SLIPKNOT's COREY TAYLOR: 'Rock Ain't Dead'

SLIPKNOT and STONE SOUR singer Corey Taylor is the latest musician to respond to KISS bassist/vocalist Gene Simmons' recent comment that "rock is dead."

Simmonstold Esquire magazine last month — in an interview conducted by his son Nick — that "rock did not die of old age. It was murdered. Some brilliance, somewhere, was going to be expressed and now it won't because it's that much harder to earn a living playing and writing songs. No one will pay you to do it."

Simmons went on to elaborate that as a result of file-sharing and other issues, record label support for rock music was not available like it was when KISS was coming up, concluding, "It's finally dead. Rock is finally dead."

Asked to weigh in on Gene's comments, Taylor told Tina Smash of the Jacksonville, North Carolina radio station Rock 105.5: "Nothing against Gene. I understand what he was trying to say. His way of making albums and making music and getting things out there is dead. But you just kind of have to roll with the technology, you have to rise with the times, you have to learn to use those to your advantage. You can't just sit back and just kind of do album-tour-album-tour — there's so much that goes into it now."

He continued: "We're such students of the game — not only of technology, but the way it's done now — that I refuse to let anybody say that and have it be taken seriously.

"Are you kidding me?! Screw that, man! Rock ain't dead."

Taylor added: "I [recently] said, 'Rock and metal ain't dead. They're just waiting to kill you.' And I mean that. It's an ebb and flow. It's like that probably every — what? — ten [or] fifteen years. There's an ebb. But it's definitely coming back."

SLIPKNOT's long-awaited fifth studio album, ".5: The Gray Chapter", sold around 132,000 copies in the United States in its first week of release to land at position No. 1 on The Billboard 200 chart. The CD arrived in stores on October 21 via Roadrunner.

The is the second No. 1 album for SLIPKNOT, whose fourth full-length effort, 2008's "All Hope Is Gone", topped the Billboard chart after an extraordinary SoundScan recount.