That said, it seems strange to argue that there was nothing political about a bunch of overheated, dehydrated kids with no access to water, shade or hygiene for days on end setting fire to ATMs and scrawling “FUCK GREED” on upturned burning luxury cars. “Take your Birkenstocks and stick ‘em up your fucking ass”. “This is 1999 motherfucker!” Durst shouts midway through their set when asked by the organisers to calm the crowd down as they began ripping up infrastructure. a flower-crown wearing crowd committed to peace, love and harmony. It’s not hard to unfavourably compare Woodstock ’99 to its hippy predecessor: a cultural wasteland of apathetic pissed-up testosterone fuelled young men concerned only with tits and beer vs. The footage from Woodstock ’99 tries its hardest to make the crowd at their set look scary, but for a nu-metal fan who came of age in the early 00s, my main takeaway was that I would have given anything to be there losing my shit to “Break Stuff”. No-one is claiming a band who released an album called Chocolate Starfish and the Hotdog Flavored Water are High Art, but there is no denying that watching Limp Bizkit perform live is the stuff mosher dreams are made of. Do they have a back catalogue of incredibly fun and dumb songs that go the fuck off when performed live? Yes. Is Fred Durst particularly good at singing, “rapping”, or writing lyrics? No, no, and fuck no. Are they well-structured? Not especially. The longer answer is defined by what metrics you use to define “good”.Īre the songs clever? No. ![]() ![]() This has culminated in a reappraisal of the band’s legacy, with people watching the footage from both festivals and asking themselves… ‘wait, are Limp Bizkit actually good?’ The short answer to this question is quite simply: yes, obviously. Mostly forgotten about or used as a punchline for the last 10+ years, the degenerate poster-boys of nu-metal are back in the zeitgeist due to the double whammy of a new HBO documentary about the corporate greed-fuelled shitshow that was Woodstock ’99, and a performance at last weekend’s Lollapalooza festival. NME named it “the worst genre of music ever” in 2013, with critics such as world’s-most-annoying-vegan Moby claiming it eschewed the art and politics of both rock and hip hop and instead “embraced the troglodyte elements”. In serious music circles, nu-metal’s legacy is mostly one of derision and ridicule: a cultural low-point devoid of any taste or meaning, beloved by angry suburban white boys dressed in comically oversized jeans that was uniquely offensive to women.
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