May 30, 2024

Designated Cheerleader: Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water

You are summoned forthwith to pay homage to the one true king

A decade ago, there were few opinions more widely held in music circles than "Limp Bizkit sucks". People with Good music taste viewed them as a vanquished foe, ludicrous and pathetic. People with Bad music taste continued to listen to Godsmack and KoRn but left behind the nu metal acts that actually centered around rapping, as they were the only ones to have meaningfully dated. The world's relationship to Limp Bizkit could be summed up in Anthony Fantano's joke review of 2011's Gold Cobra, in which he spent six minutes eating a snack instead of reviewing the record. Limp Bizkit were not simply bad, they were beneath the dignity of criticism. What was bad about them was so overt and unavoidable that to criticize them was redundant, as listening was in effect an act of criticism.

It would be easy to say that all things once considered bad by the culture at large are eventually reclaimed and thus that Limp Bizkit's memetic comeback was inevitable, but I don't think this is necessarily true. Nobody earnestly defends Nickelback aside from the same people who have always defended Nickelback (which is to say, people with $1500 truck payments). The best things most anyone has to say for Nickelback are "they weren't that bad" or "they're kinda funny" or “I like How You Remind Me”. Similarly, I don't think people care much one way or the other for the likes of Godsmack or Disturbed, bands who've endured with much more stable, boring careers than Durst and his merry band. Kid Rock will never reap the full benefits of nostalgia because he (much to his own chagrin, I suspect) decided to brand himself a MAGA artist. Then you have the likes of KoRn and Slipknot, the nu-metal acts that haters have always had a certain begrudging respect for, on the basis of musical innovation, talent, and effort, who never completely went away. Limp Bizkit stands alone as the 90s butt rockers to have fallen into the depths of irrelevance and clawed their way back, one joke at a time (we'll see how Creed's similar efforts go). And how did they do it? Well, as the saying goes: if you can't beat em, join em.

Limp Bizkit's most recent album is titled Limp Bizkit Still Sucks, and their upcoming tour with the likes of Corey Feldman and Riff Raff is the Loserville Tour. Fred Durst has spent the last ten years launching a...."charm offensive" is probably the wrong turn of phrase, given that Limp Bizkit's appeal certainly isn't charm. But he's made great strides for a man who once seemed perilously close to joining Vladimir Putin's gaggle of pet celebrity tax exile weirdos, doomed to a stature somewhere north of Steven Seagal and south of Pauly Shore.

Durst's attempts to ingratiate himself with the public seem to be pitched at roughly the same level as Charo's and Gene Simmons': "ain't I somebody ya just want to have around, lovable rascal that I am?" And I think people have accepted the terms of this agreement. We don't have to take Durst seriously, we don't have to respect him. But if given the choice between the world where he has a sad and dismal end, and the world where he hangs around pleasantly in the background of our lives, we seem to have opted for the latter. He'll have his little roles in movies like I Saw the TV Glow, and now & again a new Limp Bizkit song will come out and people will say "this one kinda goes ngl", and the Crazy-Ass Moments in Nu-Metal History guy will keep vaguely-ironic nu-metal appreciation bubbling in the ether, and eventually, if the Bizkit play their cards right, they may even join their fellow one-time-everything-wrong-with-rock-music poster boys Foreigner in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Which brings me to the task at hand: defending the music of Limp Bizkit, something that, truth be told, I don't think is all that difficult. Even at the nadir of Limp Bizkit's reputation, it wasn't uncommon to hear a Music Guy say "the band itself is talented, it's a shame they're fronted by a clown". In fact I recall this being an entry in one of Cracked dot com's "things that aren't as bad as you think" listicles, an ever-reliable bellwether of public opinion in the early-2010s. The groundwork has always been in place for a Limp Bizkit comeback of sorts, it simply required the necessary ironic distance on our part and the right strategic moves on Durst's.

Defending Chocolate Starfish and the Hot-Dog Flavored Water specifically is a bit more of a challenge. Limp Bizkit's debut, Three Dollar Bill Y'all, has been the go-to for contrarian defenders since the band's toilet days, and in recent years this grace has been generously extended to Significant Other. Both of these records, especially the former, showcase Limp Bizkit's tight musicianship and aggression to a greater degree, and are thus easier to defend. Chocolate Starfish is often seen, even by some alternative metal Heads, as Limp Bizkit's Hysteria, the moment success went to their heads, when they got way too glossy and descended into self-parody. But as my favorite Def Leppard album is Hysteria, my favorite Limp Bizkit album is in fact this one. Because Def Leppard not being puppeteered into a mechanistic rock facsimile by Mutt Lange is just another good pop metal act, and Limp Bizkit without this level of pop ambition is just a less intense KoRn with more rapping. Fred Durst's schtick is what MAKES Limp Bizkit. Which also MAKES my job here harder; appreciating Limp Bizkit is an all-or-nothing proposition. Either you're willing to listen to tough-guy white rapper posturing and stupid lyrics or you're not. You can agree the band is tight and the beats are solid, you can like the guest verses, but if you can't hang with Fred, that's it. I cannot argue someone into tolerating Fred Durst. But I suppose I can try.

Nu-metal is often erroneously characterized as a fusion of rap and metal, but this isn't quite accurate. Not all nu-metal features rapping, after all. A more accurate definition would be that nu-metal is what happens when you take the aggression and emotional/musical directness of hardcore punk and its offshoots, and the rhythmic dynamics of funk, and weld them to the aesthetics of heavy metal. And sometimes there is rapping, or a singsongy rhythmic patter that resembles rapping, a la David Draiman or Jacoby Shaddix. I would argue that all things considered hip-hop is the fourth most important component of the genre. Nu-metal without funk is Pantera; nu-metal without punk is Primus; nu-metal without metal is the Red Hot Chili Peppers; nu-metal without hip-hop is Snot, which is to say, still nu-metal. Ironically, the primary reason people don't think of Rage Against the Machine as nu-metal, apart from "nu-metal" generally being applied to music that's considered "bad", is that Rage does not have a lot of punk in their sound, or at least, nothing later than The Clash; they don't have the blunt-force skullcracking caveman quality, their music is slightly too composed and mannered. I often wonder if the nu-metal backlash would have been more or less extreme if it had been characterized more as punk than as metal. Many nu-metal guys will tend to contextualize themselves more in that vein—as I recall, at least one member of KoRn bristles at being considered metal, as he thinks of metal as butt rock—and while alternative types would think it wack either way, I don't think metal guys would have cared all that much about nu-metal if they didn't perceive it as invading their turf.

At any rate, I mention all of this because obviously Limp Bizkit centers rap more than most nu-metal bands. I think that's important in understanding the backlash as well as the enduring appeal. Fred Durst being such an easy whipping boy for the absurdity of nu-metal made him a proper sin-eater, in metal *and* alternative *AND* hip-hop, and his precipitous downfall probably gave so many of his peers the cover they needed to remove the 10% of hip-hop from their sound and continue as just another radio butt rock act. Ergo, Papa Roach continues on as a douchebag music staple to the current era, and Limp Bizkit becomes nostalgia. But people love nostalgia. People have not been given the opportunity to miss Staind or Slipknot, but Limp Bizkit went away for a good long while. Never underestimate the importance of going away when you're big enough that people will notice you're gone.

Further, the somewhat-spurious conflation of nu-metal and rap-metal means that Limp Bizkit is one of the only bands that *can* capitalize on the nostalgia. Without rapping, nu-metal falls indistinct on most ears, which was its other big sin in metalheads' eyes: how repetitious and formulaic it was, even for metal—can't disguise a lack of compositional acumen with technical showoffery when there are no guitar solos. But if there's one nu-metal band that's unmistakable, it's Limp Bizkit, their gift and their curse. And whatever you think of Fred Durst's performance as a frontman, one thing you really can't deny is that in the context of nu-metal, Limp Bizkit have a helluvan ear for songwriting. Nu-metal is a genre that relies inordinately on sheer energy, as it so rarely tosses you an especially sticky hook. The most beloved nu-metal songs, the ones that have gone down as classics, camp or otherwise, are the ones that actually do have a hook too big to forget: "Last Resort", "Down with the Sickness", "Freak on a Leash", "Bring Me Back to Life", "Bodies", and there aren't all that many of them at the end of the day. Limp Bizkit, with the possible exception of Linkin Park, has made more of these than any other nu-metal band, and swap out a few of Starfish's more tedious tracks for the big songs from Significant Other, as well as "Counterfeit" and "Faith", and you could pull the ol' Steve Miller Band "combine the last three albums that everybody already bought" greatest hits swindle, and it'd be a stronger Greatest Hits than any other nu-metal band could cobble together, guaranteed (again, with the possible exception of Linkin Park).

But I'm talking around the issue. Sure, maybe Limp Bizkit is BETTER than other nu-metal, maybe they're more NOVEL, maybe they're more SONGFUL. But the tastiest turd is still a turd, and what I've got to do is convince you that you're not eating one. I gather that one reason many people still cannot get onboard with Limp Bizkit is that when they listen to music, they expect to hear ideas and emotions that they find personally resonant, and Limp Bizkit's are largely immature and stupid. Well, I can't blame you for wanting art to function as art. So I must make the case for Limp Bizkit as art.

Yknow, when I was a teenager, my opinion of Limp Bizkit aligned with received wisdom at the time: they were moronic frat bro butt rock, ugly, insipid, obnoxious. Hearing their music sounded like a boiled hot dog tastes. The first time I began to change this opinion was in listening to the song "Nookie", when it occurred to me that it was kind of compelling, how obvious it was that the narrator of the song was lying about having done it all for sex, that he was retreating into sexist, macho posturing to deny his own pain. I think this dynamic captures my argument for Limp Bizkit, which is that Limp Bizkit serves as an outlet for the basest emotions conjured in the male mind, framed within a context that makes them look ludicrous and pathetic while still conveying their intensity.

Now I'm not gonna come on here and try to convince you that Limp Bizkit is secretly some kind of galaxy-brained self-parody. I think that Fred Durst and company are medium smart guys with good musical and business instincts, who had a sincere desire to be rockstars, but unlike most of their peers, infused their very trendy, commercial sound with a knowing awareness regarding its own immediate datedness. Consider how organically Limp Bizkit has slid into being in on the joke, in recent years, compared to Nickelback. When Nickelback "laugh at themselves", it's the awkward "ha-haaa!" laugh occasionally used in Family Guy to signal unctuous insincerity. Have you ever seen a picture of Chad Kroeger smiling? It gives off the sense of a frozen rictus, a joyless, toothy, dead-eyed means of getting across an amiability he has determined he must project in order to be a likable rockstar. Nickelback are industry hacks, they may try to get in on the joke, but only because they feel they have to; they don't actually understand what's funny about them, because they don't respect the sort of swaggering cock rock their ascendancy was instrumental in rendering irrelevant. They don't see what the difference is between them and Aerosmith, or Guns n Roses, or AC/DC. The snarky indiehead might agree with them, but let's be real here: Nickelback sucks (though in the spirit of honesty I kinda like them) because they represent the corporatization of the rock star, there is nothing genuinely dark or sleazy or dangerous about them. If Mike Love is rock's Lucifer figure, Chad Kroeger is Andreyev's Lazarus, an empty shell, nothing at all. Nickelback finished what Tom Scholz—truly the George Lucas of mainstream rock music—unknowingly started in 1976, and Imagine Dragons buried the body.

I firmly believe Limp Bizkit are more worthy of respect than Nickelback. Now that they're overtly in on the joke, it comes across like a totally natural evolution, it feels like they always have been. But listening to Chocolate Starfish and the Hot-Dog Flavored Water, it doesn't sound like they are. And that's what's compelling about it. Limp Bizkit aren't a smarmy Darkness-esque parody, they very authentically perform that insecure, needy, butthurt bro-pain, which to me is the key. Sincerity is interesting, whether actual or convincingly faked. Winking insincerity is not. When Fred Durst says that he's seen Fight Club "about 28 times", it is impossible to tell if he is cracking a joke or if he is just the luckiest a truly stupid man has ever been. Crucially, both are possible, but I know which one strikes me as more likely. Over and over again on Chocolate Starfish & the Hot Dog Flavored Water, Fred Durst aggressively demands to know why he isn't respected, why people pick on him, all the while acting like a jackass, bragging about success that any idiot in 2000 knew was shortlived even if 9/11 hadn't been around the corner, rapping idiotic bars, pseudo-singing in the whiniest voice imaginable, never coming across sympathetic even when he approaches relatable. Sitting through all seven minutes of "Hold On" makes Puddle of Mudd's "Blurry" sound like "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" in comparison. Limp Bizkit's music conjures up an emotional landscape wherein insecurity gives way to machismo, which gives way to rage, which gives way to misery and then back to insecurity in a neverending cycle of self-inflicted asshattery. And you could theoretically say this about most nu-metal, but it works especially well with Limp Bizkit because (a) they're funny and (b) it's catchy in a pop way in addition to going hard in a metal way.

The French film critic Luc Moullet once said of storied director Samuel Fuller, "On fascism, only the point of view of someone who has been tempted is of any interest", and I think this works inversely as well. Some of the most interesting art is the art which troubles us because it does *not* entirely repel us. If David Lynch trafficked in mere contemptuous mockery of Americana, would he interest us as much as the David Lynch we have, whose thorny relationship with misogyny and tradition make his personal politics and ethics the subject of controversy and debate? If we didn't want to like Cooper, the avatar of square-jawed American do-gooder-ism, would the darker framing of his entire mission in The Return haunt us? Similarly, Limp Bizkit revels in their tacky, white trash vision of success, and appeals to our most neanderthal instincts, making us cheer even as we cringe. Let he who has never banged their head to "everything is FUCKED, everybody SUCKS" cast the first stone, and be marked as a liar! The power of Limp Bizkit is to make you bow to your most shameful instincts, even if only briefly, before the post-listen clarity hits. How else explain a band being on top of the world for a few years, and then become not just unsuccessful, but as despised as a mainstream artist can feasibly be, a byword for garbage even among those whose diet is otherwise trash? And *then* for them to return to our good graces? To me, all of this signals that Limp Bizkit's music contains Truth. Truth repels and attracts, truth inspires strong reaction. People come back to truth, though they may be loath to hear it. Limp Bizkit makes us sit with the extended mockery that Ben Stiller directs at them, long enough that we stop wondering if this means that Limp Bizkit is in on the joke, and begin to wonder if we're the butt of one—if we laid it all out on a slab like Fred does, our insecurities, our desires, our petty beefs, would Ben Stiller not laugh at us? Is it not the human condition to be laughable?

And I can imagine the retorts—"but Limp Bizkit does nothing for me" "it doesn't go hard" "sounds like shit"—and I get it, Roger Ebert thought Blue Velvet was distasteful as well, sometimes we have these reactions to bold work. The aural aesthete who intellectualizes their tastes has a lot of barriers built up specifically to prevent them from enjoying Limp Bizkit, and it's a testament to how precisely Durst and company hit the bullseye on all that is considered tasteless that said barriers hold, because only by being intrinsically embarrassing could a band as good as Limp Bizkit ever have accrued their wretched reputation. The way the hooks and the riffs and the beats come together on track after track is peerless, jock rock doesn't come better. You say you don't like "Rollin", and I straight-up don't believe you. You're lying, to me, to yourself, to America. You, like each and every one of us on God's green earth, are jonesing for your fix of that Limp Bizkit mix. And Chocolate Starfish and the Hot-Dog Flavored Water has 75 minutes of it, give or take some extensive Ben Stiller chuckling.

Chocolate Starfish is Limp Bizkit skating a victory lap over a rapidly melting lake of ice. Nobody has ever bragged this much, and sounded this insecure while doing so. Broadly speaking, there are three types of songs on Starfish. One, the straightforward brag song, as seen in both cuts of "Rollin", and "Getcha Groove On". Notably, two of these three tracks feature guest verses from Method Man, Redman, Xzibit, and DMX that blow Fred Durst's best efforts out of the water. If nu-metal has an undercurrent of racial envy, Fred Durst is both the most blatant thief and the most humble. A lot of nu-metal guys I can imagine being slightly uncomfortable if they were in a room with DMX, but not Fred, who sincerely loves and respects hip-hop even as he arguably makes it look absurd. But this gets back to the fundamental contradiction of Limp Bizkit: yes, everything about them is absurd, but it works because it should be. A white boy bragging about his pants saggin' should not be respectable. Mark my words, barring a major comeback album from Eminem or a major slip-up from Fred, Limp Bizkit will have more musical cachet than Eminem within twenty years. Marshall Mathers singlehandedly made white rap legitimate, and has spent the bulk of his discography since The Eminem Show demonstrating why he probably shouldn't have. It's impossible to hear "Rap God" without feeling faintly embarrassed that a fellow Caucasian is trying that hard to be the best at something that he cannot and will not be the best at. Fred Durst did not make that mistake, and he's more than happy to let better artists rap circles around him.

But time has been kind to Fred Durst's rapping, in any case. In Limp Bizkit's heyday, there was still a mystique to being an MC. If you presumed to rap, you were expected to attain a certain level of dexterity lest you be called wack. Fast forward 25 years, and the game is different. Walk out in the street. Look around. Do you see ten people? One of them is a rapper. And they suck ass. *I* have recorded rap songs, they're public on Soundcloud right now. Fred Durst's rhymes hew closer to what might be termed classical hip-hop style than most rappers bother to anymore. And this isn't me being a boomer, I love Future, Lil Uzi Vert, Gucci Mane, all that stuff. Fred Durst isn't as good as Busta, Rakim, or even Paul Wall, but he's probably better than your cousin. And that's about as good as he needs to be. If Limp Bizkit had a seriously capable rapper, or just an especially self-serious one like Mike Shinoda, they would lose much of their charm. Limp Bizkit is good *because* Fred Durst kinda sucks. And because they know he kinda sucks. And because they pretend he doesn't.

The second type of song on Chocolate Starfish is the song that finds Fred Durst complaining, either about the state of the world or of his place in it. "Hot Dog", "My Generation", "Full Nelson", and "Take a Look Around". Between the first and second type of song is "Livin It Up", a song that sees Durst bragging relentlessly, with a distinctive undercurrent of prickly insecurity. Yeah he's living large, but he's still just a redneck from Jacksonville, ain't nothing changing with him! Durst has a very difficult time bragging without sounding defensive, which is probably another reason he recruited better rappers to carry the bulk of those songs. As for that second type of song, they are all about how nobody respects him specifically, or his generation in general. Durst repeatedly asks why people don't respect him, in a way that suggests he knows damn well why, and "My Generation" is a savvy means of transplating the disrespect he feels to the listener. They don't respect ME, they don't respect YOU, and we don't give a FUCK. But also, if you talk shit he'll knock you STRAIGHT THE FUCK OUT. Which is why he responded to Trent Reznor saying Limp Bizkit sucked by crediting him in the track dissing him, thus granting him royalties. The key to Limp Bizkit's music working as well as it does is the dim sense emanating from Fred Durst that he knows he deserves to be mocked, which he reinforces with every wack lyric and goofy inflection of his voice. Durst is the rock star to end rock stars, the walking talking avatar of the small man lurking behind every big ego. Every swaggering rock god who ever had a 14-year-old paramour is Fred Durst on the inside—yes, including that one—and don't you forget it.

The third type of song, and the one that eats up the most time, is the incredibly pathetic song about a relationship, as heard in "My Way", "The One", "It'll Be OK", "Boiler" and "Hold On". These are the tracks that tend to break this album even for those open to it, as nobody wants to hear Fred Durst whine at length, and they do take up almost half the runtime if you excise the outro. In each of these Fred Durst moans and groans about a woman who has left him, or is about to, and his responses to this emotional turmoil range from passive-aggressive face-saving that promises HE'LL be the one to leave ("My Way") to bitter dirges that make it clear he didn't ("It'll Be OK"). The album ends on a trilogy of these songs, and if not for the intervention of "Rollin (Urban Assault Vehicle)" said trilogy would ensure the album leaves off on a sour, depressing note. Instead, Fred Durst invites three of the best rappers in the game circa 2000 to run circles around him before inviting Ben Stiller to make fun of Limp Bizkit for ten minutes. Fred Durst is pathetic, but more than that he's a joke, and this album doesn't let you forget it.

Lest you think I'm giving Limp Bizkit too much credit for any of this being intentional, let's examine the facts: Limp Bizkit named their big album, the album intended to cement them as one of the biggest names in music, "Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water", which is to say, they named it "Asshole and the Most Mundanely Disgusting Thing Possible", and this album is entirely about how Fred Durst (who identifies himself as the Chocolate Starfish) is completely unable to maintain a relationship despite his constant boasting about wealth and fame and cocksmanship, and unlike most truly awful people he doesn't waste any time at all trying to manipulate you into thinking he's a good, interesting, or nice person, and this album ends with one of the hottest comedians of the day mocking him for precisely the things everybody was mocking Limp Bizkit for, with precisely the same vaguely-ironic amusement that has allowed Limp Bizkit to survive to this day.....and we're to believe that all of this is completely accidental, that Fred Durst is truly the dumbest, most self-centered, oblivious hack on the planet, who inadvertently made an album revealing himself as such and nobody told him?

Again, I'm not arguing that Fred Durst is pulling some kind of Thin White Duke long con, a quick skim of his wikipedia page suggests he is very much capable of petty, sexist dickery. But I am suggesting that he is an artist, and like any artist is capable of exaggeration, reflection, and crafting a deliberate image. If Fred Durst appears to be the biggest douchebag alive, which is more likely: that he is, or that to some degree he's putting it on? Would a man as singularly devoid of redeeming qualities as this album suggests he is be capable of keeping a group of musicians this talented together this long, let alone of staging a comeback? I submit that he would not, and I point to Puddle of Mudd's Wes Scantlin as supporting evidence. I will end this section with a quote by Ben Kenobi: "Who's the more foolish, the fool or the fool who follows him?"

There are many very serious-minded people who will argue sincerely that the filmography of Michael Bay or the Jason Statham Crank movies are major works of contemporary cinema, and I'm not disparaging these efforts. Instead, I ask why music must be the domain of the tasteful, the classy, the acceptable, why must we put in our ears only what we'd be comfortable taking home to mom if we don't force our eyes to adhere to the same standards? One of my first musical fascinations as a teenager was rock music's first critical bugbear: Grand Funk Railroad. Time has reduced them to a handful of songs and a Simpsons reference, but make no mistake, Grand Funk Railroad were the most popular and the most critically-despised rock act in America for a brief period; after a hard-won bid for respect on rock music's part, Grand Funk Railroad were the barbarians at the gate, promising success and glory for any medium-talent, empty-headed young musicians who were content to sing and play about nothing more than singing and playing and the resulting carnal benefits of doing so adequately. Listening to Grand Funk, I was surprised to find that they were simply a classic rock band, playing better than I could imagine ever being able to. I couldn't hear wrong notes, bad rhythms, anything that'd mark them as rock's downfall. To this day I think "Inside Looking Out" is one of the all-time barnburners, a track that Aerosmith should be envious of. I realized then that for the most part, critical attacks in music are more philosophical than qualitative; it's not that Grand Funk performed their amiable white boogie rock poorly, but that they performed it at all, and I've never been convinced by any musical dogma, which has left me unusually receptive to some of music's most abject specimens, for someone with quite robust and expansive taste, someone familiar witg all the things I’m supposed to like. But to be fair to the Creem ilk, they weren't entirely wrong; on comes KISS, and there goes Foghat, and Mötley Crüe, and Dokken. One band makes a gold record with no ideas, a thousand will. But no amount of critical scorn for Candlebox could prevent Nickelback, anymore than critical praise for Faith No More and Helmet could raise standards too much for people to tolerate KoRn. The arc of history bends toward butt rock, until it breaks, and now, after 55 years of complaints, I think butt rock is finally about as ugly and unlistenable as critics have always acted like it was. Limp Bizkit, as bad as rock gets? Reader! Try Falling in Reverse, Bad Wolves, Blind Channel!! Why, one listen to a recent Godsmack song will send you shrieking back to 1998 to apologize to "Voodoo" for all the mean things you said. Even if you can't buy into taking Limp Bizkit seriously as artists, I would argue to appreciate them on the level of a cultural totem. If one considers them butt rock—I think they have too much personality, to be honest—then they are the *last* butt rock band to have any vitality. They stood on the precipice, the last morsel of food the snake could find before it had to resort to eating its own tail. And now, meathead rock is a rapidly-shrinking demographic. If you consider this a positive development—and considering the increasingly reactionary-coded Call of Duty quality of such things, perhaps it is, though this may be an aftereffect of ghettofication—then it's Limp Bizkit you have to thank. Limp Bizkit consigned an entire wing of music to the domain of people who would listen to Limp Bizkit sans any sense of irony, and then rebuke them when being a Limp Bizkit fan became inconvenient, and in doing so, sent hard rock music careening off a cliff. Fred Durst showed the butt rock audience its true face, and instead of adapting, it fled. Now we have 1000 grunting, po-faced Monster Energy spokesmen denying that they could ever be silly to the bitter end, to a diminishing audience of people who will eventually listen to country instead. Hard rock music is not simply disparaged—it's QUARANTINED. Limp Bizkit became a shameful symbol to run from rather than a hard truth to face, and twenty years on from their commercial implosion, the world promised by Limp Bizkit seems brighter than ever, in comparison. When George Carlin saw Rick Moranis tear his act to shreds, he changed it; when rock saw Limp Bizkit do the same, it closed its eyes.

That leaves us with one final matter to settle: the actual musical quality of this album. If you're willing to judge it on its own terms, I think Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water is an unqualified success. It delivers big arena anthems, it delivers mopey angstfests, it's simultaneously irresistible and embarrassing. Sometimes when I listen to it—which I confess has been frequently, this year—it strikes me as a bit lumpy and overlong. Why does "The One" need to go on for that last two minutes? I almost never listen through the whole "Outro", for sure. Other times I just can't get enough of it. With Limp Bizkit I find that you have to give yourself some time to lock in, to ride their groove. You're gonna resist at first, like a gag reflex. But get past that and there are few albums more committed to going hard, at the expense of the band's very dignity. I've even come to like the slow atmospheric songs, if to a lesser degree. It's hard to be earnestly invested in Fred Durst's whining, pointedly unpretty vocals, but if you come to the album the proper amount of Jokerfied, you may get a perverse enjoyment out of all 7 minutes of "Hold On": "Wow, I can't believe he's humiliating himself like this".

I think that music can and must operate on multiple levels. Perhaps Limp Bizkit is not "good" in the same way that Astral Weeks is good. But must this mean that it's bad? If an artwork provides you with something you can't get anywhere else, is that not value in its purest form? When man first felled an aurochs, and wrenched the horns from its skull, and called down demons in the night-wind with his very breath, and his countrymen cowered and slew him in their frenzy, were they right to do so? This is the fundamental question.

Dismissed