Since I kicked off my own journey with The Nu Metal Agenda back in the spring of 2023, I’ve been trying and largely failing to get into Limp Bizkit outside of a few songs, but I’ve acquired a relevant rant and a plethora of hot takes on the subject over the past two years of dutiful attempts.
Okay, fiiiine. I'm not being totally forthcoming with that intro. For all my psychologically and rhetorically pretzeled Good Girl Writing About Nu-Metal posturing, it's important that you also know I wound up at a local hardcore show in Fitchburg, MA this Friday, one of the bands jumpscared the room with a "Break Stuff" cover, and I rapidly realized I knew all the words and remembered how much of a blast it was to scream along while dodging spin kicks from scene bros two-thirds my age, and honestly looking kind of good doing it. Getting to reroll puberty in my 30s on my own terms is insane. And possibly, genuinely getting into the poster child for late Nineties/early Aughts white boy puberty angst is going to be an incredibly funny personal arc if things keep developing in this direction.
But I digress. I was going to say that this throwaway meme playfully describing Fred Durst’s red-capped golden ticket out of Nineties Jacksonville as “rapping” that bears a “hint of metal” is largely accurate. In practice they’re pretty similar musically to a more straightforward hard rock group like, say, Rage Against the Machine. Maybe a little tighter in terms of rhythm section, and Wes Borland’s a criminally underrated guitarist, but much more controlled and less willing to Just Frickin’ Go For It(TM) than Tom Morello. From where I’m sitting, these are all largely just personal preferences for the nerds to fight over and leave as friends afterwards. I’d rather listen to Rage, personally, but I could see myself going back and forth on that in the future.
The thing that I struggled to understand for a while about Bizkit (and other goofy white boy rap metal fellow travelers from the present day like Toronto's Klokwise or Atlanta's Silly Goose) is that they’re really going for abrasiveness as most metal bands do, but for them a lot of the abrasiveness is tied up in the stage persona of William Frederick Durst, and the way they play fast and loose with hip-hop culture - irreverent to the point where they very justifiably pissed a lot of people off.
Take “Rollin’.” That actually started off as a Swizz Beatz-produced posse cut featuring Fred Durst, DMX, Method Man and Redman, the band was like “hey maybe this works better as a rock song without the features,” and ultimately both versions ended up on Chocolate Starfish. Clearly there’s a willingness to engage with and collaborate with broader hip-hop culture there, but I get the impression it was kinda weird for those artists in practice.
Bizkit’s gotten more thoughtful and nuanced as they age, though, starting around Gold Cobra in 2011–their new single “Making Love to Morgan Wallen” is an absolute blast and absolutely worth a listen. Peep my colleague Josh Rioux’s thoughts on the new single and the context that spawned it—he’s the site’s greatest apologist for the band’s return from the alt-metal wilderness beginning with Gold Cobra and continuing through the present, and our many Discord chats over the last two years have continually refined and challenged my own thinking and assumptions on all things Bizkit and the sub-subgenre they’ve successfully carved out for themselves. “Making Love to Morgan Wallen” is one of the most convincing and surprisingly poignant pieces of music the band has put out to date, its opening eulogy to Chester Bennington becoming all-too-fitting all-too-quickly as the band and its fans mourn the tragic passing of founding bassist Sam Rivers. At this point—Fred’s history of “Eat You Alive”-branded performative misogyny, slow de-facto alienation of the same hip-hop scenes that enabled his meteoric rise, and honest-to-goodness pro-Russia advocacy during the 2014 annexation of fucking Crimea notwithstanding—the band has too much accumulated talent and has been through too much together not to start rooting for them at least a little bit.
And, listen. Back when I was still rocking my cope beard and walking through the world as another insecure white dude in a country rapidly bursting at the seams with them, I was pretty clear on the point that this shit just wasn’t for me. I used to work with a guy my age the older women on the floor would warn new cashiers about, who once confessed to me how the words of William Frederick Durst gave him the resilience to get through the collective madness of a grocery store weathering the fallout of COVID-19. I remember razzing him about it in the grocery backroom and still would now, if we ever crossed paths again, but I’ve come to appreciate Fred’s game a little better after stepping more confidently back into my own body and femininity.
The first and only time I’ve posted a TikTok since my egg cracked was earlier this year, a “Why did you transition? Wrong answers only” prompt above my best face of makeup, a smirk through black lipstick, a crop top reading “YOU ARE NOT IMMUNE TO PROPAGANDA” (the requisite matching booty shorts reading “PROPAGANDA” across the ass were tastefully left out of frame) and the unforgettable chorus of “Nookie” playing in the background. It’s been a deeply silly year in a staggeringly craven and homicidally silly country, so I’ve started to get a little silly with it myself. The particular breed of humor blended with aggression on 2020s T-girl classics like 10,000 Gecs and D1G1T4L_DR1FT all hits much differently now, after nearly two years on HRT, and I’m leaning deeper into the mess. I got a couple of mean comments on that vid, but listen, I grew up with hockey players. These guys either aren’t sending their best, or just don’t have the mental bandwidth or joie de vivre to keep the fuck up anymore. We’re made of stronger stuff than they are, and there’s a near-boundless strength that comes with reminding ourselves and each other of that Unquestionable Truth (I had to go with the pun, Durst forgive me).
Weirdly, and especially as I go through a period of Difficult Life Shit(TM) that’s forcing me to rethink about a lot about who I am, who I’m becoming, and the kind of woman I want to be going forward, I, too, have found a certain degree of resilience in new Bizkit. They’re older, wiser maybe, willing to laugh at themselves a little harder and just have fun in the studio and on-stage. Fred’s on a supportive chaser arc these days, starring in I Saw the TV Glow and doing between-song banter at concerts about how much he likes sucking girldick. Read uncharitably, it all feels like the same kind of “look at how cool and edgy we are” bullshit from the ‘90s, just redirected towards the dolls as the newest window dressing for his countercultural posturing. He seems willing to let us take more of a lead creatively in those collabs and let the shameless dude-bro stage persona slip a bit, but the exact contours and commitment to this quintessentially Durstian form of allyship are just one of those things I’ll never really know for sure unless I meet him and give him the good old “hmmmm, interesting 🤔” treatment until he confesses something that actually is. If you ever see this one, Fred, feel free to hit me up next time you’re in Boston and I’ll make sure we get your side of the story up here as a counterpoint to one girl’s read on the whole thing.
There’s honestly so much about “Making Love to Morgan Wallen” that’s right for the moment. I like the earnestness of the opener, the unabashed goofiness of Fred’s bars and relieving irreverence toward the man the nation’s biggest wet blankets continually see fit to remind me is still Our President(TM), as if I’m somehow going to chill the fuck out about national politics if I look at the 2024 electoral map one more time, just one more time bro I promise. (Pfft, guys, you’re never gonna get a bilingual bitch from Boston to co-sign whatever the fuck kind of picos Tom Homan, Kristi Noem, and the least-cool Steven Miller in American history have maldingly shoved up their own asses this week, so quit crashing out over the milkshake y’all ordered from Home Depot and then maybe we’ll start finally fucking getting somewhere.) The Bizkit-ass nü-koan of the chorus—“If you’re hot, you’re hot / If you’re not, you’re not”—feels less gatekeepy than it would back in ‘98, and more of an open-door challenge to become the best possible version of ourselves. A “do or do not, there is no try” for a new/nü generation.
Towards the end though, before the bridge, and before the straight out of left field monster of a finish, Fred coyly drops another gem: “I see through your act, and I still enjoy the show.” And that take, slightly reminiscent of journalist Josephine Riesman’s theories of US conservatism as inextricable from Vince McMahon's WWE-style neokayfabe, is increasingly the kind of relationship I have with this band. It’s posturing, but it’s pointing in a direction I believe that they, on some level, want to go. Fred starts shouting out and lyrically high-fiving the “good girls” and the “good guys,” taking a homoerotically charged parting shot at the country singer who receives his place of prominence in the song title as compensation, before remixing his own years of pariah status into one last bar, accepting his experiences with empathy and leaving an open-door mantra for anyone who’s taken L’s under Trump 2.0 to join in.
So, in this spirit, as a woman, as someone transfeminized under cisheteropatriarchy and fully conscious that she’s far from the only one in the path of a brutal machine that’s already racking up a body count, I’ll make the same pledge Fred does in the last line, and I encourage anyone who can relate to pledge the same. We’ll spend the rest of our lives racing each other for the title, lend each other a hand along the way, and someday everyone that’s still standing will look back at how far we’ve come since:
