons why nobody talks to each other anymore — because they’re so used to just exploding with no chance for a rebuttal that we’ve forgotten how to have a conversation.
“I’m gonna call it right now — there will soon be classes in college that teach people how to have conversations again. You watch. I’m telling you. It’s that type of retrograde destruction of the way we communicate that is forcing people into these places where they feel like they have no room but what they believe and they’re constantly just doing this [presses fists against each other]. Whereas in the past, we could have differences of opinion, but depending on what your mindset, your mentality, just who you were as a person, that would kind of create how you were in a conversation. You could have a conversation and a difference of opinion, and people wouldn’t pile on you, people wouldn’t troll on you, people wouldn’t get violent, people wouldn’t get just destructive. And that, to me, I think that’s the thing that social media has killed. For something called social media, it’s not really social, is it? It’s a dumpster fire.”
Taylor previously spoke about his decision to quit social media this past January in an interview with the Irish Times. At the time, he said: “There was a few years when I was dealing with some shit right around the end of my last marriage. The fallout from that marriage had forced me into social media, burrowing into a place where people wanted to make me feel better about things because it was bad in my house. I was really ensconced in social media for a while to the point where, when I came up for air, I had gotten to the point where the people on social media were my real friends and my real friends weren’t. It was because my real life had become so unhappy. When I got out of that situation, I took a long look at where I had gone to. It took me a long time to extricate myself from it and now, a year ago, I made the change.”
He continued: “From social media, from my point of view, you don’t know who is trying to talk to you, who they are and what they want from you. When you don’t give them attention, they turn on you. I have had to deal with some serious shit because of that. It’s called cyber-trolling. In a lot of ways, it really is stalking. It’s the darker side of fame that people don’t want to talk about. It’s everybody from me to Chrissy Teigen. It’s really got to the point that it is a dogpile. If you don’t give them the right kind of response, they will come after you in the dirtiest ways, creating different accounts under different names. That, to me, is enough not to ever go on social media again. It brings out the worst in people. It is social mania. It’s ridiculous.”
Corey will release his debut solo album, “CMFT”, on October 2 via Roadrunner Records. Taylor recorded the effort with his band consisting of Jason Christopher on bass, Dustin Schoenhofer on drums, and Zach Throne and Christian Martucci (STONE SOUR) on guitar. The LP was completed at Kevin Churko‘s The Hideout Recording Studio in Las Vegas with producer Jay Ruston, who has previously worked with ANTHRAX, STEEL PANTHER and STONE SOUR, among others.
