Even now, in 2025, when we all love Limp Bizkit again, when we’re all reassured that they’re in on the joke (whatever we think the joke might be), when those of us who loved them the first time around and then later denied them over craft beers (stomp-clap playing in the background, the new worst genre of all time) have now denied the denial (looking in the mirror here) and are officially back in the fold, I think most of us who press play on “Making Love to Morgan Wallen” are still carrying some version of the belief that Fred Durst is the caveat of Limp Bizkit.
Here’s a thought experiment for a nu metal fan. Take Limp Bizkit and Rage Against The Machine and hold them in your mind. Now remove Fred and Zack and stack Wes Borland, Sam Rivers, and Joel Otto against the remainder of Rage, and ask yourself which band you’d rather run the pit tonight, there’s no real question—Limp’s engine room are more technical, more elastic, more experimental, more explosive, more fun than everything going on in that other, almost completely unquestioned rap rock institution (leaving Lethal out of this cause it makes it not fair). But put Fred and Zack back in and one of them goes “Some of those that work forces are the same that burn crosses” while the other goes “Fucked-up AIDS from fucked-up sex, fucked up titties on a fucked-up chest”, and now one band is up in the trophy case and the other gets hidden under the mattress.
I say all this because, even if we as nu metal true believers have accepted that Limp Bizkit doesn’t work without Fred, that Fred’s a load-bearing element–even that Fred’s maybe actually secretly what you loved about the Pirate Band all along–with “Making Love to Morgan Wallen”, it’s now officially uncontroversial to say that Fred Durst is good.
“...Morgan Wallen” opens on a rubbery, delay-soaked little guitar figure, the kind of thing Wes Borland seems to doodle out effortlessly in Bizkit’s latter-day formation. Joel Otto jumps in after a couple of bars with some jazzy hi-hats, quickly followed by Sam Rivers’ bass undertow, and then Fred arrives. Over the next four minutes, we’re treated to a free-associative romp through the onion layers of Fred Durst’s mind. We get a little love and respect right off the top:
Damn, I miss you Chester
Sending love from a bass compressor
Followed by some goofy auto-hagiography:
Ground control with a soul like Bowie
And I’ll chop you up if I’m under pressure
Before we completely wing out into the surreal:
Bizkit beats from the pirate band
Signed this deal with a lobster hand
Freestyle like a bowling pin
Flex these bars on a dolphin fin
Life’s too short but I can’t complain
Doin’ backflips on a candy cane
Now here’s the thing; Fred Durst’s lyrical approach has never been his strong suit. Confidence, his live presence, a certain smooth, perpetually 10th grade vocal pocket that sits in the mix like a nocked arrow, yes, all that, yes. But the lyrics? Early on there was a lot of spleen at exes and scene antagonists, always leavened by a track to two of pure gratitude (“Indigo Flow”? Cobain never woulda) for the bands and fans holding them up. Limp’s meteoric rise in a critical environment that still missed Kurt led to some hurt feelings, and by Chocolate Starfish and Results May Vary, Fred was too defensive to convincingly flex. It hurts to feel misunderstood, even when it’s mostly our fault (Fred didn’t make them tear the plywood down at Woodstock, but he didn’t need to surf on that shit either). But sometime between Fred’s grasp-exceeding reach for the political on 2005’s The Unquestionable Truth, Pt. 1 and 2011’s Gold Cobra, which found the band emerging from the woods into a world that had entirely written them off, Durst discovered the power of acceptance. If nu metal was wandering the wilderness, Limp Bizkit had been in the belly of the goddamn whale. Gold Cobra was the moment Fred Durst let go and became free.
“Making Love to Morgan Wallen” is Fred doing exactly what he’s done since then, only with an even sharper pen. He’s not a better rapper—it was never really about that. What he has become instead is a better writer of Fred Durst bars—gone are the misplaced attempts at profundity, or to brutalize with words; Post-Gold Cobra, Fred Durst is fully himself, loving on one line, funny on the next, flexing with a wink, and, maybe most crucially, being as weird and creative on the mic as Wes is on his guitar.
Which has got to be why the verse on “…Morgan Wallen” seems to give Fred way more room than you expect going in. When the chorus finally does hit, you’re reminded that this band is still this band, but grown; Wes keeps it simple and brings the walls down while Fred goes “Hey ladieeeeees” and drops a classic “HYeah”, and you can close your eyes and watch the great moshpit sea of the heart ripple and wave like it’s sunset in Rome, NY.
The most interesting moment in the song hits right at the very end. After what becomes a pretty tried-and-true Limp Bizkit formula of funky verse, slamming chourus, trippy bridge (“No jokes, no goats, no toast, no ghosts”), we get the riff back-but-slower, a siren wails, Fred yells “Turn it up!”, and suddenly we’re accelerating into what feels like the next song on the record;
I make this motherfucker diamond-plated
Makin’ love to Morgan Wallen in an elevator
I’ll be turnin on you bitches like a generator
I’ll be the greatest motherfucker that you ever hated
Do I know what this means? I do not. It almost feels like a tease, like an edit that hides some follow-up track this one bleeds immediately into, one I want very badly. Or it’s just this new Limp Bizkit, doing what they want, fucking around with form and expectation. Limp Bizkit have been from feted to hated and are back, clown wigs and goofy tours with Corey Feldman and knowing singles like “Dad Vibes” and now this, apparently a soundtrack piece for EA’s upcoming Battlefield 6. So maybe there’s no track 2, where we find out what happens to Morgan and, y’know, whether they keep the baby, but fuck, what we got here is good. So I can let go and accept this too.
