The Seven Deadly Sins

by Corey Taylor

  The third phase is what I consider the most crucial: discovering your music. You see, until that point we are all exposed to other people’s music, which is all well and good, but it stops speaking to you after a while. You need something that feels like your own. You have your own generation to stand with and that includes your own set of problems. It also means you need your own music. That is when metal swept into my life. Master of Puppets was and still is the greatest album ever created. It was a turning point for me. I absorbed any and all metal music I could get my fucking hands on: Slayer, Anthrax, Megadeth, Testament, even skate thrash like D.R.I. and Suicidal Tendencies. I finally had a style that was my style. My listening started to expand at an alarming rate.

  If you are a casual listener, you usually do not make it past phase two. You saunter along with the rest of the herd, clinging to the latest mesh of pop pathology and reminiscing about times when people were not so angry or loud when they made music. If you are anything like me, you stumble onto the next few stages in your development. The fourth phase is a sort of maturation of the younger aggressive stage. I started expanding past metal after a while, going back to my punk roots and discovering this movement coming out of Seattle and Minneapolis and a handful of other places. From the Cure to Nirvana, alternative music—called “college radio” when I was listening to it—was speeding its way into the international psyche to destroy the bloated carcass that was Mainstream Rock and Pop Princess Crap. Alice In Chains and Soul Asylum steered me toward a future that was more Dylan than Dio, and I rolled around in it like a dog in a yard full of delicious bones. You could take the darkness and shape it to your will. You could basically do whatever you wanted. All bets were off.

  And that brought me to my final phase: the creation and realization of my own music. I had been writing and playing my own stuff long before that, but up until that point, I had only been mimicking what I had been listening to. I was a response and call with an acoustic guitar and an attitude. It was all I knew. But when I heard “Would” by Alice In Chains, I knew there was so much more I could do and that I wanted to do. It was an expansion of the hunger in my soul that needed to sing and be. I had been looking my whole life for something to unlock the inner muse. I had finally found it. And I have never looked back. This glutton has scoured the entire musical landscape, taking twists and turns wherever the road gets crazy, from P Funk and Public Enemy to the Rolling Stones and Roxy Music. Mike Patton made me want to explore any and all vocal styles. David Lee Roth and Steven Tyler made me want to party and smile. Henry Rollins made me want to write and scream. Bob Dylan made me want to be a genius. Johnny Cash made me want to sit on a corner and smoke while singing sad songs. But James Hetfield made me want to be myself. I am a gluttonous child with the music of time in his veins. I always want more. I always want to make more. I have no boundaries and no limits—I will push the lines and blur the borders. I have not heard the ultimate song yet, but then again maybe that is because I have not written it yet. I am enough of a fan to know that you can never put limits on your abilities just as you can never put limits on what you like. I have always said your heart knows better than your head does when it comes to the music you are drawn to. If you can get out of the way of your own prejudices, you can experience a universe of music. I stopped holding myself back a long time ago, and the payoff has been rich indeed.

  Gluttony has bursts of brighter sides, but the darker sides can be vicious. An abused wife who refuses to run from her torturous husband becomes a glutton for fear because her capacity for denial makes her a target. It is twisted conditioning; I am not saying it is right. I am saying it happens all too often. The other reality is she fights back and either flees or kills the man. That woman can then become a glutton for life and happiness, spending the rest of her days feeling sunlight instead of raining fists and brutality. The epilogue becomes the karma that should befall the abusive man. There are no sins bad enough for him.

  I have a hard time with this whole sin thing because it is the act that carries the stigma, not the aftermath. I mean what good is a bottomless hunger if you cannot try to fill it? Ask this: Are you a glutton if you have no idea what you are hungry for? Can you suffer if you do not know why? We are force-fed this moral bullshit from the moment we take our first breaths. People judge people, and we don’t need a reason, just a scapegoat. Humans have been manufacturing targets out of each other since our molecules formed. It only makes sense that we would break it down to hunger as well. What do we care? We live our own hells every day. We feel our own pain. Is it the distraction that gives a little respite? Are we truly so indignant that we sift through people’s emotional trashcans to find something, anything, that will give us the superior edge? Nobody wants to feel alone in the world; they especially do not want to feel alone in their misery.

  Drug addicts and alcoholics are gluttons for not only the chemicals they take but for the effects that are forthcoming. It can gloss over a different hunger entirely. Repression and delusions can only make a person long for the thrill of contentment. Getting high or drunk is meant to be a celebration, the old rituals of becoming one with “god.” Visions and lightning are a heavy effect. If these things make you feel like god, why would you not want that feeling all the time? But stamina, adaptation, and tolerance can build up fairly quickly. Suddenly you are drinking more and taking more and looking for all the right “reasons.” Dependency can destroy the greatest of us; so many talents have come and gone. But it is not the gluttony that ultimately kills them but the depression, and I mean that in the literal and metaphorical sense. Depression is a dark lonely place. A depression is also a hole. The parable is obvious.

  I had an alcohol problem for a while. I was drinking two or three bottles of Jack Daniels a day. I just wanted to stay numb and drunk and oblivious to what I was doing so I could do something other than what I was supposed to do. I never stopped to realize that maybe I was doing it to mask something, something I did not want to face. Fortunately, it had never really affected me adversely when I was doing things like Late Night with Conan O’Brien, but as time went on, my darkness slowly took control. Fast forward to The Tonight Show with Jay Leno: I was lined up to play “Bother” with a string quintet I had never met before in front of an audience of 35 million people. Yes, I was nervous. Yes, I was unprepared. Yes, I guzzled my way through a bottle of whiskey just so I could do it. So my gluttony for alcohol, misery, and challenges all coalesced into a frothing experience that I have very little recollection of. I regret it, and I spend very little time on regrets. But this one sticks with me. I was in front of a national audience, really basically by myself, playing guitar and singing. I should have relished this moment. Instead, all I have to show for it is the cardboard Tonight Show nameplate from my dressing room with my name on it. I do not remember meeting Jay Leno, which I allegedly did. I have no clue if I was good or not. I have seen the footage and I still have no idea. All I remember is purchasing the Skid Row T-shirt that I wore for the performance. Everything after that is a blur. That should have been my first clue that my gluttony had gotten out of hand.

  I was miserable, a broken poker player who had tried to buy his way out of too many bluffs. I was a ball of hate with whiskey in my fists. I did things I am not proud of during that time of my life, and that shame reinforces my resolve to be the very best person I can be. It took three years of being sober and another two years of being on my own to find that hunger, that black spot in the desert that the sun can never seem to get to no matter where it places itself in the sky. I have put my hungers in their proper places, and now I move a few days at a time through the remnants of a life that was almost wasted. So when I stepped onto that Tonight Show stage with Slipknot a year or so later, I was not petrified. I was not nervous. I was invigorated. I was there, strong and coherent, ready to show the world just how fucking good I really was. I did not give a shit if I fucked up or not—I was not going to be fucked up. So I would be myself and destroy, and that I
did. I know now that my misery fueled my gluttony to speed out of control. So I do not blame the drinking. I blame myself.

  But that was not the first time. I have had an addictive personality since I was young. I have noticed that the term addictive personality is a euphemism for glutton, just like custodial guardian is a euphemism for parent. I am enchanted and consumed by things very quickly. I am like a mad scientist running with a dangerous hypothesis. Maybe this is because I grew up limited by what was in my brain and little else. I always had the feeling I was not like the other kids. But I also knew I could not relate to them very easily. So I overcompensated by making myself the goofball, the class clown. A front man/showman is nothing more than the class clown on a bigger stage. So I am a glutton for attention as well. I want all the eyes on me for as long as I can hold their fixations.

  Self-esteem is a key factor to gluttony. When you feel incomplete, you crave something to fill the void. Psychologists describe it as compulsive eating. That in itself can lead to the other end of gluttony, anorexia, which is a glutton’s way of “fixing the problem” that gorging oneself creates. Two opposite ends of a spectrum and the result is the same: a cycle is born. Stimulus and emotional abandon will converge and yet leave you empty. So now I obsess and acquire: I buy houses, guitars, collectibles, toys and gifts for my children, and anything else that covers up the remnants of that kid who woke up in a dumpster, feeling like so much trash for the compactor. I chain smoke and binge drink and overthink and self-diagnose till my eyes boil and my chest hurts. I buy shitty T-shirts to match my shitty jeans and my shitty shoes, all so people do not notice my shitty jackets or my shitty haircut. I am a reaction in a world of practiced moves. I wish I knew who created this monster. Then again, I guess I do know who created it. I just wish the answer were not me.

  So, essentially, my mind searches for distraction. There it is: I am a glutton for inspiration. I try to weed it out wherever I can, and I have become adept at it. My brain races like a freight train on rocket fuel and I forget more good ideas than I write down. I become fixated and one-minded until all I can see is the final outcome. Then all I can do is wait for the fruits to be revealed. I will get songs stuck in my head that I have not even written or recorded yet. I do not mean melodies or lyrics—I mean full-blown compositions. I can think of nothing else. I can focus on nothing else. It is the source of my greatest songs. It is also why it basically took me two weeks to write this book. When the spirit takes me, I have no control, and the spirit is all around me. The disparaging echo rattles around in my tenement and gives me a decent dose of black lung, all the while teaching me there is a sea just waiting to be established in the valleys of my heart.

  When you break it down to its barest minimum, gluttony is nature’s way of super-sizing the human race. People are getting larger and larger every second. I have been all over the world several times, and believe you me, it is not a specifically American problem, although pound for pound we have the biggest reputation. The global diet is fucking disgusting. We eat foods made from garbage. We eat animals that we process and inject with enough hormones to make them not so dissimilar from humans. We soak shit in fat then fry it and bread it and then fry it again. I am not saying it is not delicious; I can knock the fuck out of some chicken fried steak, especially smothered in sausage gravy and some hash browns on the side. But that is a surefire way to gastrointestinal mayhem. People are getting so fat they are having bands put around their stomach tracts to keep them from eating too much. They used to just cut out lengths of intestines, which is extreme enough, but now they put a belt around your organs, proving once again that human beings will do anything possible to keep from having to exert some fucking self-control in their lives.

  Do not get me wrong—I love to eat. It is one of those plugs I use to fill my despair. I can gorge with the best of them. I once made a man who outweighed me by 150 pounds tap out at a buffet. But I know my limits, which is a perfect segue for my next example of why gluttony is about as deadly as a barbecue fart in church: professional eating contests. I know you have heard of this shit; they broadcast the events on ESPN 2. There is even an official organization called the International Confederation of Competitive Eating. It is basically sanctioned gluttony for glory and profit. Men eating seventy hot dogs in two minutes, women eating several bowls of spaghetti before the final buzzer. . .I mean people call this shit a sport. Overeating is as much a sport as mopeds are motorcycles. Just because you get a trophy and a cash prize does not mean you deserve to be on the cover of Sports Illustrated. You deserve to have your fucking head examined, to be honest. It is unhealthy, it is unwise, and it is also the biggest “fuck you” to the parts of the planet living off flour and vitamin supplements. Children are starving to death all over the world. Meanwhile, John Fuckwrinkle gets a highlight on SportsCenter for eating one hundred hard-boiled eggs, breaking the record set last year by his arch rival Hank Buttertits. On this list of sins, that may be the closest it comes to actually earning its Deadly Badge. It is also one of the saddest things I have ever heard. Eating contests are just offensive, insulting, and, at the end of it all, a terrible excuse to find new ways of staying in the adult end of the competitive gene pool. Hey, Americans cannot really compete on any other level, but I will tell you what: We will kick your ass at getting fatter in seconds, huh? You are goddamn right!

  The nefarious gluts of the world prey on the weak and the desperate when you throw greed in the picture as well. The real key to making these sins deadly is combining them together. Alone they are fairly blasé. But in a tag team they can become as brutal as the Hart Foundation. So a greedy glut will slip you sweet sounding words and shallow flattery while gutting your future wants for his present needs. Like I have said, moderation keeps these whims from being nothing more than human folly. But giving in and letting them take control is the real sin. There is more to life than being sated. But try explaining that to a glutton with too much time and not enough balls.

  We are all pseudo-vampires dying of thirst and searching for the next great food coma. We will take anything to hold off the wolverines inside our souls. The greatest battle of our lives takes place every day on the wasted spaces of our subconscious and the innermost workings of our tragic lifestyles. We spend and fuck and eat and fuck some more and lie and cheat and take and hurt and do everything to make everyone else just identical to us. The human condition is a lot like a true crime novel. A man eats so much they have to knock holes in a building to get him to a hospital. My first response is let him fucking rot: If he could not be bothered to take care of himself, why should anyone else save him? I get very angry when I hear about idiocies and ignorance. But then I have to give myself a time out and remind myself that we are all imperfect. The idioms of the world herald a time when we as a species realize our true potential and recognize that there is only one true god: the human soul. It binds us together and gives us huge reserves of untapped power, unique strength, and infinite wisdom. I have all the optimism that this sentiment is true, but not that the idea as a widespread notion will come to pass anytime soon. If we are the “one true god,” then god has a lot of fucking explaining to do.

  I watch the passing of time and expectation with the eyes of someone who missed last week’s episode but knows the series will not end well. We take ourselves too damn seriously. We think that everything we do is a miracle. It is only a miracle when no one gets hurt. We are common gardens with roses and weeds alike. We are exceptional with exceptions. How dare we declare that everything that everyone does is phenomenal? All we have done is dilute the juice and turn it into Kool-Aid. So it is no wonder that the volume gets turned up on things that are beneath us, such as gluttony.

  Street gangs and criminals are gluttons for violence. Politicians are gluttons for power. Scholars are gluttons for knowledge. Children are gluttons for safety. Gluts are gluttons for gluttony.

  What seems worse: having everything you want or wanting everything you have?

&nbs
p; There is a famous quote that states “satisfaction is the death of desire.” You would be surprised how many people get credited with that one, everyone from Bob Dylan to Steven Spielberg. Hell, some asshole even said Pete Wentz came up with it. My buddies in Hatebreed have a killer album by that name. But I believe it is one of the Dalai Lama’s quotes. I happen to agree with it. The human spirit needs a healthy hunger to continue on its way toward achievement and discovery. Gluttony can stoke the fires that keep us dancing on our tiptoes, but it is hardly deadly. In fact, no one can really be satisfied. You can stop trying after you have succeeded, but you are not satisfied. After every conquest, our eyes instinctively scan the horizon for the next adventure, the next challenge, and the next reason to keep our hearts pumping red-hot excitement into our 70/30 mixture. It is one of the great gifts I accepted long ago. As long as I am still looking, I will always find myself. Sometimes that gets me in trouble.

  You see, I am also a glutton for the truth. I hate fakes, shams, and liars—I always have. I cannot stand it when troglodytes ascend to heights I know damn well they do not have the talent to have earned. So I run my mouth, usually with no censor. I do not care who hears it or who takes exception. I do not give a fuck how it affects my career sometimes. I try to do my very best to call it the way I see it. Maybe that is pride or my vanity talking, but I have seen truly gifted people stepped on by ruthless hacks in the pursuit of empty credit, not actual accomplishment. When I raise my voice to protest, I am regarded as a jealous asshole.