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A lot of surprising line-up changes have come about in many big bands lately, so I thought I’d talk a bit about them. Honestly, this isn’t really a post with a specific message, more of a ramble. I’ve not thought any of this through, and I’m keeping editing to a minimum. If I say anything slightly meaningful, it’ll probably be by accident. But my opinion obviously matters to a lot of people (shut up, it does), so I’ll just say what I want to say.

Let’s start with the most recent, and perhaps most surprising. Guitarist Jim Root has been fired from Stone Sour. This may not seem all that surprising, Stone Sour have had many line-up changes in their past, and Root sat out of their latest tour to focus on writing material for Slipknot. But a few things make this particularly odd. For one, next to frontman Corey Taylor, Root was the most senior member of the band and arguably the second biggest name. Somebody like that doesn’t get fired for no reason.

And yet no reason has been given. Stone Sour have confirmed that Root is fired, but haven’t stated why at this moment.  All Root has said is. “Not my decision. Not happy about it.” This would suggest some bad blood between Root and the other members of the band. And yet he is currently working with Corey Taylor in Slipknot. Of course at this point we have to remember that back in December, Slipknot parted ways with drummer Joey Jordison (the band announced that he quit, although Jordison later claimed to be fired). Like with Root, there was no reason given, although Taylor has said that this is for legal reasons, and that he wants to explain to the fans what happened but is unable to at this time.

I guess if I want to talk about anything, it’s about a bands relation to its fans and transparency. Do fans need to know why Jordison or Root were fired? No, the reason why doesn’t affect the music and these people’s personal lives shouldn’t be of interest to us. And yet, I kind of feel like they deserve to know. Like it or not, fans become invested in the lives of celebrities, sometimes far too much. Nobody really has any right to know in most circumstances, but you can’t change their desire to.

Let me say that if I seem unclear on this point, it’s because I am. I honestly don’t know if we should know why Root was fired. I can’t say I don’t want to know, no matter how high we hold ourselves above it most people are interested in gossip, but I know I don’t really have the right to know. I think in this case, we perhaps deserve to know a bit more than we normally would, given that it could affect Root’s work with Slipknot as well. At the end of the day Stone Sour and Root will have to decide whether we should know.

Then there’s the firing of Trivium drummer Nick Augusto. In this case we know slightly more. We know that he was fired due to worries that off-stage issues with the band would affect his work on-stage. There wasn’t much clarification beyond this, we don’t know what these disputes were and the reason for his firing was brushed over as quickly as possible. But here I feel we know enough. Again, that’s not to say that I don’t want to know more, just that I don’t feel I have the right to. Leaving personal disputes to the people involved seems fair enough to me.

Besides, at least at the end of the day these bands announced their line-up changes. Billy Corgan has recently fired half the members of The Smashing Pumpkins, something you could have easily not known, because he failed to tell anybody. I’m going to assume that there were no backstage disputes in this case. At this point The Smashing Pumpkins is very much Corgan’s band, he most likely simply decided that we wanted to mix things up a bit. So why not announce it? It seems like these things simply don’t matter to Corgan, he doesn’t see it as important. But the fact is his fans do. This is an example of a complete failure for a musician to engage with his fans and explain what is happening. In this case the fans definitely deserved to know more, considering they didn’t even know (and many of them likely still don’t) that half the band is gone.

And then there’s the cases where we know a lot more. This is something I should have been writing about weeks ago, but I’ve been putting it off. So here we go. Recently Flaming Lips frontman Wayne Coyne fired drummer Kliph Scurlock from the band. Scurlock had been a member for 12 years and claimed he was fired because of a dispute with Coyne’s friend Christina Fallin over her use of Native American headgear, the appropriation of which many consider to be highly offensive.

Like The Smashing Pumpkins, nobody in the Flaming Lips announced Kliph’s departure, although it was widely known to fans for a few weeks before Scurlock made the announcement. The resulting few days was a complete publicity mess for Coyne. After Scurlock delved into some of the backstage drama between himself and Coyne, The Flaming Lips Facebook page was overcome with messages from fans supporting Scurlock and deeming Coyne a racist. Scurlock later claimed that although he had disagreements with Coyne, he did not believe him to be a racist. Later he went further, saying that he reevaluated his time in the band and believed he was fired for not putting enough effort in (he did not drum at all on their latest studio album The Terror, nor the cancelled collaboration with Ke$ha, Lipsha).

However the damage was already done, and it’s hard not to blame Coyne. He took part in an interview with Rolling Stone, which was clearly meant to save face and serve as a character assassination of Scurlock, and yet in it Coyne came across as petty, pathetic, angry and worst of all, racist. Everything he was trying to avoid being labelled was backed up by that interview.

So what’s my point with all this? Honestly, I’m not entirely sure. Coyne’s problem wasn’t a lack of clarity with his audience, in fact they were all too clear on the behind-the-scene troubles. But the situation was no doubt exacerbated by the fact that the band failed to announce Kliph’s departure. With Joey Jordison out of Slipknot and Jim Root being kicked out of Slipknot, people are starting to point fingers. Neither Jordison nor Root appear to be happy with the situation, and fans (who I may remind you know nothing about what’s going on) seem happy to absolve them from blame. Instead the common thread between the two bands, Corey Taylor, is receiving most of the blame. Of course, we don’t know if this is Taylor’s doing and it’s certainly unfair to put blame on him with this little information, but you can see why fans may be a bit suspect of him. Frontmen are notoriously egotistical and rumours are already flying that Taylor wants more money for himself. Now, I personally don’t believe these rumours and I think it’s very unfair to jump to conclusions. But what happened here was a failure for the band to adequately explain to their audience what was going on. If we knew why Root was out of Stone Sour (and I highly doubt it’s for the reasons people are saying) then we wouldn’t be so quick to jump to conclusions.