Music DVD Review: Slipknot — Maggots: Unauthorized

I have a confession to make — I am a maggot. That’s right, buried deep within the shyness of a quiet southerner, lies a fan of all the metal that Slipknot has to offer. The reason I mention this is to explain how, when a chance to review a DVD that promised to give a glimpse of the hidden “unauthorized” side of Slipknot came, I found myself requesting it.

Usually I tend to shy away from anything and everything that is of the “unauthorized” genre. I have a general idea that anything you might learn from such material would never be of the quality that, say, an authorized Slipknot documentary such as the newly released Voliminal: Inside The Nine DVD. Thoughts like that just make sense to me, generally.

Now that I’ve watched Locomotive Music’s Slipknot: Maggots DVD, however, I can honestly say it does have its place as a way a fan might get to know more about Slipknot. While that place certainly isn’t situated at the head of the line, it also isn’t left stranded 10 blocks away and hoping for someone to come point it in the right direction either.

Owing to its unauthorized status, Maggots is immediately hamstrung, a bit, by the fact that it cannot (and does not) contain any of Slipknot’s music. Another thing that limits the immediacy of the project is that none of the actual members of the band are involved in any way in its production — which equals out to no interviews with the band.

What it does feature, though, are interviews with people who were familiar with the members of Slipknot before they ever donned matching jumpsuits and their “unique” rubber masks.

Generally, you’re not going to learn much from a guy that sits there and tells you that “so and so” was a stand-up guy when they knew him, and that he’s probably still a stand up guy to this day. Well, okay, if you know absolutely nothing about Slipknot other than you own one of their albums and love it, then you might learn something from that.

That would be my guess as to the audience this DVD is best meant for — to those new to the music of Slipknot, to those perhaps who have all of their albums but live in small-town America where there isn’t a great availability of information on the metal music scene, or even I suppose to the absolute Slipknot fanatic who must own and know about everything that has anything even remotely to do with the band… this DVD is for you.

While it didn’t necessarily teach me much of anything new about the band, Maggots did give me a definite sense of the situation and community that Slipknot emerged from. I can’t say I would recommend this DVD to any and everybody looking to learn what lies behind the nine masks of Slipknot, but I have come to believe that it is certainly a good place to start if you wish to learn why Slipknot makes the kind of music that it makes.

Much like a maggot will eventually grow and emerge as a being so capable of flying about that it is ultimately renamed in association with the act itself, so, too, do I think that the DVD of the same name is a step that will allow someone who watches it to emerge with a better understanding of what it means to being a fan of Slipknot — of what it truly means to be a maggot.