So you can take that cookie…
Hi friends! Long time no talk. In between online workout classes, bread baking, and moments where our anxiety gets the best of us, we’ve just been trying our damn best.
While we’re in between seasons, we’ll be releasing some mini episodes and blog posts. We’ve wanted to write some of these for a while but other things came up. Luckily, we’re back on the blog, celebrating over 6,000 listens (thank you!) and ready to deep dive on shallow topics.
I (Emilie) came up with the idea for today’s shallow topic about a month ago when I had to do research for our 1999 music videos episode and I learned more about this band than one ever should. Yet every new fact somehow made this more worthy of a blog post.
Let me me take you back to 1998. Suburban white teenage boys were angry. Truthfully, some of those boys have grown up to be angry suburban white men. I mean, have you seen those protestors trying to get states to reopen?
Someone needed to be their pied piper and help them through their feelings and acne. Thankfully, a nü metal band from Jacksonville, Florida answered the call and became an MTV staple between the years of 1999–2003ish. I’m talking about Limp Bizkit.
Who knew a red backwards Yankees cap and all black contact lenses could be so iconic? Limp Bizkit was formed in 1995 by members Fred Durst, Rob Waters, Sam Rivers, and John Otto. Their name apparently comes from wanting to have a band name that would repel listeners and make them think the band sucks, which sounds like the logic a 14 year-old would use for his band’s name. The other names Fred Durst considered were Gimp Disco, Split Dickslit, Bitch Piglet, and Blood Fart. Again, 14 year-old boy. The band’s website says they formed in 1995 but Wikipedia says 1994. Either way, they’re Rock & Roll Hall of Fame-eligible (truly a sentence I never thought I’d be typing).
Pre-national/international success, the band was wildly popular in the Jacksonville area, so much so that Sugar Ray opened for them instead of the other way around (and this was when Sugar Ray had a major label deal and Limp Bizkit still didn’t). Over time Waters left the group and Wes Borland joined as a guitarist. His signature contacts and crazy costumes is what drew a lot of people to their shows.
Eventually they were crazy famous in Jacksonville because Fred Durst was a one-man marketing team, doing everything to spread the word on the band. He was in contact with all the local record stores and high schools to help them gain more visibility. To try and get a major label deal and attract the attention of A&R representatives, he would pose as the band’s manager, albeit unsuccessfully. Look, I’m not some diehard Limp Bizkit fan and in his heyday Fred Durst said some pretty misogynistic and stupid things, but I respect the hustle.
Eventually, the hustle paid off when Korn was in town for a gig and Durst invited the band over for some beers and to tattoo them. Side note, Fred Durst did tattoos and landscaping in the early ’90s while he came up for the idea of a hip-hop/rock group. Truly a nü metal Renaissance Man.
So Durst gave Brian “Head” Welch from Korn a free tattoo and a mix tape of the band. According to a (wait for it) Angelfire Korn fanpage I found while researching this blog post titled “kornaddiction,” Durst gave Head a “Korn” tattoo but the K ended up looking more like an H. Durst had told them he had done a ton of tattoos but really he had only done a few. While Korn wasn’t impressed by the tattoos, they thought the tape was good and invited Limp Bizkit, still unsigned, to join them on tours.
Eventually Wes Borland suggested that the band needed a DJ instead of another guitarist (which is what the band had originally planned to find). and so DJ Lethal joined the group to round out the lineup. Lethal was best known for having been a member of House of Pain, yeah that House of Pain.
Limp Bizkit originally signed to Mojo, a subsidiary of MCA records, but left eventually due to a dispute and signed with Flip, a subsidiary of Interscope Records. Remember subsidiary labels? Remember Interscope Records? Remember A&R budgets? What a wild time.
The band would go on to release their studio debut Three Dollar Bill, Y’all in July of 1997, which was a minor success at the time of its initial release, despite a minor payola controversy where Interscope paid Portland, Oregon radio station 101.1 KUFO $5,000 to play the single “Counterfeit” from the album 50 times. While “Counterfeit” barely charted, the band’s cover of George Michael’s “Faith” would do moderately well. After an appearance on the Warped Tour and Korn’s Family Values Tour, the band released their second major label album Significant Other in 1998. Despite bad reviews from critics and fellow musicians, the album would go on to sell 16 million copies and spawn four singles: “Nookie”, “Rearranged”, “N 2 Gether Now” (feat. Method Man), and “Break Stuff”.
So I didn’t know this until I did a lot of research for the music videos episode, but apparently Fred Durst directed almost all of the band’s music videos. I found conflicting reports (if you can call them that) on the Internet about this, but it sounds like he might have directed all four music videos for this album. This makes sense, since he’s gone on to direct a few feature films, including The Education of Charlie Banks.
The song that really sticks out for me in 2020 is “Break Stuff”.
“Break Stuff” is amazing because the lyrics, quite frankly, include some of the best PSAs for Coronavirus ever. First verse:
No human contact
And if you interact
Your life is on contract
Your best bet is to stay away motherfucker
It’s just one of those days
Bridge:
My suggestion is to keep your distance
’Cause right now I’m dangerous
Who knew Limp Bizkit’s lyrics could be prophetic? Fred Durst: rapper, singer, songwriter, producer, guitarist, actor, director, tattoo artist, Florida Man, and public health advocate. The. man. doesn’t. stop.
Also, this music video is such a perfect encapsulation of 1998–1999.
This list of cameos is from the Wikipedia page: Snoop Dogg, Jonathan Davis of Korn, Dr. Dre, Eminem, Eminem’s daughter Hailie, Alec Baldwin, Pauly Shore, Derek Jeter, Roger Daltrey, Bam Margera, Bucky Lasek, Seth Green, Stryker, Riley Hawk, Aaron Lewis, Flea, model Lily Aldridge, and Richard Lewis (Larry David has truly missed an opportunity to not reference Richard Lewis’ appearance in this video during en episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm).
On the podcast, I talked about the video for “Nookie”, which starts with back and forth footage of Fred Durst walking on the street alone and then a crowded Limp Bizkit performance. Durst starts singing the first verse while walking through a city in a puffer jacket. Slowly women (who are not wearing any outerwear) start following him one by one because he is, as mentioned earlier, the nü metal pied piper. Instead of leading them into a river cave, he leads them to a secret concert performance of the song in an alley. In the bridge, the group of girls dressed like Fred Durst show up in the background (they’re a common reoccurrence in Limp Bizkit videos). Hitchcock had his blondes, Durst had his tank top, red Yankees cap, and Dickies-sporting female clones.
According to Wikipedia, “The video was the first in a concept video dealing with the premise that Limp Bizkit were wanted and arrested for inciting the riots that plagued Woodstock 99.” So in case you didn’t remember, Woodstock 99 was a display of peak toxic white masculinity, with a lot of violence taking place during Limp Bizkit’s Saturday night performance (and reaching a peak the following night during the closing of the festival). I don’t feel like going into the details, but suffice to say it was bad, and anyone who has a problem with this week’s protests in Minneapolis needs to check their privilege and read up on what happened at Woodstock ‘99.
According to the blog Kerrang, Durst ended up adopting the term “Nookie” as something of a personal catchphrase for a while, using it as an excuse when criticized for performing onstage with Christina Aguilera (he responded with “I did it all for the nookie, man. That’s why I did that with Christina”). Aguilera later clarified “He got no nookie. That did not happen.”
The end of the Significant Other album is a nearly-two-minute rant by former MTV VJ Matt Pinfield. Again, angry white men, they’re everywhere!
This album was followed by Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water (again, named coined by a 14 year-old), released in 2000, which sold 6 million copies. To this day, it holds the record for the 17th fastest-selling album in US (almost 1.1 million copies in a week). In case you were wondering, it sits on that list between Garth Brooks’ Double Live and Taylor Swift’s Speak Now.
Favorite quote from the Wikipedia page for this album: “Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water was listed in the book for 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die, but later removed in recent editions of the book.”
A year later, Wes Borland left Limp Bizkit and the group released a statement where Durst said they would “comb the world for the illest guitar player known to man.” — 2001, those were the days.
Ultimately the follow-up album, Results May Vary, sold about 2 million copies, which was considered a disappointment for the band, and really the only big song off the album was their cover of the Who’s “Behind Blue Eyes” (I’d like to think Roger Daltrey and Fred Durst became friends during the “Break Stuff” video and he called him up while recording this album and was like, “Yo, Roger, Freddy Durst here, mind if we record a mediocre cover of your classic song?”).
Borland would eventually rejoin the group in 2004, but the following album, 2005’s The Unquestionable Truth (Part 1) EP, sold less than 40,000 copies. The band later released a greatest hits compilation and then went on hiatus in 2006. They would reunite in 2009 with the release of Gold Cobra, but their sixth studio album Stampede of the Disco Elephants, remains unreleased to this day and has been in development hell since the early 2010s. A few publications have called it the “Chinese Democracy of nü metal” (referencing the Guns N’ Roses album that took over 20 years to be released), but Durst claims it’s been available on a few sites in the past.
Anyway, I’m exhausted writing about Limp Bizkit, so I’ll just end this on a list of people Fred Durst had feuds with at one point or another. We at Old Millennials love a good petty feud, but this is Fred Durst-asking-the-Real-Housewives-to-hold-his-beer petty:
- Slipknot (apparently Durst called their fans “fat, ugly kids”)
- Scott Stapp of Creed
- Eminem
- Christina Aguilera
- Britney Spears — although this is more that he claimed they were in a relationship, which she denied
- Placebo
- Insane Clown Posse (apparently Shaggy 2 Dope tried to dropkick Durst when they were on stage together in 2018?)
I’m sure there are/were more, but guys, it’s been real.
P.S. let’s not forget when HBO released that docuseries The Jinx, one of the top things googled was “is robert durst fred durst’s father?”
fin.
