Limp Bizkit has gone from bad to worse. Although it obtained success with a truly god-awful sophomore album after rising to fame with a heavy rotation on TRL, selling out to discover the head-banging potential of "Faith," "Significant Other" was merely awful. But with the band's new album, so inanely titled it doesn't merit mention, Bizkit finally hits rock bottom with an album so mindless, not even the angry young man contingent of the MTV generation can make it worth Fred Durst's while.
Can a band for whom songs like "Nookie" and "Break Stuff" actually represented progress possibly further degenerate? The first cut, "Hot Dog," answers the Three-Dollar Bill (y'all) question by displaying Bizkit's lowest-common-denominator appeal in all its glory. After jacking the riff from Alice In Chains' "Angry Chair," Fred Durst manages to use the f-word some 46 times and rework a few Nine Inch Nails choruses in his latest lame attempt at hip-hop style beef with Trent Reznor. It's a concise package of the worst aspects of what's hot now with an inkling of how bad Eminem would be if he didn't temper his intolerance with humor, insight or astounding lyrical skills.
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In a presumed nod to the Smashing Pumpkins, the only thing longer than the album title is the disc itself; it clocks in at a punishing 75 minutes long, where you hear the band evolve from jungle-gym taunts to bad high-school poetry. Durst claims that no other group could take "rap, punk, thrash, throw it in a can and come out with something that's not fertilizer." Um, actually, he and Faith No More should do lunch sometime.
Bizkit's rhythm section doesn't deserve much of the blame. Terry Date helps tighten up the band's monster mash, as he did with the Deftones in the past. Wes Borland is an underrated guitarist, who conjures up Tool dynamics with Tom Morello's bag of tricks on "My Way" and "Boiler." The Scott Weiland-adorned "Hold On" almost achieves elegance before you realize how dull it is four minutes in. The heavy numbers get repetitive in a hurry, too.
But this is Mr. Durst's band, and he still fancies himself to be a laughably self-proclaimed "old-school m.f. from around the way." But you get the feeling that "you got to get up to get down" would be his idea of a complex rhyme.
He brings in some of hip-hop's best to do battle or to merely help his street cred. Durst isn't as helpless as he was on "N2Gether Now," but the beats fail him on the rap-oriented numbers. Xzibit's fiery verses are done in by a lifeless DJ Lethal track, and "Rollin' (Urban Assault Vehicle)" is Swizz Beatz at his self-plagiaristic worst.
Durst's boasting is more tolerable than his attempts at songwriting. His lyrics tend to be straight out of Chicken Soup For The Moron Soul or a Columbia House catalog: "the grass will always be greener on the other side," "my way or the highway," "I'm looking for Mrs. Right," "livin' in the fast lane," "welcome to the jungle." It's like hearing a supermodel claim what she does is really hard work.
The nadir, though, is "My Generation," which could only be more insulting if it actually was a Who cover. "Do you think we can fly?" may have worked for R. Kelly and Texaco commercials, but here it's a soulless attempt at a catch-phrase for a population that should know better. "Generation X / Generation strange / The sun doesn't shine through our window pane," Durst yelps as if this were an anthem for the new millenium we could all agree on. Sorry, "Big Pimpin'" already took that honor.
But in the end, Limp Bizkit is our generation, much in the same way that Warrant's "Cherry Pie" was 10 years ago. To Durst's credit, he isn't as misogynistic this time around. Nonetheless, it's an embarrassing time capsule of a reprehensible genre that will sell millions and leave people a decade from now wondering what happened. Durst's lyrics wouldn't sound any more empty, manufactured or harmless if they were written by the Backstreet Boys' team. Combine that with their TRL ubiquity, youth-oriented subject matter and a song called "The One," and you realize it's getting harder to tell Bizkit and Backstreet apart.
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