Introducing 'The Most Awesomest Shit Out There'

From the mind of She Hate Me comes 'The Most Awesomest Shit Out There'. This is essentially a list of everything that is awesome and ... that is ... out there. 

Ladies and gentlemen, the criteria for awesome is thus:

1)  Our definition of awesome is that it is awesome.  As usual, this is incredibly biased.  The subject must rock - maybe not literally, but you get the point.  Said band or artist needs to make very good albums or be a great live performer or amuse us greatly or terrify us greatly, etc.  What we say is awesome is awesome.  Them’s the rules.

2) These must be current bands/artists. They can be 'old', too, but they must be relevant. Dylan and The Boss are current – they are still releasing relevant albums.  The Stones are NOT.

3) These need not be artists to watch.  This is not the CMJ Music Festival. This is 'Holy shit, you must know of the awesome contained herein.' Hercules and The Love Affair is not to be seen here.  These bands are awesome and there’s not much debate to it…or is there?  

First up is the guys in the photo upper left. Oh, fuck yeah, it's a punch in your balls, it is ... SLIPKNOT.

Slipknot

Anything that terrifies me this much has to be included in the pantheon of Awesome.  Terrifying, you ask?  Terrifying.  Have you seen these guys?  Look at that picture for 5 seconds.  If eight disaffected white Midwestern dudes in gas masks and dread locks playing speed metal is not the thing of nightmares, I’m not sure what is.  They seem apocalyptic not in the sense of “North Korea could wipe Seoul off the map in five seconds”, but more along the lines of “The Wal-Mart in Sandusky just closed down, the guy from Slipknot is now out of a job and doesn’t have anywhere to buy socks.”  The former scares you when you read the morning papers, but the latter makes you log on to the Live Nation Website to make sure Slipknot is not playing in a stadium parking lot near your home.  

Slipknot’s brutality has to be respected. With a lot of bands that throw out a psychotic, violent vibe, you know they go offstage, take off the masks and laugh about how funny it is that everyone buys into their Broadway schlock. Not Slipknot. I fear that these guys go offstage, demand the souls of anyone within earshot and begin randomly whipping ball-gagged groupies. Anyone this dedicated to rocking is OK in my book.  Much respek to Slipknot.  Marilyn Manson and GWAR think they’ve set the bar for this type of shock rock but they cannot even step to Slipknot.  As with Krampus, The Austrian Santa Claus of your nightmares, we fear and respect these great men.