This week, I have decided to throw out my opinion on the song “Left Behind” by Slipknot. It is a pretty mainstream song, but it is meaningful. This song personally relates to me because it was the first song by Slipknot that I heard. Also, it largely shows what has happened many times to myself and those I knew with how everything you knew so well becomes a stranger.
“I’ve known
Faces that have disappeared in time
Find me wrapped in glass and slowly soaked in lime
All my friends have pictures made to make you cry
I’ve seen this and wondered
What I’ve done to calcify…”
This part of the song is the introduction, as Corey Taylor, Slipknot’s vocalist, comes in with a distraught tone in his voice. Basically, these lyrics are telling you that Taylor has seen many people fade away into the past. His “pictures made to make you cry” refer to old pictures of friends, old memories that he cannot return to, and knowing now that you cannot have it anymore. Now that he’s seen all of this, he questions what he did to deserve the hardened heart that was created in his chest. This can easily be connected to my life, and many lives in the high school scene. Things change, and we look back and want to cry, and it sucks. But then we have to move on, and appreciate the things that make us smile now; otherwise you’ll once again find yourself crying over what you now no longer have.
“(I ignore you)
As i close my eyes,
I feel it all slipping away
(I come towards you)
We all got left behind,
We let it all slip away
(I ignore you)
As i close my eyes,
I feel it all slipping away
(I come towards you)
We all got left behind,
We let it all slip away.”
This section of the song is the chorus. Taylor screams in a voice that feeds the agony in his heart directly to your ears. When Taylor says “I ignore you,” it does not necessarily means he gave his close friends the cold shoulder. It rather means that he took them for granted. He had his eyes closed, and all of the sudden it was all gone. They were “left behind” in the past of each other’s memory, similar to how many teenagers sit by and lose friend daily to the past.
