While success has its rewards, it also makes you one big target.

After finding himself exchanging words with Trent Reznor and Marilyn Manson, Limp Bizkit frontman Fred Durst may now have a rift brewing with metal up-and-comers Slipknot.

The group's singer, Corey Taylor, told the crowd at Slipknot's New York show Monday night a story about an "anonymous rock star," telling the audience, "He said, and I quote, 'Slipknot's fans are a bunch of fat, ugly kids.'"

Taylor continued, "So I said, 'Fred, you may have a lot of money and be all over the world, but when you talk s**t about Slipknot and our fans… we will kill you."

Despite the on-stage declaration, spokespeople for Slipknot told MTV News that Taylor is withholding further comment on the situation until he and Durst can address the matter directly.

Durst's success with Limp Bizkit seems to have made him a bit of target as of late, as the singer has been on the receiving end of barbs from Nine Inch Nails' frontman Trent Reznor and Marilyn Manson (who once called Durst and his fans "illiterate apes").

Not one to take such talk lying down, Durst fought back on stage during Limp's recent Billionaire Pirates tour, and also told Britain's "NME" of Manson, "His career has gone in a shambles and he's alienated his fans, so if he has to say things like that because he's very mad at himself, I would forgive him. And Trent Reznor is in the same f***ing boat… We're just here doing what we do and we have nothing to say about anybody."
 

SLIPKNOT PERCUSSIONIST Shawn Chahan was rushed to a plastic surgeon after smashing his head open for the second time onstage. During the Iowa nine-piece's set at the Ozzfest's recent Seattle stop-off, the irrespectable 'Number Six' became over-excited and the song 'Eyeless' almost saw him loose a peeper

"I stood up on my drum-riser and crashed down on my kit," he recalls. "I saw blood squirting from my eye socket before I felt the pain. I felt all this warm s*it on my neck and I thought I'd been shot in the head."

The clown-headed casualt was dragged offstage by roadies and System Of A Down bassist Shavo Odadjian. "My mask was full of blood," Shawn recalls. "I must have swallowed two pints. I almost passed out. But I remember looking over and watching the others carry on playing. I thought, 'That's the greatest band in the f*cking world!'."

Crahan later saw a plastic surgeon who closed the crevice in his head with 17 stitches. Despite some imminent additional laser treatment, the percussionist remains determened to be the most self-abusive man in rock. "When I'm onstage I live off complete hate and aggression. On the next Ozzfest date I probably went madder than I ever have before. This is only the f*cking beginning. I have really tough bones - I'm a big milk drinker.
 

MIKE:You guys know about mtv and what they do for bands' careers. Will you ever feature a censored video or something that is not you just so you can be on mtv?
Shawn: We did submit a video called "Spit it out", we did a rendition of the Shining, they didn't take it so we are not doing anything else for mtv. We then put it on home video at a low price, and gave it to our fans. We can give two shits less for what's going on.
Joe: We recognize that the current success of the band is thanks to the fans and the fans only not because of mtv or magazines cause you want see us much in either one of those. However, thanks to our current success, they might in turn look at our next video and actually play it
. MIKE: I noticed on your cd, the opening is really sick and it reminds me a little bit of Marilyn Manson. What is your opinion of him?
Joe: The first two records are really good...
MIKE: Do you like his old shit?
Joe: Yeah...
MIKE: What do you think about the new image that he is trying to get out there?
Shawn: I just think he's out there to do his thing, and i don't think "Slipknot" is anything like him. We never met him, but if you' re a musician and you are working very hard at it, we respect you.
Joe: I think he's just pushing the limits of what he can do.
MIKE: How do you feel about Korn and their success?
Joe: The first record was really good, the second has some good stuff on it, but the third one, i didn't care much about. The latest one, i haven't heard much of.
MIKE: Do you guys fuck with your masks on?
Joe: (Laughter) I think Shawn might have, but i haven't yet.
MIKE? Have you ever slept with anybody so ugly that you had to put the mask on her?
Joe: Oh, no.
Shawn: That's what the lights are for.
MIKE: The sound effect at the end of your cd... what is that. Some kind of fucked up porno?
Shawn: We can't tell you.
Joe: You gotta keep something secret.
MIKE: To me it sounds like some nasty ass porno.
Shawn: It's like this man... number one, we are against the whole hidden and track thing. A whole bunch of bands that were doing well started doing it. But with that particular thing going on in our lives, it was so real and so disgusting...
Joe: It was one of those things you' ll remember even when you're eighty.
MIKE: How did your appearance on Howard Stern affect your popularity?
Joe: I don't think it did shit! If we didn't do it we'd bit at the same level of popularity that we are at now. We were only on for a second and i don't think when people heard us it made an impact.
MIKE: If you were a New York City cab driver, would you pick up a black guy?
Joe: Yeah, sure, why not?
MIKE: How do you feel about the internet and the distribution of MP3's?
Shawn: I'll be honest you with man... I think the Internet is the greatest invention the world has ever seen. If a kid can't be at a "Slipknot" show, he could be with you intimately at home, regardless of where he is around the world. MP3's I think are fine, but it's very dangerous when certain people get a hold of an album before it is released and leak it out to the public. Then people download it and distribute it... You have to understand; if you're a musician, you learn how to, and i'm gonna quote something from Henry Rollins here: "you learn how to starve creatively". This is our livelyhood, and MP3's can be very dangerous. I'm a great supporter of the Internet. Our "Slipknot"1.com page got over 230,000 hits last month, and it's a great way of reaching out. Joe: It's more fun to me to go out and buy a CD from a record store, than to just get it off the Internet. Shawn: I think the corporate world needs to wake the fuck up and make it more fun for fans to go online and get educated about their favorite bands.
MIKE: What's the hot cd's in your player right now?
Joe: The new "Amen" record is really good and the new "Accused"
. Shawn: And i got to say, the new "Nine Inch Nails", whether you like them or not, is an awesome album
MIKE: What about "Limp Pizkit"? What's the story between you and them?
Shawn: Let's go on the record and say something right now: We live of the most common things in life, number one of which is respect. I don't talk shit about anyone, unless i have something to say. A couple of people in that band said that we're with RoadRunner so we'll never go anywhere. And also that we speak for fat ugly kids. So take that for what it is, but when we see "Limp Pizkit" for the first time, we are going to get naked and take it in cromag style. I'm gonna have a fucking quarter in my hand and we're gonna flip for fucking punches.
Joe: Punches in the face. Fifty fifty chance of winning.
Shawn: We'll give them the benefit of the doubt. I'll flip for a punch with those cock suckers any time! But if they didn't say anything, then we're all good.
Joe: Let me make something clear about them. Wes, the guitar player, fucking rules. Wes is the shit.
Shawn: Few people have the gift, and Wes is one of them.
Joe: He can jam with us any time.
Shawn: The rest of the band, whatever, but Wes is the man.
MIKE: What kind of background are you guys from?
Joe: As far as musical asperations, we grew up with "Black Sabbath", then we got into the black metal shit like "Venom", and "Slayer". Then we started getting into the "Jane's Addiction" type of staff. Pretty much a wide range of everything. Right now, we're so involved with "Slipknot" we don't listen to anything except from the few we just mentioned. From an attitude perspective, we were all raised pretty well, but we were raised in an environment were you had to develop your own sense of individuality. I had 16,000 imaginary friends. I had my own fucking army. Where we came from you don't really have an outlet to let go. This is why we stuck with this for ten years.
Shawn: It's beautiful because we know were we wanna be, and it's easy because we're all guys and we're all best friends. We're doing it all and it's easy. We're just starting, so this is just fucking foreplay. (At this point Shawn gets very excited and sticks his head through the wall. The interview was then abruptly ended...)
 

Rarely since the fiery crash of Buddy Holly's plane in 1959 have the words "Iowa" and "rock and roll" been used in the same sentence. As we've come to know it, Iowa means corn, livestock, conservatism, and precious little else. And like a thousand other landlocked heartland nowheres, it brims with kids dying from boredom, and with small-minded politicians trying to keep their little slice of Americana quaint, quiet, and soul-crushingly sterile. But the kids aren't all right - they're getting pissed.

And in Des Moines, their rage has a name: Slipknot. Draped in Ed Gein-style coveralls and nightmarishly surreal masks, touting a sound patched from the best parts of metal, hip hop, violent L.A.-style "new metal," and armed with a multidimensional percussive onslaught the weight of a hundred Neubautens, you could call Slipknot equal parts style and substance. You could also call it payback time for Middle America. In a recent Alternative Press cover story, drummer Joey explained the band's vitriolic attack this way: "All of us were so used to having the middle finger thrown at us, that when we finally threw it back, we did so with ten times the venom."

And they hit a nerve in the process. Slipknot's self-titled Roadrunner album is nearing platinum status. Their home video, "Welcome to Our Neighborhood," has dominated Billboard's Top Ten since its release, and is already platinum. But that's just America. Australians have made the album gold and the video platinum, and the band continues to sell out gigs there - and throughout Europe and Japan too. Even grumpy old England -- notoriously intolerant of heavy American rock -- has chimed in with a Silver record and New Musical Express' declaration of Slipknot as "brilliant." Similar accolades can be found within recent cover stories in Alternative Press, Circus, Guitar World, Hit Parader and Metal Hammer, and the band has also been featured in Kerrang!, Metal Maniacs, Rolling Stone, and Spin, among others. To top it off, the tune "Wait and Bleed" (which the band performed on Late Night with Conan O'Brien) has lately been rotating on MTV, KROCK NY, KROQ LA, LIVE 105 in San Francisco, WHFS Washington, DC, KNDD Seattle and so on. The video for the single has been officially added to MTV as well.

Surprised? Don't be. From the skull-pummeling "Sic" and unforgiving bludgeon force of "Surfacing," to the sublime melodicism of "Wait and Bleed," to the entrancing percussive drive of "Prosthetics," Slipknot's Ross Robinson-produced Roadrunner CD swarms with such dense instrumentation that you'd swear it was a whole symphony of sickos in command. And you'd be right: Slipknot is made up of nine native Iowans: DJ Sid (#0), drummer Joey (#1), bassist Paul (#2), percussionist Chris (#3), guitarist Jim (#4), sampler Craig (#5), percussionist Shawn (#6), guitarist Mick (#7), and vocalist Corey (#8). Nine guys, each with his own gruesome visual persona AND dehumanizing number. Sounds like a lot? Percussionist Shawn wouldn't have it any other way. "Our music is so reliant on each other that if one guy is gone, it just wouldn't be our songs. Without one person, something is really, really missing. Everybody has to be present. Even the littlest things make our songs magical."

And it is about the songs, after all. While some visually oriented bands forget about that, the beast that is Slipknot, with its virally infectious sense of melody and explosive, percussion-driven backbone, knows its priorities well. "We never put on the shit we wear to try to get people into us," says Joey. "We did because, after being degraded constantly for trying to play music or do something in Des Moines, it just came out to be like we were an anonymous entity. No one gave a fuck. No one cared, so we were never about our names or our faces we're just about music."

Shawn concurs, but refuses to downplay the importance of the band's freakish, startling visuals, or their pathological appeal. "The masks are an extension of our personalities," he says. "Everybody's got a sort of tweaked, demented way about themselves, and we just alter the masks over time. It feels really, really good when we wear our masks for an hour and then take them off. The first thing we do is go, 'God, what a relief.' But we always seem to put them back on after a show."

Forming in mid-1995, Slipknot endured the necessary growing pains and lineup changes before arriving at what they now call "a family unit." Within a year, they'd recorded, self-released and self-distributed their debut, "Mate, Feed, Kill, Repeat," which helped catch the fancy of more than a few big label suits. Eventually signing with Roadrunner via Ross Robinson's I AM RECORDS imprint, they recorded the explosive self-titled album and exported the horror to the outside world through a series of live shows that Shawn understates as simply "like nothing else out there." This included an exposure-grabbing stint on Ozzfest 1999 and a slew of sold-out shows with label-mates Coal Chamber.

Which brings us full-circle in a way. Because, in actuality, there was one other strange incident besides Buddy Holly's death in which "Iowa" and "rock and roll" could be uttered in the same breath before Slipknot: January 20, 1982, when Ozzy Osbourne bit the head off a bat during a gig in Des Moines. "We got the whole thing about the bat right in us," recalls Joey. "When we were little, we kept hearing about this guy named Ozzy biting the head off a bat. That was here in this town, and we've had a little bit of the bat in us ever since."

The heaviest band around could have no better teacher. And indeed, as Slipknot moves from a slot on last year's Ozzfest to the headline act at this summer's Tattoo the Earth tour, one thing is clear as crystal meth: Corn ain't the only thing growing in America's heartland. Consider yourself warned, planet earth!

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