The Reason Slipknot Kept A Dead Crow In A Jar
For the world's biggest and most successful bands and performers, it's about so much more than just the music. It's about a movement and a persona. Elton John, for instance, is a world-renowned piano maestro, but he's just as famous for his inimitable and unrivaled sense of style. In a 2018 interview with Vogue, John said of his fashion sense, "The more the merrier. I would wear a tiara if I could." Gucci's Alessandro Michele then added, "and you have two," which surely says everything that needs to be said about the acclaimed musician's style.
There could hardly be a musical act further removed from John's heavily sequined style than Slipknot, but they too are known just as much for their aesthetic as for their string of beloved hit songs. In their case, it's less spangly spectacles and tiaras and more terrifying masks and songs with frightening titles like "My Plague" and "The Devil in I." Still, life is all about finding your own vibe and rocking it as well as you possibly can, and the heavy metal outfit from Iowa has never fallen short of that.
So why did Slipknot bring a dead crow along with them to shows? It's a brilliantly disgusting story.
The not-so-sweet smell of death
The band is famous for the wild nature of its live performances. Vocalist Corey Taylor fondly reminisced with Revolver (via Kerrang) about some of his and his bandmates' friendly shenanigans: "They were lighting my legs on fire every night ... Next thing I know, I'm rolling to keep [the flames] from getting up to my face." Charming. Drummer Shawn Crahan's dead bird antics, then, were just another example of Slipknot doing Slipknot things.
Of the hideous little jar and unfortunate bird, DJ Sid Wilson explained (per Spin), "Clown kept it in there for a long time. We'd bring it out on stage and take deep breaths out of it ... It would make you throw up immediately, vomit in your mask."
They did this, Wilson said, "to see what death smelled like," as this was a perfectly logical and not-horrifying-at-all method to "[get] you in that dark place." There it is, then: definitive proof that the members of Slipknot are the most committed method actors in the history of method acting.
As for what happened to the rancid remains, Wilson concludes his delightful anecdote by explaining that the band's fans asked to "smell death" themselves one night, and when the dead crow was in their grasp, they took some of the smelly mixture out and even consumed some. "I think it was more disturbing for us," he confessed.