0.43.0 - I'm just a teenage dirtbag, baby
So, in part, the rise of Nu-metal was my fault.
There was, for a brief moment, a kind of countercultural Avengers team which appeared in the wake of the death of grunge, and which seemed targeted with laser precision at disaffected, insecure young men, confused and angry at their confusion, frustrated and looking for catharsis in the most obvious, the most immediate way. Almost simultaneously, Marilyn Manson*, Eminem, Limp Bizkit, and Korn (along with Linkin Park who I covered previously, House of Pain, and the prominence of rap in young white musical culture) rose together. Musically only slightly overlapping in Venn diagram terms (hardcore goth metal, snarky white rap, frat rock with terrible rapping, and bagpipe emo metal), these acts crossed over together, featuring in each others songs and music videos before publically falling out and feuding with each other over petty nonsense. Each of them (or more likely, the marketing teams in the record labels handling each of them) sensed that there was a moment of generational angst they could tap into and rise through together, each of them bolstering each others position in the canon of Bands Your Parents Don't Like But They Just Don't Get What It's Like To Be A Teenager Right Now Man.
It doesn't take a genius to guess which side of the equation I came down on.
The fault lies in part with the DJs in the various alternative nightclubs I was frequenting at the time. I'm certain that the first time I heard a Korn song or a Limp Bizkit song was on a dancefloor at La Montmatre or at Corporation in Sheffield. I remember distinctly hearing Eminem for the first time listening to BBC Radio One. I had a job as a general dogsbody for a small architecture firm, doing low grade computer tasks for them like running their server tape backups every day (which involved me sitting in a small cupboard listening to the radio on my radio walkman and watching a progress bar fill up), printing copies of reports and binding them together (another solitary activity with plenty of time for radio listening) and fixing printers and installing software updates. My Name Is... was all over British youth radio at the time, and as someone who already had a passing familiarity with some hip-hop (primarily through the Beastie Boys) it instantly registered with me; this funny, unrepentant, outrageous guy is saying stuff I didn't think you were allowed to say on the radio? Sign me up.
Ironically, I ended up with two copies of The Slim Shady LP because the first time I bought it, I didn't even know there was a 'clean' version and an explicit version. I just walked into the HMV around the corner and bought the album by the guy which had the song I liked on it, and it was not until I got home that night and played it only to discover the lead single had a range of alternative lyrics I had never heard before that I carefully examined the packaging and realised my mistake. The following day I bought it again, this time with the proper PARENTAL ADVISORY sticker on the case, but because of a long standing foible of mine, I never returned the original purchase. I like to kind of live with the consequences of my mistakes; it has proven to be a good way for me to not repeat them, and friends, I can tell you I've never accidentally bought the clean version of an Eminem album since that day.
None of these albums stand much in the way of modern scrutiny, I'll be honest. I was a dumb youth with little to be angry about but lived with that angst and frustration anyway. I've seen subsequent generations of young men with the same anger and frustration exploited and manipulated by grifters, manosphere influencers and alt-right propagandists, women-hating pick up artists and anti-immigrant racists. In my kinder days I like to think if I'd have been 20 in 2009, or 2018, I'd have seen through these attempts to weaponise my teenage confusion; in my more cynical and honest days I thank my lucky stars that the only people trying to prey on my insecurities were musicians of dubious merit and quality.
It's perhaps unfair for me to lump Eminem into this grouping, though its undeniable that The Slim Shady LP fits all the criteria laid out above. By the time The Marshall Mathers LP came out a couple of years later, I think even Eminem had moved on, had different things to say, had worked more to distance himself from the dominant nu-metal scene; It's also doubtless in my mind that I'd have been less inclined to make the effort to learn to appreciate rap and hip hop without Eminem acting as my gateway drug into that genre. Questionable content aside, I think the two Eminem albums here are musically the most respectable. Marshall is one of the smartest, fasted, most precise rappers and the wit and lyrical skill spread across the two records can't be understated, even if it would get a far less tolerant reaction now in 2025.
I'm finding my position on KoRn harder to define. One thing I know for sure is that I listened to both Issues and Follow The Leader a whole bunch when I was in my early 20s. There's definitely a part of listening to KoRn's music and learning about their lead singer Jonathan Davis that contributed to a generalised unpicking and questioning of the institutional homophobia that was part of the schoolyard curriculum in the mid 90s. There are songs like Make Me Bad and Falling Away From Me and Freak On A Leash that, in the context of dark, sweaty nightclub go incredibly hard and would have me sprinting towards the dancefloor. Absent those factors, without that context, as an album of songs to play start to finish I found these two albums much harder work than I thought I would. There's just not enough range, difference, depth, variety to sustain hour long, 15 song average albums. Everything just kind of merges into one dark, muddy puddle and I found myself asking what possessed me to listen to these albums over and over as a teen. Maybe, if Interpol exists as the band who's music most closely resembles the internal vibrations of my resting mental state now, maybe the monotone, grinding rumble of KoRn was what lived in my head then.
Nothing on either album however comes close to the pure misery which is the song All In The Family featuring Limp Bizkit's Fred Durst.
What can I say about Limp Bizkit? Does their legend live on, do the youth of today know how a gang of terrible people from Jacksonville accidentally recruited one of the best guitarists in the world in Wes Borland and turned the musical incarnation of a kegstand into an international music success? How Limp Bizkit ran a guitar competition across stores in the US, had people compose original songs and come play them and then the band just jacked all that music because the T&Cs of the competition granted Limp Bizkit the ownership of any music submitted? How their encouragement to an already volatile crowd caused a riot at Woodstock '99 which claimed 3 lives?
The worst thing that happened to Limp Bizkit was their overnight success. I think Significant Other (and their earlier album 3 Dollar Bill, Y'all which I did not listen to because I am only willing to punish myself with Limp Bizkit so much) aren't overtly bad; sure the content is a little misogynistic and basic and Fred Durst can't sing or rap very well, but they're bouncy high energy alt-rock and songs like Break Stuff and Just Like This are decent pump up jams. Sadly, off the back of those songs and breakup song for every contemptible jock in the world, Nookie*, Limp Bizkit came to dominate the musical landscape, and in turn, stop trying.
You only have to learn that the follow up album to Significant Other's smash success is called Chocolate Starfish and The Hot Dog Flavoured Water to realise how far downhill things had gone, and the low-rent Jackass direction things were heading in. Somehow, it was also an enormous success, propelled beyond any right it had to be as an album by the power of two media crossover events. The first was the Limp Bizkit track Take A Look Around being used as a title music for the sequel to the prior years hyper-successful Mission: Impossible film. It samples the famous Mission:Impossible musical jingle and its honestly pretty catchy, and has a video which is frankly stupid enough to merit its own ten thousand word essay, but I'll just encourage you to watch it and you can then write it yourself if you are so inclined. The second was the the use of My Way to promote the WWF's (now WWE) Wrestlemania XVII main event between Stone Cold Steve Austin and The Rock. This isn't a wrestling blog but I've been a fan for a long time and I can tell you that never in the 40 years I have been watching wrestling was it hotter, and more culturally relevant than it was in 2001 when Wrestlemania XVII took place, and the video package for the main event, set to My Way has achieved legendary status in the canon of great videos to hype a wrestling match.
Limp Bizkit were hugely successful, thanks to savvy marketing and partnerships but the album was running out of ideas, if there were any to begin with, and the release of the follow up three years later, Results May Vary was a historic flop, a fall from grace so inevitable the bookies had long ago closed the odds on Limp Bizkit ever making a hit song ever again.
Somehow, they are still out there, lurking in the background; they released an album in 2021 that didn't gather any attention or traction apart from the most hardcore of fans, and since that time in the late 90s and early 2000s, they've not troubled me at all.
They're a mistake I made, an album I can't return to the store, a part of my musical journey where I veered hard off the tarmac and into the mud. I can't see the value of not facing into that fact, not embracing and understanding it and going 'look, I was wrong but I think I understand why and here's how its affected me since'.
Don't regret the choices you made when all they did was make you look like an ass, expose your thinking as incomplete, as basic, as easily led. Own it, understand it, and make efforts to learn from it. Its going to lead you somewhere different, somewhere new and interesting, and god willing, as far away from Limp Bizkit and KoRn and All In The Family as possible.
* I'm not covering Marilyn Manson here even though I own 3 different MM albums in my CD collection is I am trying not to platform people with credible sexual abuse allegations thrown at them this year. If I'm not going to listen to Arcade Fire, a band who's early musical output I love, you can bet Brian is getting the same treatment.
** In slight defense of Significant Other it contains two more breakup songs, 'no sex' and 'nobody like you' which are lyrically much more self-reflective and well considered as breakup songs. Obviously, the loud shouty one which says they were only in it for the sex anyway is the one that made the airwaves.
