Why does seeing Fred Durst on my TV screen fill me with hot, righteous anger?

Damn you, Maura!

Fred Durst may be one of the more repellant pop musical figures I've ever had the displeasure of seeing shit out of the ass end of pop culture. (I would have used a birthing metaphor, but I couldn't imagine Freddy coming from anywhere but the anus. The fact that his face kinda looks like a placenta notwithstanding.) He is jock rock incarnate. I never though I'd long for the whiners of the early 90s, but here we are.

I put a Limp Bizkit song on the jukebox the other week.

fred durst is in limp bizkit, right? i've only heard "nookie." is it just his voice/persona that inspires all this hatred or is there something about the music that everyone hates? nu-metal seems to be so widely and thoroughly despised that i'm really getting interested.

Seriously, though: Isn't hating Fred Durst a sign that you think music can influence human behavior in a negative and destructive way? It seems like the hatred comes from the idea that Durst is actually *creating* an army of shirtless, overfed brutes. If he's just reflecting feelings that exist without him, then the problem is within us all.

As for my own opinion on the man? I just think he's sort of corny and pathetic. How could anyone with a voice so weak and a flow so forced be but so intimidating or anger-inducing?

Fred Durst's house, I'm guessing, must be as sad as the man himself; this huge attempt to try and get you to envy him, or something. But Sebastian Bach doesn't care! He's gonna make this huge, ugly house, fill it with crap and then broadcast it to the world!

i'm not even going to get into an attack on the music because i think that would open me up for more 'you just don't understand'isms, but calling limp bizkit's version of rising up anything more than a series of precisely calculated marketing moves is giving them way, way too much credit.

The main complaints about Durst seem to be: he's a nasty, bigoted bully-boy (this is true, alas it wouldn't a priori stop him making exciting music); he was marketed super-heavily and pretends to be for real (this is also true, but it's true for N'Sync's new CD too); the pain he sings about is, even if real, unearned (but whose pain is? and if it speaks to people, why does a performer have to mean it?); the music isn't as good as metal used to be in my day (hmmm).

I am bored with hating fred durst and will now stick up for him. But who is he? (Pinefox, you know these things...)

Regarding Mr. Durst -- it seems like nobody is actually admitting being a full-on honest to god LB fan *at all,* which amuses me. The utterings of Dave Q and Scott are going to great lengths to put down everybody while offering nothing in its place -- which rather sums up what Fred's all about, surely. ;-)

he just looks mean. the angry white boy, perfected. and he's got a total messiah complex -- i watched the limp bizkit 'becoming' (it's good to have as much ammunition against your enemies as you can, i think) and he said something like 'you are going to be me,' with that stare that he gives, that unblinking squint, and it was just so ominous and icky and i couldn't bear to look at the screen.

and he's given such a free pass by those who get apoplectic about these sorts of things, probably because he looks like their sons -- and that, to me, is what's truly unnerving about him. fuck his music, i couldn't give a shit about it. it's his amalgam of bully and businessman, and how that blend is totally working, that makes me ill.

If you remove my ideological objections, and put Fred Durst's music in a vacuum ( you certainly have my permission ), well, I strongly suspect that I still won't like it- aesthetically, it pleases me not.

your question also opens up the can of worms about just what makes up radio formatting these days -- for example, why does eminem get played on 'rock' radio that wouldn't touch songs by dr. dre?

Mitch: band != fans. But if you think band = fans there's not much I can say to stop you.

There's also a qualitative difference in the Durst bully/businessman stereotype and, say, Suge Knight or Master P. Knight and P take as their role models respectively gangster-businessmen and some kind of odd military stereotype. These stereotypes are seen anyway as scary and bad and threatening and Knight and P play up to that.

Durst, on the other hand, with his macho-but-hey-it's-all-fun hi- jinks, his co-option of therapyspeak and his super-aggressive moshpit ethos, is a closer mirror for the actual business world of taking clients to pole-dance clubs, mock-compassionate bullshit speak and ruthless rightsizing. "Mook culture" as Mitch puts it does not present itself as scary, either in boardroom or on the street - it presents itself as ruthlessly normal.

Dave, I appreciate your casual dismissal of my sentiments on Mr. Durst. I guess that Limp Bizkit are so important and menacing, that it's impossible for someone to think Freddy is just a big tool who got some lucky breaks.

And Ethan, drawing all these parallels between gangsta rappers and Fred Durst really just ignores the manifold differences between the objects of comparison - differences in context, message, audience, etc. - differences that are drastic enough to make the comparison pretty worthless.

I think Tom's right on the money with this one, and it's probably precisely why this music turns me off so much. It's not an absolute or anything of course (it's hypocritical, but true, for me to say that I appreciate the "normal guy" pose in early-indie rock but am repulsed by it in nu-metal, but it's merely a distinction between two types of "normal guys," one which is more like me [slightly introverted, sentive, blah friggin blah] and one which is exactly what I assume most of us defined ourselves against in HS [jock-frat- thug chuckleheads.]), but it just reminds me too much of the real world and all of it's horrid callousness and morons-making-it-big. And "reality" is by and large not where I'm going for my pop kicks these days.

You said: see above.

Excuse the snippiness. I am not saying that your ceaseless quest etc. is a bad thing - on the contrary, you've pointed out some snarl-ups in my thinking before and I'm grateful for it. But in this case Maura is objecting to Durst precisely because of the special-treatment he gets from his whiteness, and I am objecting to the Durst-stereotype as opposed to the Knight-stereotype precisely because the former is presented as 'normality' and the latter as criminal deviance, and the root of that is plainly totally racial too.

Basically, Fred Durst is the most notable and prominent rock star since Kurt Cobain. And he is in a lot of ways the anti-Cobain: musically reaching-out, socially intolerant, keen to embrace corporacy. So Durst has a massive symbolic hate-value - he is the symbol of a generation, my generation, losing power. Nu-metal is the first thing to come along which people my age loathe and people ten years younger love. That, more than the racial inflections of the nu- metal debate, is what gives the (justifiable) dislike of Durst the real spite it seems to have.

Agreed. Which is what I was saying above when I longed for the "whiners of the early 90s." PC-rock is no better than nu-metal in a lot of ways, but one of the goods which came from the alt-rock explosion (to these ears anyway), was that it opened a lot of young peoples eyes to *another* way of doing things. Which, of course, is the history of youth movements and subcultchas in general. Nu-metal screams about "making it", and making it in the most corporate cock- sucking way possible. It's impossible to imagine anyone appearing on the cover of Rolling Stone right now wearing a t-shirt with "Corporate Rock Still Sucks" pathetically scrawled on it, even if the sentiments are essentially empty when the artist is signed to Geffen. And to preempt the racial end of the discussion, yes the commercialism of most hiphop these days is just as, if not moreso, grossly crass and over the top as Limp Bizkit. But, like Simon Reynolds once pointed out, "making it" has often held its own revolutionary charge in black pop, after years of not getting paid. Also, let's not forget, Cash Money and No Limit, in their own mercenary capitalist ways, are both d.i.y. indie labels in a sense, both starting as essentially underground propositions. Cash Money's deal with their major is one of the more unique in the industry's history, retaining far more of their own rights and profits than any indie-rock concern which dallied with a major.

Also, Tom's comment above gets it slightly wrong -- not just teenage girls listen to the Backstreet and not just teenage guys listen to the Bizkit. Regular viewing of TRL helps in gaining an accurate sense of targeted demos. In some ways, I think that some teen-pop represents a step in a process of maturing to adults, and other represent a rejection of maturity -- fuck you! I hate you! I'll throw tantrums and act like an eight year old!

Finally, I don't have it in for all nu-metal, mainly just Limp Bizkit. Plenty of the others are more interesting, sometimes even more talented, and soforth. I haven't gone all out to try and "get" them yet, but it remains a back-burner project. For example, if Crazytown has anything to do with nu-metal, then I'm all for it.

Crazytown!?! Ugh. Please say it isn't so. That single is like an aural laxative...

(speaking from the true north strong and free here, and pretty firmly anti-Durst)

Unfortunately Ethan isn't British and Dave Q only lives here, if memory serves.

Also I don't think Durst deserves 'defending' really but I think the tone of the attacks on him is very interesting.

Maybe Limp Bizkit's identification with mall culture (or the "normalcy" attributed to Durst by some posters) be more irksome to North American indie/punk/alt types, while that pose is still sort of exotic and interesting to Britons (as football hooligan types would be to North Americans)?

PLUS the only LB fan I know = 12/13, is v.bright and funny, v.unconfident abt his physical attractiveness towards gurliez, a total gentle sweetheart who has his own skatepunk metal band (who have a hilarious name which I have forgot) and lives in south london (last = obv. not his fault). Probably he isn't a fan any more: i last saw him wearing his LB T-short more than six months ago. But of course this wd prove durst's non-evil effect even better: fans can also grow up and walk away, and that's the point also.

Personally, I dislike Durst because, as Maura mentioned, he reminds me of every other frat-jock that I’ve ever hated. He also – along with George W. – puts a public face to these types, who run the patriarchal U.S. (Western?) society, usually unchecked in CEO’s offices, so I’d think that it’s natural when one of "these" people can be taken to task, they represent not just themselves but an entire paradigm. (And, obvious except it hasn’t been pointed out: Durst was embraced by U.S. corporate culture; Master P and Suge formed their own labels and companies.)

From way back: How is Durst "musically reaching out" except that he is embracing hip-hop in an era in which every other genre is doing the same, but Cobain is not? One dragged the Meat Puppets, Vaselines, Wipers, Raincoats, Pixies, and others into the spotlight; the other duets with Method Man for cred and with, I’d assume, "Supernatural"-style authenticity.

I (mistakenly) interpreted: Musically outreaching = Stretching the possibility of commercial, mainstream music (in the "outreach program" sense). A mistake made because my consideration of both was already in a commercial context, as that is unfortunately Cobain’s legacy to be certain and the original question suggests this. (Last night I was watching that "Merchants of Cool" documentary). So Durst v. Cobain = cling onto the Now to cement relevance v. attempt to expand the possibility of people’s musical literacy and tolerance for foreign sounds.

It’s Durst earning backslaps for his half-baked hip-hop/[insert genre here] marriage when many other rock, pop, R&B, UK garage artists are doing the same – and better – that is baffling. I suppose it's as much a mainstream media problem as anything else. When hip-hop informs (or even defines) Mariah or Aaliyah it somehow doesn't resonate or (better yet) it's expected; with rock it's still new and shocking. (NYT magazine finally had a rap-rock article earlier this year.)

Concerning indie: Too true, with rare exceptions (Dismemberment Plan, Beta Band, Super Furries) it is terribly willfully stranded in a punk/lo-fi neverworld.

"(And, obvious except it hasn’t been pointed out: Durst was embraced by U.S. corporate culture; Master P and Suge formed their own labels and companies.)"

I did. Scroll up.

i do think it's a valid point. but it's also pretty easy to shoot holes in as well. like i said, master p and the cash money boys version of indie is just as ruthlessly capitalist as any major labels; their interest in getting theirs is admirable in the face of record companies screwing over artists, but it's not as if their promoting anything different, just on a smaller scale.

If you say "X is bad because of [reason]", and somebody replies "But [reason] applies to Y too" when you haven't mentioned Y as bad or not...is that like an acceptable argument or not?

Because it strikes me that a lot of time is being spent here - by people incl. me - talking about people who are in some sense or other comparable to Fred Durst, and not so much time is being spent talking about some of the other stuff that has been said about Fred Durst.

The sexism for instance - I am on Maura's side here to a large extent although I would also like to see some evidence for the "embracing the date-rape ethos" claim.

If there are specific pro-daterape references in their lyrics, I'm not aware of them.

They're still vile.

This idea of a band being held responsible for creating a "violent envioronment" is very interesting to me. When I saw Nirvana a girl had her shirt ripped off while crowdsurfing in the pit. Me and another guy pulled her down and helped get her off to the side. The band stopped playing and Cobain told the audience to find the guy who did that to her and beat the shit out of him (it was actually lots of people that were pulling at her.) All the hopped-up teenagers were looking for somebody to hurt, and they didn't seem particular. It was VERY scary, and seemed like Cobain was being irresponsible for advising the crowd to deliver a group beat-down. Even if his heart was in the right place, the enviornment was downright violent.

As in your Nirvana experience, the crowd at the front was not too picky about who they chose to exact retribution on.

Dude! This is two threads I've read in a row where I'm brought up randomly. I like this sort of thing, though perhaps in the context of "hurting yourself classic or dud" section of posts it's not necessarily a great context for my name to be brought up. ;)

Anyhow. My stance is...well. I don't know how to explain my stance, which is a cop out. On the terms of Fred Durst, I don't think it's fair to blame him for the attitude of certain fans of Limp Bizkit. Fred Durst is an annoying, obnoxious person with a personality like wet mops. He's the kid in high school whom everyone hated and wouldn't stop following your group around even when you spewed verbal abuse towards him. He's the guy who doesn't realize that the Yankees wear blue, not red (which is so irritating - WEAR THE RIGHT COLOR GODDAMNIT, IT'S NOT A FASHION SHOW IT'S SPORT!). But I've never personally heard him say anything to debase women, nor have I heard a Limp Bizkit song that I found to be particularly negative towards women in the context of rock songs. I mean, we can go into semantics and argue whether or not Nookie is debasing towards women because it is objectifying them or something, but the reality is that Limp Bizkit really say nothing in their songs.

I just don't think that the sins of the followers should reflect on the person being followed if that person isn't actively endorsing the activity.

Comparing him to Eminem is ludicrious, for the record, because Eminem does endorse vile behavior in his songs. You can take his music and state that he is kidding or it's social commentary, and that's fine, but it's an equally fair point - if not a fairer point, just look at the amount of people who can't get sarcasm and/or pointed commentary online, not speaking of anyone in particular who defends Eminem tirelessly, mind - to state that by saying the things he says, he is endorsing them. It gets into icky territory that I don't necessarily like to comment on - I think Eminem's positions are vile at times (Kim is an inexcusable song in my mind, I'm sorry), but when it comes down to it if I thought more of his songs were good, I would listen to Eminem. As it is, I don't think he has that many good songs, so I do not.

Positions that I find irreconcilable with my own beliefs don't stop me from listening to music; I find quite a lot of Jay-Z's women ain't nothing but money grubbin' hos attitude (and by extention quite a lot of hip hop) just very awful to put forth, but the songs are really good and just feel more authentic to me, so I listen. I can separate the attitude from the rest and dissect them separately. My concern in this matter, which extends to Limp Bizkit's very unfocused anger as well, is that a lot of people don't dissect as such.

This is a very unfocused post, I am aware, because as I said I find this an extremely icky sticky issue, coming from my personal background. It's vile what happened at Woodstock '99. But I also think it's vile to blame Fred Durst for the occurences.

Oh, and on that taking sides, I'm definitely on the side of hurting yourself. Isn't that the classic drug/prostitution/whatever legalizing stance? "Who are they hurting but themselves?" Great line, great stance. You can hurt yourself wittily, but generally it's pretty damned hard. I can't think of as many ways to hurt others wittily, unless you're duelling to the pain or something. ;)

mark: I actually suspect that the decent LB fans are 12/13 or so. The problematic ones are the ones who don't outgrow it.

LB endorsing date rape? Not exactly, but they lyrics to "Nookie" certainly endorse a pretty ratty view of women.

Perhaps proving a point though, is that rap and rock are extremely different musical traditions, and foax have been attempting synthesis since mid-80s at least, and with rare and unique exceptions, failing. Also, rap and rock are very strong paradigms, with great incorparative power -- they can both assimilate all sorts of influences, but rarely have succeeded in assimilating one another. Thus the rap/rock fusion is both exciting in a way, but also fairly distant from the great body of both rap and rock music, relying on a sort of harsh melodically-lombotomized funk. Also, the rap/rock fusion seems to very anti-incorporative, at least right now, like I can't even imagine the way in which it will progress (which, assuming it does progress, is exciting in itself). So, uh. I dunno.

I'd like to see indie get more rap influence, but don't see it happening on the current musical terrain. ATDI found an emo-core fusion which was actually not all that distinct from the formula of the nu-metal acts.

I really don't think there's been enough time yet - you say '20 years' but really what counts is how long it's been OK to be influenced by rap. And since we're talking about a lotta very conservative (musically, in one sense) white boys...

Ironic that the post-punk threads are currently running, as I'd say PiL/Slits/Talking Heads/Pop Group and others managed to make a go of combining studied rock -- chord and notes/VCV -- with the more adventurous production, less rigid structure, and organization of sound rather than notes of disco, afrobeat, dub, reggae, and there is, as Josh hit on the head in his last post, no reason that hip-hop can't inform indie rock in a similar way. (See: Beta Band, Dismemberment Plan.)

Sorry to double post.

Because lo-fi is shite.

Okay, no, serious answer: it's not intrinsically better, it's just that a lot of people have a preference that leans towards hip-hop. Personally I just think it's better music. I like the beats, I like the flow, I like the production, I like the style. I like to dance, what can I say?

Both are somewhat 'pure' components of their genre in a way that syncopated beats or rave riffs can never be for hip hop (the one real hip hop joint LB have released - the one with Method Man - was basically a jaunty take on Wu-Tang, surprise surprise) - the latter group's musical lineage is too complicated.

What we're talking about therefore is an attempt by the band to sum up the 'spirit' of the two genres rather than explore simultaneously their musical possibilities. I'm thinking that this approach has tended to predominate over a post-punk type approach when it comes to mixing rock with rap. A good and contrasting example of a 'post-punk' attempt to combine elements of rock and rap would be Disco Inferno, right?

The problem is that it makes it much harder for, say, rock artists to produce anything meaningful by attempting to incorporate hip hop music into their template, because musically (commercial) hip hop is so amorphous. For example a white band trying to steal tricks from bounce would probably end up making synth pop (actually much of the Future Bible Heroes album sounds close to current hip hop IMHO). Which is why the bands end up going for the lame raps and the scratching, or occasionally will pillage a carefully limited and easily identifiable hip hop sound, the most obvious of which is RZA/Wu Tang style.

In Disco Inferno's case, I remember that Ian Crause's sampling approach was inspired by The Bomb Squad specifically, which is the sort of indirect hip hop influence that I think is more viable to indie/rock bands. The world does not need more white rock singers trying to rap.

*Which leads me to a thought on post-punk as referenced above: why were the original "post-punk" bands so much more adventurous than their descendants are now? Because twenty years ago it referred to a generational movement moving away from a punk sound in multiple directions, whereas now it refers to a more specific musical sound in stasis. The moment people started saying "that sounds like post-punk" as opposed to "that sound is no longer just punk", conceptual limits were placed on the movement's experimental scope. See also: post-rock.

when was the last time Durst was on a TV screen these days?

Conan O'Brian used a picture of Durst as a punchline last night.

-- Tom (ebro...), August 13th, 2001 5:00 PM. (link)

Great post!