'Very Intimidating': Inside Slipknot's Untold Studio Reality with Joey Jordison
Visual identity was inseparable from Jordison's musical presence. Slipknot’s iconic mask concept began largely with his personal history. During Halloween as a child, his mother had greeted him at the door wearing an emotionless white Japanese Kabuki mask. The vacant stare frightened and fascinated him, leading him to adopt it as his onstage face when Slipknot formed.
Over the years, the mask shifted subtly. Jordison painted it with black vertical tear tracks, scratched tribal symbols into the cheeks, and eventually added stitching and thorny crown motifs. The emotionless visage stood in sharp contrast to the blistering, hyper-kinetic human fury unfolding behind the drum kit.
In the early 2010s, that kinetic capability faced a catastrophic threat. Jordison began experiencing weakness and numbness in his legs during late-stage Slipknot tours, eventually losing full control of his lower extremities. In 2013, the band parted ways with him, a bitter split clouded by confusion over his condition. He was diagnosed with acute transverse myelitis, a neurological disease caused by inflammation of the spinal cord that damages the myelin sheath protecting nerve fibers.
Many presumed he would never walk again, let alone drum. Jordison responded with grueling physical rehabilitation. Through intensive physical therapy, gym sessions, and sheer willpower, he regained motor function, eventually returning to the drum kit to launch Scar the Martyr, Vimic, and the extreme metal supergroup Sinsaenum. His public speech at the 2016 Metal Hammer Golden Gods Awards, where he detailed his fight to reclaim his legs, revealed the extraordinary inner toughness that had fueled his early career.
