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Fred Durst’s Bizkit go limp while the Darkness shine
BY CARLY CARIOLI
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If this past summer’s Metallica-headlined "Summer Sanitarium" tour told us anything other than that Metallica still have a little gas in the tank, it was that people just don’t like Fred Durst. For a number of years, the Limp Bizkit frontman was insulated from this wide-ranging contempt by a significant throng of Bizkitheads who reveled in his angry-white-fratboy angst and drove his albums — the ones by Limp Bizkit as well as the ones he masterminded behind the scenes by Staind and Puddle of Mudd — to the top of the pop charts. But lately, even the Bizkit faithful have begun to rebel. On October 8, just before the release of Limp Bizkit’s fourth studio album, Results May Vary (Interscope), 172 fans filed suit against the band in response to Durst’s bravura performance during the July 26 Summer Sanitarium tour stop in Chicago. According to the complaint, Durst was met on stage with a hail of boos, at least partly in response to a series of "obscene and profane messages to the crowd [displayed] via four giant monitors." He’s alleged to have retaliated with a stream of "disgusting homophobic and anti-gay statements" at the audience; after that, we’re told, he "became increasingly hostile and . . . insulted all in the crowd and the City of Chicago repeatedly and without end for the duration of Limp Bizkit’s brief time on stage." He left 17 minutes into the band’s scheduled 90-minute opening slot but kept his mike with him and continued baiting the audience from backstage, at one point screaming "a challenge to members of the audience to come and fight him." The career of Limp Bizkit will likely be bookended by two events: their arrival, in 1999 at Woodstock, an event marred by charges that a female fan was raped during the band’s set, and their Waterloo, at Summer Sanitarium, with Durst calling his fans a bunch of faggots. All told, Limp Bizkit may turn out to have been the worst thing to happen to rock and roll, ever. Although it may be too soon to put the final nail in Durst’s coffin, the 250,000 copies Results May Vary sold in its first week were half what the group’s previous album, Chocolate St*rfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water, sold its first week back in 2000. The Chicago debacle was only the most extreme example of what seemed to have become a running firefight between Durst and the audiences at the biggest party on the summer metal social calendar. In interviews conducted in Summer Sanitarium parking lots as part of an MTV documentary about the making of Results May Vary, fans were asked their opinions of Limp Bizkit, and the responses ranged from outright contempt at worst to at best sneers that the band had been better before original guitarist Wes Borland exited. At Foxboro Stadium just after Independence Day, Durst was almost booed off stage: what began as his good-natured response to a few comments about his choice of headgear (a Yankees cap) grew into an all-out war between him and a stadium full of hecklers. It didn’t help that the band’s set was unremittingly weak and based mostly on covers — Metallica’s "Welcome Home (Sanitarium)," their signature version of George Michael’s "Faith," and a long and pointless vamp on an old Ministry riff. The oddest moment came toward the end, when the band left the stage and Durst performed a version of the Who’s "Behind Blue Eyes" to a karaoke track while perched on a hot-dog stand at the back of the arena while a young fan waved an oversize American flag. "Behind Blue Eyes" is the centerpiece of Results May Vary, an album three years in the making that at one point was to have been called Panty Sniffer. The song is among the Who’s finest ballads, but it tends not to get covered much — perhaps because the first-person narrator is so unlikable. Sung from the point of view of a reviled and remorseless wretch who sulks in his own self-loathing while blaming the rest of the world for his lot in life, "Behind Blue Eyes" was written by Pete Townshend for what was envisioned as a sci-fi rock opera to follow Tommy; that effort drove Townshend to a nervous breakdown and was never completed, though pieces of it were reworked for Who’s Next. The few artists who have ventured a version (Sheryl Crow, the Chieftains) usually present it as a character song where the defenseless anti-hero’s plea for sympathy is darker even than the Stones’ "Sympathy for the Devil." Durst may be the only person artless enough to treat it as straight autobiography. It may seem odd to accuse the author of "Nookie" and the interpreter of "Faith" of being too earnest, but in a song about revenge sex and a reworking of a camp classic about gay coupling, he proved the great leveler of heavy-metal angst, compressing irony and ecstasy, rock and rap, into a flat-line boorishness that for all its cartoonish lunkheadedness seemed to take itself far too seriously. In the post-grunge era, Korn and Limp Bizkit and their new-metal and rap-metal followers reconfigured metal into a woe-is-me medium. In the ’80s, the prototypical metal ailments were going crazy and committing suicide — as in Metallica’s "Welcome Home (Sanitarium)," where listeners identify with the plight of someone driven insane by the madness of a corrupt, doomed world on the brink of holocaust. Bizkit, on the other hand, inaugurated the "Anger Management Tour," which was savvy in making reference to court-mandated self-help for overzealous bullies. On "Eat You Alive," the first single from Results May Vary, Durst realizes his most misogynist portrait yet: the title and the chorus come off as less sexual than cannibalistic as he focuses his rage on an object of his affection who won’t return his advances. It’s a number that seems destined to become the standard themesong for stalkers and domestic-abuse perpetrators. There’s rampant speculation that it was inspired by his dalliance with Britney Spears; when he couldn’t parlay a production gig on her album into a romance, he savaged her in radio interviews. Since then, he’s been working out his crushes on video: for the disturbing rape-fantasy video for "Eat You Alive," he got Thora Birch to play a girl who after being abducted and tortured comes to love her attacker. More recently, he spooned with Halle Berry in the "Behind Blue Eyes" clip. Durst wears a tattoo of Kurt Cobain on his chest, and though you’d be hard-pressed to find two men with less in common, it makes for a compelling image. Kurt was the guy who succeeded where past alternative pioneers like Sonic Youth and R.E.M. and Jane’s Addiction had failed: he transformed punk into rock and roll’s official faith, and in doing so he relegated heavy metal (and all that it stood for) to rock’s version of original sin. Guilt has been the operative component of metal as a pop pleasure ever since, and the rap metal of Durst’s design would’ve been unthinkable without that guilt. Out went metal’s flamboyance, its camp, its androgyny; in came the normal-guy stage garb, the boy’s-club shout-alongs, the frat-hop posturing. The bonehead audiences driving alterna-rock sales figures, the ones indie-rockers were always warning us about, were out there in droves; and Durst knew what they wanted. But at Summer Sanitarium, the tide shifted: after a decade of drab new metal, there are finally signs that metal as a guiltless pleasure — metal that rejects the all-consuming seriousness and stodginess of grunge and embraces the silliness and exuberance of metal’s past — is on the rise. Andrew W.K. brought back the music’s flamboyant show-tune gestures and its wide-eyed Meatloafish grandeur while at the same time parodying new metal’s clichés in songs about partying (and partying, and then partying some more) and turning the enthusiasm knob on his Tony Robbins–like self-help mantras up to 11. If his new The Wolf has not had quite the impact of his debut, I Get Wet (both Island/Def Jam), that’s not for lack of great songs. Maybe it’s just that the objects of his satire are less in evidence. Meanwhile, lurid, gaudy heavy metal is out of the closet again thanks to the Darkness, an English quartet who’ve been compared with Queen and Judas Priest, though frontman Justin Hawkins’s Freddie Mercury worship has less to do with his singing than with his unitard. In the same way that the Strokes and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs have gripped the imagination as a "sonic souvenir" from a time when NYC rock and roll was "grittier and artier, and perhaps [its] motives seemed purer," as the New York Times’ Jon Pareles opined recently, the Darkness are the latest, and the goofiest, in a recent spate of bands who’ve peeled back the innovations of the ’90s to get at the unreconstructed metal of the ’70s and ’80s. (They’re an Anglicized version of Detroit’s Electric Six, whose "Gay Bar" and "Danger! High Voltage" returned the sound of Sweet to the airwaves earlier this year.) Hawkins has the best balls-in-a-vise hard-rock falsetto to make the airwaves since Axl Rose’s heyday, but his models are even older and less imitated: on the Darkness’s debut, Permission To Land (Atlantic), they revive the translucent, anthemic pop metal of AC/DC, Journey, Foreigner, and Night Ranger. On the disc’s breakaway single, "Get Your Hands Off My Woman," Hawkins’s high-singing, tumescent flutter could pass for Loverboy’s Mike Reno attempting a Styx melody, and the riff comes directly from Urge Overkill’s "Sister Havana." And the disc’s triptych, "I Believe in a Thing Called Love," the Scorpions-like ballad "Love Is Only a Feeling," and "Love on the Rocks with No Ice," may do for metal’s matters of the heart what Andrew W.K. did for matters of the keg. It’s symptomatic of new metal’s long reach that the Darkness are being misinterpreted as a spoof — but after a long winter of new metal’s grave discontent, it’s refreshing to find someone recalling a time when metal’s brilliance was not so easily separated from its folly.
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