December 22, 2009 Slipknot's song "Snuff" is led by acoustic guitars and has been dubbed as Slipknot's attempt at a power ballad. The song maintains Slipknot's conventions of a dark, ominous and even morbid feeling. The lead singer Corey Taylor
states 'This is the slow one. It's another personal one...it's about someone who helped me through a lot and I thought she felt the same way that I did and then she really let me down...it was good that she did, because it was that final push to me figuring out myself'.
From the first verse the lyrics express how the band combine poetry with religious imagery and symbolism.
'Bury all your secrets in my skin
Come away with innocence and leave me with my sins
The air around me still feels like a cage
And love is just a camouflage for what resembles rage again'
From this we can identify major emotions already in play, the most prominent being Love and Hate, which will remain as two main themes throughout the song.
Although the popularity of this song was overwhelming, vocalist Corey Taylor said in an interview 'Im not sure about how our fans will react about Snuff, but Im hoping for the best'.
The song was released on September 28th 2009. It was recorded in February-June 2008 at Sound Farm in Jamaica, Iowa. Slipknot are assigned to Roadrunner recording label and Snuff was written by Frontman Corey Taylor and Percussionist Shawn Crahan.
This information was a result of research into fan-bases and different reviews of the Album and Singles.
Reasons for the Change
Although the song has a very strong sense of narrative and provides a lot of opportunity for a well made, emotional music video; I struggled in the planning stages of the project. Taking such a morbid and serious song, it was difficult to provide a suitable 'story' music video which was not based around death and horror.From the start it was my intentions that my music video would be a story based one with little or no performance footage. This being one of the criteria for my personal preference of music videos.
Through research of the bands fan-base and audience it was clear that from this music very morbid and disturbing images would be expected in a music video. Even though I consider the song to be a very moving and emotional piece of music, I did not want to make this kind of story. My intentions were to make a stunning and enjoyable video with a meaningful story, however with this song it provoked depressing and morbid emotions that I did not feel comfortable with portraying.
