DJ Sid Wilson in 2001
Just over ten years ago, a gang of masked Midwesterners went from cult favorites to metal gods overnight. On August 28, 2001, Slipknot dropped an acidic, boiling slab of brutality on the world called Iowa, and DJ Sid Wilson – a.k.a. Number Zero, a.k.a. Starscream – was the man who made it spin. The youngest member of the band, his skill on the wheels and flamboyant behavior stood out even in a group as unforgettable as Slipknot, and he’s stayed with it in the intervening decade, honing his abilities and expanding his musical knowledge while remaining an integral member of the band. He spoke recently about his memories of how Iowa came to be, his views on the role of a turntablist in metal, and why Slipknot answers only to Slipknot.
It’s been ten years since Iowa was released. Does it seem like it’s been that long?
Sure, I guess. It seems longer, actually [laughs].
Did you guys make a conscious decision to make Iowa different from the debut album? What did you do differently?
We felt like we were under pressure from a lot of people to go more mainstream. The band was so popular, and there were other bands out there like Korn and Limp Bizkit that were doing it pretty big too, and we were getting lumped into that genre. We didn’t see ourselves as being the same kind of band as any of those people – we saw ourselves more as metal than nü-metal, or whatever the fuck you want to call it, you know? [laughs] And from some people, there was a lot of pressure to do more songs like “Spit It Out” or “Wait and Bleed,” with more melodic elements to them. Stuff that had kind of a radio appeal. We didn’t really think about it that way – we just wanted to do our art the way we’d been doing it, where everybody could fit in the sound. So when people would tell us to go more melodic or mainstream, we’d think, “Why would we let anyone else tell us how to do it?” It was so hard for us to get noticed in the first place, and no one wanted to fuckin’ touch us when we were first bugging the shit out of all these record labels and people in the industry. And so we made the first record, and it was a big success and started getting all this attention, and people seemed to be interested. We thought, “You didn’t believe in us at first until you saw numbers.” And when they saw numbers on a piece of paper, all of a sudden they believed in us, and all of a sudden they had an opinion on what they thought we should do. That’s just not how it works! You either like it for the art, for what it is, or get fuckin’ lost! So I think Iowa was kind of a big middle finger, a “fuck you” to the industry. And there was a lot of this rap-metal happening, and we were a metal band, so we wanted to send a signal that we weren’t going to conform to that. We were going to do what we thought was awesome, what we thought was brutal, what we thought was cutting-edge. That’s what got us to where we were in the first place. It wasn’t someone else telling us what they thought we should do; it was us doing what we knew we needed to do.
