herecomethefuzzz - Tumblr blog

herecomethefuzzz · 6 months ago

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i can't keep quiet about this anymore, i have to say something controversial.

sal and larry, especially larry, are not listening to that much slipknot.

i'm sorry but it has to be said. they're a completely different genre of metal than sanity's fall or any of the bands listed on larry's backpack in the bologna incident. sal owns some masks because his tastes are more diverse than larry's, but also he's sal. of course they're gonna draw him in for that reason. i'll give you a detailed analysis on why i think this and worry not, i will point you in the right direction of the kinds of music that they would listen to a lot more of at the bottom under a TLDR, just scroll until you see it if you don't want to read everything. i'm just tired of people acting like slipknot is THE band they listen to when it's a completely different style to sanity's fall.

if anything, sal's slipknot phase is probably something larry would poke at him for in the future like a cringy emo phase.

the analysis (you can skip this if you want)

for one, while slipknot is pretty iconic, they're not the same genre of metal as sanity's fall at all, and sal and larry are 100% regularly listening to much more hardcore metal than what slipknot produces.

the style is just completely off. the kind of metal that sal and especially larry listen to is a lot closer to bands like eyehategod, decapitated and shrüm than it is to slipknot.

just analyzing the band purely stylistically, sanity's fall is not a band that focuses very heavily on vocal melody or the repeatability of their lyrics, they focus a lot more on the melody of their guitars and dope riffs and the screaming itself than they do anything else, their lyrics are almost completely unintelligible and as far as i'm concerned, basically irrelevant, because that's the genre of metal that they are (i don't know what specific genere they would fall into outside of ~general hardcore~ but you get the idea). this kind of metal does not care if you can repeat the lyrics. maybe the tapes or CDs they produce would come with a sheet telling you what the lyrics to all their songs are, but this genre of metal is not about the lyrics or the vocal melody. what the songs are about themselves is almost completely irrelevant to the vibe that they are creating, which is one of pure Loud And Fucking Awesome. drown out literally everything else in the entire world with the music, that is the kind of genre that sanity's fall is.

that's not something slipknot does with their music at all. slipknot wants you to know the lyrics to their songs, their screaming is powerful but doesn't make their words unintelligible, and they have much stronger vocal melodies because it seems like they want you to be able to sing or scream along to their lyrics. this is part of why i describe them as more "broadly appealing" metal than the kind of metal that sanity's fall is, because it's something people less attuned to the genre can latch onto more easily than a band like sanity's fall. there's nothing inherently wrong with this at all, but the fact is, slipknot is not the hardcore metal that sal and larry are listening to the most of, because they aren't hardcore at all comparatively speaking, and that's actually been the subject of a lot of metalhead discourse and memes over the years, with some people going as far as to say slipknot isn't even metal--something i disagree with, i just don't think they're very good metal, but that's just my opinion.

(the memes are just examples, to be clear)

and for two... the culture is just. very different. the slipknot fanbase has a very, very different culture and vibe than does the culture of bands like acid bath, eyehategod, soilent green, goatwhore, and the kind of culture that sanity's fall would have, because they're completely different genres of metal. this is important because the culture of a band and its fanbase is extremely important in metal spaces, and that was especially true in the 90s.

while i listen to hardcore and especially sludge metal and have my entire life, i'm not nearly as into specifically "metal culture", and i'm also 21 and have gotten a lot of information second-hand since i wasn't there, so i can't really be named as an expert on this, take my words with a grain of salt. but from what i know about the fanbase and about this era, there was heavy overlap between slipknot fans and fans of bands like limp bizkit, where the vibe created was one of somewhat exaggerated Tuff Guys, for lack of a better term, and that's very different from the kind of vibe that gabry seems to have been going for when creating larry in particular. this is why sal is probably a much more casual listener who's more drawn to the aesthetic the band creates with their masks than anything else, in my opinion.

larry is a stoner metalhead, an artist, and is someone very attuned to his emotional self even if he does generally keep especially his darker/more negative emotions to himself/in his art alone most of the time. he wants to be strong, for the people he cares about, but he does not want to be a Tuff Guy in the same way that slipknot and limp bizkit fans are. larry is not at all aggressive or insanely easily threatened unless someone is threatening his friends or family, and he's incredibly chill and easygoing, because at heart, he appears to be a sort of caretaker for the group/his loved ones, at least that's how i interpret his character. he's very kind, passionate, caring and genuine, and he's not generally afraid to let that part show, especially around the people he cares about most. on top of this, he's incredibly goofy and silly, it seems like he really loves to make his friends laugh and really more than anything else, he just wants to have a good time. he's also a huge slacker, though it's not expanded on very much in the game itself, and probably enjoys doing nothing [with his friends] more than he enjoys doing almost anything else. he's an incredibly laid-back character, and i describe him as the chill golden retriever to sal's anxiety-disordered cheetah, and that's how the two of them balance each other out.

at the very least, the same cannot really be said for the culture that slipknot is trying to create with their music. larry is just a very different archetype of metalhead than [at least the stereotype of] your average slipknot fan.

basically, larry is this guy:

and a slipknot fan is this:

it's just a completely different vibe.

if larry were to listen to them at all, slipknot is very far from the primary kind of metal that larry would be listening to, but i'm personally inclined to believe that he wouldn't like them very much at all.

the canon basis

larry's backpack has all the answers. just looking at the bands parodied on his backpack in the bologna incident makes it very easy to see what kind of music larry listens to, and not a single one of the bands parodied here is parodying slipknot, as far as i can tell. the only one i couldn't make out at all was the one on the left hand side, next to the creeper sticker, but i doubt it's parodying slipknot. ('a break inside'? 'a birth inside'? i don't know, that middle word looks like gibberish to me).

i got this from the wiki so i'm really disappointed that it's as low quality as it is, but i'll do my best to list the bands out out from top to bottom, and what band each label is parodying to the best of my knowledge:

oden's blood (unsure)

deth (death)

deadtones (deftones)

pantasia(? pantera)

corn (korn)

slay (slayer)

we are void (unsure)

creeper (unsure)

meatallica(? metallica)

S.O.D. (system of a down, often abbreviated to S.O.A.D.)

type o positive (type o negative)

at the grates (at the gates)

slipknot ws formed in '95 and the bologna incident takes place around 94/95, so larry wouldn't have reasonably known about them at this point, but if you've listened to any of these bands, you can see the stark difference between slipknot and the rest of them, and you can see why, in my opinion, larry isn't the kind of metalhead who's regularly listening to slipknot.

to an extent, they probably enjoy some slipknot, and sal in particular is definitely drawn to the culture due to how the band members and fans often wear these halloween masks as a part of their getup (see below), because he has what appear to be slipknot masks in his room in episode 5, (they don't appear to have a picture of this on the wiki so you'll have to take my word for it), because by this point, his interest in rock/metal appears to be a lot more broad than larry's, but even then, i still don't think that he would be as interested in them as other bands. the thing that draws him in the most is the masks and general aesthetic, but there are a lot of other rock and metal artists that did very similar things, such as buckethead and mushroomhead. but in my opinion, he's more drawn to the aesthetic and the 'they're just like me' aspect than he is to the band itself.

i don't hate them personally, they have their place in music history and have made iconic songs and lines, like psychosocial and "i push my fingers into my eyes, it's the only thing that slowly stops the ache", etc. it's just that when they're the only metal band i see getting referenced constantly, and when the rest of the bands i see getting referenced are literally not metal, they're emo/alt-rock or just rock (such as paramore), it drives me up the wall a little bit as someone who actually listens to quite a bit of metal.

i just don't think that slipknot is the band that sal and larry are listening to on such a regular basis just because sal owns some masks, and when it's the only metal band i ever see people pointing to it makes me want to explode. there are so many metal bands out there, i promise.

you, reader. i am gripping you by the shoulders. allow me to help you expand your tastes.

TL;DR - here is a list of various metal bands to check out.

here is a list of bands that are way more in the genres of metal that sal and larry are interested in (also taking from the bands listed on larry's backpack in case you didn't read that part):

at the gates - swedish death metal

korn - numetal

deftones - alt metal, early numetal

pantera - classic metal

slayer - thrash metal

death - death metal

metallica - classic metal

system of a down/S.O.A.D. - heavy/political metal

type o negative - gothic/doom metal

goatwhore - extreme metal

acid bath - sludge metal

dirty rotten imbiciles/D.R.I. - thrash metal

saxon - english heavy metal

eyehategod - sludge metal

soilent green (not to be confused with the movie soylent green) - grindcore/sludge metal

puscifer - rock

shrüm - sludge metal

decapitated - polish (early) technical metal

these are a good bunch of bands to start with if you're just getting into heavy/hardcore metal, but the best ways to get into more bands is to let your youtube recommendations bring you down a rabbit hole, or talk to people much older than you who are into metal who can recommend bands. another thing you can also do is look at other projects worked on by members of bands you already like.

acid bath is a fantastic sludge metal band, one of the best that's ever done it, in my opinion, and the lead singer has worked on other projects such as deadboy and the elephantmen, a band that is not metal but has some really good songs. other members of acid bath have also worked on bands like shrüm and goatwhore, which is how i found out about them. another example is that the lead singer of tool worked on another band in this list, puscifer, as the lead singer.

music artists don't necessarily tend to stick to one band their entire careers, and it's always a great idea to check out the other projects they've worked on, it's a great way to continue to support your favorite artists and to find new music, and you can often do this by just reading their wikipedia page.

if you read this entire thing, you might be insane but that's fine we can be insane together. i hope at the very least this gave other sally face fans a place to start with when expanding their tastes in metal.

that's it, i'm done, goodnight.

ETA: changed around some wording and fixed some memes that got put in the completely wrong place due to formatting errors.

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