You're Making Me Hate You (10 page)

Let’s get off the ramp and onto the street for a while. That’s where the heart of real fashion comes from, the reservoir of inspiration and reality coming together to make a Reece’s Cup full of tight-fitting kick ass. But I’ve found it sucks just as bad at sea level down here too. There is a remarkable phenomenon going on in the “Indie” scene in which men are tight-rolling their pant cuffs halfway up their calves, only to wear crappy dress shoes with no socks on. This, quite frankly, is a dick move. You all look like cunts. I’m sorry—I’m sure you were all very proud of yourselves for not only dressing on your own this morning but also putting a lot of thought and care into this pathetic ensemble, but as my British friends would say, “You really look a prick.” And they wouldn’t lie to us: they’re British, therefore they do nothing wrong … unless you count the Spice Girls. But that was the nineties—nobody can
possibly
remember that far back. That’s like trying to remember Thursday … good luck with that.

It’s beyond me who comes up with these horrific ideas. I believe that somewhere in Miami there is a Masonic-like temple filled with bell-end fuck-ups with nothing better to do than send out the ugliest shit imaginable. Every six months these ball bags take turns spinning a giant Bingo drum full of worst-case fashion scenarios. They pick two—one for each coast, knowing that these ideas will slowly work their way inland, colliding in the Midwest, where trends go to die. By the time these ideas are “hot” in Des Moines, Iowa, the couture conspirators go back to the big spinning drum of shit and start it all over again. That’s
why fashion doesn’t last long in the Heartland: if you can’t wear it at work, we don’t really give a shit. But New York and LA have never really cared about things like dress codes or wearing clothes that cover the bottoms of your ass lips. It’s stuff like that that makes me happy Carrie never wore Crocs on
Sex and the City
: housewives all over Chicago would still be rocking that shit to this day, slurping cosmos out of old
Barbie and the Rockers
Thermoses on their way to get their nails done.

As I said before—or, more appropriately, “hinted at”—I am now forty-one. That means not only am I “seriously ancient,” as my son, Griffin, has pronounced, but it also means I can remember trends that go back four decades … and that shit wasn’t pretty. I was a sad participant—albeit an occasionally reluctant one—in the following: polyester, bell bottoms
and
flares, spandex, parachute pants, neon colors, aqua socks, JNCO jeans, wallet chains, silvery short-sleeved button-ups, tie-dyed
anything
, high waters, corduroys,
more
spandex, and pink. Just simply the color pink: yeah, I remember that, and I still have a T-shirt affirming that “Pink Is the New Black.” Obviously that T-shirt was very mistaken. That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. There are some things in life you’ll have to accept: Corey Taylor had a mullet, wore shit clothes, and, at one time, adorned his body with the color pink.

I’m not proud of it. But I stand by my units.

I also remember weird fads like friendship pins: little safety pins with different colored tiny beads on them. In third grade that was the
rage
; people put them on their shoes and on the breasts of their shirts. If you didn’t have one or no one had given you one, you were deemed a loser—quite harsh for kids under the age of ten. And kids
knew
if you made them yourself and put them on your own shoes. Kids are prescient when it comes to
covert operations like pretending you have friends and have no proof of such relationships. These same people probably passed that trend on to their own kids in the form of friendship braids or bracelets. When those same children grow up, they will pass something on to
their
children, like friendship chastity belts (being a dad, that’s not a bad idea …). These adults will then force their husbands to go to Jared’s and put together obnoxious charm bracelets with stuff like hearts, footballs, and the Eiffel Tower on them … then pay way too much for said trinkets. Like I said, we’re all stupid and none more than men when it comes to keeping members of the opposite sex happy—or at the very least to keep them from screaming at them in the car on the way home from dinner on their anniversary.

The last time I really gave a shit about looking cool was when I was fourteen. I still had very little money, and it was kind of a chore to find things that felt in style. My mother and her best friend came up with a solution that to this day makes me cringe: they took my mother’s best friend’s daughter’s jeans and simply tailored them (no puns, please) to fit my scrawny ass. Yes, friends and enemies: for a full year of my life I wore women’s jeans to school because I couldn’t afford men’s jeans of any kind. Was I ashamed? Duh. Did the other kids find out and fuck with me? Seeing as the other girls had the
same style jeans
as I did, that would be an emphatic “yes.” Do I miss wearing women’s clothing? Not really, because I wear them every chance I get. Might this be why I have a deep-seated hatred for fashion of any kind? Most likely, yes. Do I want to talk more about it? I’m sorry, but our time’s up for today. But I feel like we’ve made some really important strides toward what the underlying problems are.

Lady Gaga wears meat suits and smears mascara on her face. The critics rave and call it art. Britney Spears shaves her head
and starts wearing hoodies while doling out the accidental VJJ shots. People call her crazy. The Red Hot Chili Peppers go out on stage dressed as light bulbs and pose for photos wearing socks and nothing else. They are labeled cutting-edge frontrunners. JT and Ms. Jackson (if you’re nasty) let a nip slip during a one-sided Super Bowl half-time show. Parents—well, at least the mothers—everywhere are appalled. Miley Cyrus plays on MTV in what can only be described as a bizarre anime circus stage show, complete with wrecking balls and uncomfortable twerking. Need I say more? I believe we’re all on the same page about how fucking banana sandwich
that
little girl has turned out to be. It’s like the more famous someone gets, the more their fashion radar goes awry and it’s the Emperor’s New Clothes in 3D, showing our idols for who and what they really are as they run ridiculously through the streets. We all follow along, but the kicker comes in the strangest form, because most of us might be mocking them, but the rest are taking notes and smartphone pictures so we can get the look right when we get home. Are we
that
fucking ignorant? The million-dollar answer is apparently, or else I wouldn’t have this chapter in this book.

Look, we’re humans. We are spectacular at being brilliant and buffoonish simultaneously. In fact, if Lenny Kravitz went on YouTube and told us all to paste palm fronds painted with iridescent moles onto our asses, every ball bag in a café on Manhattan Island would look green and eerily shiny the next day, and housewives up and down Rodeo Drive would be plunking down heavy plastic to buy and don what would essentially add up to an oversized disco salad. That’s just how we roll. We chase trends like dogs chase cars. We bite into fads the way kids bite into taffy—with no regrets and no thought about what this will look and feel like in retrospect. I’m sure most hippies look back and sigh sadly, wishing they’d just stuck with the mod look of
the early sixties instead of the floppy pant legs and scratchy threads of the later sixties. But when you’re that fucking high, I suppose it’s a wonder you remembered to get dressed at all. So we’re all susceptible to fawning for shallow flattery. That doesn’t mean we’re not stupid for it.

When I was a kid, feathered hair and alligator-baited short sleeves were a rage. Women teased their hair as high as humanly possible, and the entire natural world seemed to be stone washed. I wasn’t entirely impressed, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t forced through peer pressure and social facilitation to engage in these atrocities. Yes, I wore that shit. But you need to understand that this was all that was available at the time. Thrift shops weren’t the centers of the groovy universe like they are today. You couldn’t get away with ironic fashion in the eighties—it was virtually extinct in those days. I am indeed aware of how fucking sad I sound right now. Shit happens in every industry. It was a tough time for people of my ilk: the sad few who were forced to commit the sins of terrible fashion faux pas. But it was either that or go to school in mechanic’s uniforms, and after it didn’t work the first time, I didn’t do it again until my tenure in Slipknot began. So Plan B was a shitty bust.

Not all of the stuff was bad, though. I can remember being skinny and cool enough to wear punk/goth/metal/rock fashion pretty well. I had a considerable collection of bondage pants, poet shirts (yes, poet shirts—I was a Lestat fan …), leather jackets, and enough Iron Maiden Ts to stock a Hot Topic on Black Friday. Now, I couldn’t pull most of this off today—I may not be fat, but I have a neck the size of an offensive lineman. However, I have a sense of pride that, among my pack of wild dogs, I could hang with the Dobermans. I couldn’t tell you whether I looked worth a shit, but enough people took notice that I wasn’t ostracized either. So maybe I did give a shit about fashion many
aeons ago. But then I discovered flannels, jeans, and comfortable Vans. Effectively my life as a billboard was over.

As a (snicker) celebrity, I am encouraged by others to dress up from time to time, especially at awards shows. You can guess how those conversations go by the suits I have worn diligently to the Kerrang Awards for years. If you’re not familiar, just Google “Moods of Norway,” and that’s just the tip to that titanic iceberg. Every once in a while, though, I do throw on a nice suit so the wife and I can go out and look respectable. I admit she looks much better than I do when it comes to the upper echelons of suave accoutrement. I just do my best to keep up while hoping I also don’t make her look like she’s married to a guy who still works at Hardee’s. Unfortunately, for the most part, I just can’t be bothered to give a shit. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: when I wear a suit, I feel like I raided my uncle’s closet. They just feel like someone else’s clothes. I wish I were more comfortable in this stuff, but I used to streak naked around my old neighborhood, and I can honestly say I felt more normal doing that than wearing a tuxedo.

Maybe it’s because of the way I have witnessed other people stress over how they look and the way they worry whether people are going to notice or, worse yet, make fun of them. Let’s face it: Joan Rivers, God rest her soul, was ripping people to shreds over their fashion sense a lot longer than I was. I should have let her edit this chapter before she passed just to make sure I didn’t step on any of her material. There was a malicious gaze of sheer glee that glazed over her as she picked over the clothes that people were wearing to places like the Oscars or the Grammys, like a kid watching his friends eat candy he
knows
fell in poop. You could almost see the targets in her eyes as the masses moved their asses through her crosshairs. When she found the weakest of the pack, she pounced. Rivers did
not
let up until her
comments were in
People
,
Us Weekly
, and every website devoted to eating our heroes. Then a few months later it would happen again. I’m sorry, but I’d rather wear sweatpants into the White House with the world’s biggest boner than go through
that
kind of scrutiny any time in my fucking future.

It’s also my distaste for “peacocking” that causes me to turn my nose up at the deliverance of trendy getups. To me, alpha males are like the Betamax: not much use in the modern world and a pain in the ass to get rid of. Alpha
anything
is just ugly—women are just as bad. This brings me to the center of the universe where all this hellish crap collides: the modern-day club night. Good fucking God, I haven’t experienced discomfort like this since my first rectal exam … and at least my doctor felt bad about it later. Let me explain—not about the rectal exam but about the … never mind. It would take longer to back out of this apology correctly than it would to explain why it’s none of your business about that exam or why I’m depressed that my doctor hasn’t called me.

One weird moan …

Anyway, I did a couple of solo shows in Las Vegas a few years back—one with a band full of my friends and another one purely acoustic—and the show’s promoters asked me to make an appearance at their club as a way to drum up excitement for the events. For whatever reason I agreed. Almost as a subliminal way of admitting that I’d made a huge error in judgment, I dragged my friends in the band and the rest of my family along with me. It became very apparent I’d made a horrible decision as I was suddenly and effectively blasted by nausea and regret once we entered the establishment.

Everywhere I looked men and women alike were gussied up in their “party clothes,” which, by the way, ALL FuckING LOOK THE GODDAMN SAME, just in different colors and cuts. It
was like being in the Realm of the Replicates on Hawaiian-Shirt Wednesday. The women all had on dresses that barely fit over their surgically enhanced bodies, making them resemble a strange mix of Madame Trousseau’s and the Hall of Presidents at Disney. There was no room to dance, but they did their best to do so anyway, clumsily flailing and wailing in a room that was too small to be that loud. The men were, shall we say, afflicted with the same outfit: tight dress shirts with rolled sleeves, terrible jeans with bedazzled jewels and tribal stitching, heavily gelled spiky/slicked hair, and black nondescript shoes. Every one of them had already sweated right through their clothes. Every one of them looked greasy and moist. Every one of them smelled like they’d bathed in Cool Water or some other noxious tonic. It was by far the grossest display I’ve had to endure in my forty years of dragging knuckles on this planet, and that’s saying something—I’ve been to Tijuana.

The music might as well have been cued up by the entire cast of the
Jersey
Shore
. This did nothing to improve my situation; in fact, it made it harder for me to leave because everywhere I looked these mooks were “dancing.” Dancing, as I like to say, like they were being shot with arrows. They were also blocking all the exits with their meandering moves and silly spillage. I had nowhere to go, so the family, my friends, and I huddled in a back booth, mocking the people while also studying their habits. The fucked up thing is that with the exception of a table of businessmen from Dallas, NOT ONE PERSON IN THE JOINT GAVE A SHIT THAT I WAS THERE.