Rick Rubin
Pull a thread
Three Tuesdays in 2001: Iowa, Toxicity and God Hates Us All, 25 Years On
Slipknot, System of a Down and Slayer released records on three consecutive Tuesdays in 2001, exactly seven days apart, and the third one reached stores on the morning of September 11. Under the dates runs one producer, one label, and the distance between #1 and #28.
The Tuesday rule
For most of the CD era, new records in the United States came out on a Tuesday. That is why the sequence below lines up without a gap or an overlap: one heavy record per street date for three weeks running.
Andy Wallace mixed Nevermind because he had made Slayer records: the producer chain behind six weeks of 1991
Between 12 August and 24 September 1991, five albums arrived that rearranged what rock radio sounded like. The thread nobody pulls runs through the people at the mixing desk, and it starts on a thrash record from 1986.
The six weeks, in order
Start with the calendar, because the calendar is the part people misremember.
Metallica released the self-titled album everyone calls the Black Album on 12 August 1991. Pearl Jam released Ten on 27 August. Guns N’ Roses put out Use Your Illusion I and II on the same day, 17 September. And on 24 September, a Tuesday, Nirvana’s Nevermind and Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Blood Sugar Sex Magik both landed (1991 in music).
The Man Who Mixed Slayer Also Mixed Nevermind
Nirvana wanted the engineer behind Reign in Blood, South of Heaven and Seasons in the Abyss*. He gave them the biggest-sounding record of 1991, and by 1993 the band’s singer was telling interviewers he was embarrassed by it.*
Nevermind came out on 24 September 1991 on DGC. That makes September 24 the 35th anniversary, and the anniversary pieces will do what anniversary pieces do: the cover, the baby, the pool, the year everything changed. Fine. I want to talk about a name in the credits that almost nobody reads out loud.
God Hates Us All at 25: Slayer's nailed Bible cover, the September 11, 2001 street date, and the same date on Repentless in 2015
Twenty-five years ago this week, Slayer put out the record with the nails through the Bible, on the one Tuesday in 2001 nobody remembers for a record. Fourteen years later they put out another one on the same date.
The street date was a Tuesday. That is all it was supposed to be.
Slayer released God Hates Us All on September 11, 2001. In the US that was a normal Tuesday street date, the day new records went on the shelf. The album had already been pushed back once because of the cover, as Loudwire’s anniversary piece notes, so the date was not chosen for anything. It was where the schedule landed after the delay.
"Chop Suey!" Is Diamond, and Heavy Music's Entire RIAA Diamond Club Is Five Songs Certified in 30 Months
System of a Down’s 2001 single peaked at #76, got pulled from radio after 9/11 and never sold ten million of anything. On August 28 it became the fifth heavy song ever to hit RIAA Diamond. The other four got there since February 2024. That timing is the whole story.
What Diamond actually counts
Diamond is the RIAA’s ten million mark. For most of its life that meant ten million copies sold, which is why the club was built out of Whitney Houston and Elton John and almost nothing with a distorted guitar in it. Then the RIAA folded downloads and streams into the count, and “ten million units” stopped describing a purchase and started describing a habit. A song can get there now without a physical copy changing hands in years.