How Guns N’ Roses’ ‘Use Your Illusion II’ Got Slipknot’s V-Man Into Metal
Every metal musician has an artist or an album that got them into heavy music, and for Slipknot bassist Alessandro "V-Man" Venturella, it was Guns N' Roses' Use Your Illusion II.
"[In] secondary school, [I] started noticing there was little groups, and everyone had their little pockets of stuff that they listen to," the bassist recalled during a discussion on the Knotfest Twitch channel. "And I think I kind of stumbled across people that were listening to metal from the older years. I always kind of looked older than the age I was, so I always hung around with people three or four years older than me."
That's how V-Man discovered Guns N' Roses. He started listening to the rockers when he was around 13 or 14.
"I know it's not heavy metal, but it led to other things. It was a stepping stone," he said, citing Use Your Illusion II as the primary album that turned him onto metal.
"There's some serious work going on on that record, I think," he praised. The bassist didn't get to Appetite for Destruction until afterward, because no one at the time was urging him to listen to it.
Check out the conversation below.
Guns N' Roses released Use Your Illusion I and II on Sept. 17, 1991, and they debuted at No. 2 and No. 1 on the Billboard 200, respectively. The albums differed greatly from Appetite for Destruction sonically, as the band wrote a handful of grandiose songs and ballads for this new double release. UYI II, which had the blue cover, housed iconic songs such as "Civil War," "You Could Be Mine" and "Estranged."
It's unlikely we'll hear anything GN'R-esque on a Slipknot album at any point, but we do know that the follow-up to 2019's We Are Not Your Kind is definitely underway. For now, find out where you can see Slipknot live at this location.