A Look Back: Limp Bizkit Significant Other

A look back - Limp Bizkit Significant Other

“You wanted the worst?  You got the worst.  The one, the only Limp Bizkit.”

Intro

“Shut the fuck up.”

N 2 gether Now

“Like a chump. HEY! Like a chump. HEY! Like a chump. HEY! Like a chump.  HEY!”

“I did it all for the nookie k’mon the nookie k’mon.  So you can take that cookie and stick it up your yeah stick it up your yeah stick up your…”

Nookie

Ah the lyrical genius that is Fred Durst.  With such insightful and thought provoking lyrics and such expert delivery it’s a shock both rap and rap/rock was able to survive.  Seriously though play that “Like a chump” part over and over and try to tell yourself your cd is not skipping.  I always thought “stick it up your YEAH” was put in there for the radio edit but believe it or not that is the actual lyric.  There is some ambiguity about where he wants the female subject of this song to stick that cookie.  What cookie?  Is it a euphemism for something?  Up her ass?  Up her vagina?  Up her mouth?  Kinda makes cookies sound less appetizing doesn’t it?

When I started writing this I sent a frustrated text message to my brother

ME: So I’m gonna be starting a new segment on my blog about all the music I used to listen to back in the day.  I’ve been listening to Limp Bizkit.  LIMP BIZKIT!  This totally sucks and I hate myself.

MY BRAH: Lol… gotta have faith, a faith, aaaah faaaith!

ME: More like nookie I never listened to 3 Dolla Bill Yall$

MY BRAH: Their worst album hands down was Chocolate Starfish and Hotdog Flavored Water.

ME: I dunno dude saying there’s a worst Limp Bizkit album is like saying at least the hooker who gave me herpes was hotter than the one that gave me crabs.

MY BRAH: LOL!

Last time I talked about Korn’s Family Values Tour and this next band was another popular addition to that tour and one I’m sure many of the people myself included are now ashamed that we listened to.  I am of course talking about Limp Bizkit or the reason why rap and rock don’t really fuse together all that well.  As I remember the only album they had out at the time was Three Dollar Bill, Yall$(uhhh yeah that was actually the name of the album and if you think that’s stupid you’ve never heard Hot Dog off their third LP) and the only single was a cover of George Michael’s Faith accompanied by the music video which featured Tour footage from the Family Values Tour.  Even though some of my friends owned that album it was never popular and I never saw anyone actually listening to it.  Even Limp Bizkit fans didn’t really like it at the time(but that didn’t stop it from going double platinum somehow).  Their next album, Significant Other, was different; everybody including yours truly loved it.

This album suffers from the same lyrical themes as the orgy album did(only put in a less eloquent way) and I’m starting to think that if you judged us entirely by the music we listened to you’re bound to think we were a very shallow, illiterate, and selfish generation.  Just to put it in perspective 6 out of the 12 songs on this album are about women that wronged Fred Durst and how he is very upset with them(I added Break Stuff because it’s all about the he said she said bullshit and I think that’s what forced Durst to become so mad he wanted to “Break Stuff”).  Musically it’s not that interesting either.  The songs start off with a beat, change for a chorus, wash, rinse and repeat.  A lot of rap takes a 4 or 5 second beat and loops it through the entire song.  Limp Bizkit does the same but the difference is Fred Durst is backed by an entire band and a dj.

The worst song on this album is “N 2 gether Now(sic) featuring Method Man.  I remember seeing the music video and it was the second part of a two part video and the lyrics were so graphic half the damned vocals were chopped up.  To get an idea of just how bad it is the lyric “Shut the fuck up” is uttered continuously throughout the song.  

I better stop listening to this shit before I go shopping for red flexfit hats and khakis.  The reason Limp Bizkit is so bad is not any one person’s fault.  The reason Limp Bizkit is so bad is because it’s so disposable.  There’s a time and a place for everything and some bands like Aerosmith, Rolling Stones, The Who, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, and Black Sabbath are timeless, Limp Bizkit is not.  Thirty years down the line do you really expect anybody to remember Limp Bizkit or their music in a positive way or any way for that matter?  Limp Bizkit’s music isn’t relevant to a specific era, or politics, or even a subject.  The majority of their lyrics centers on Fred Durst and his problems and are you going to give a crap about them in 10 or so years?   Does their music have memorable hooks or riffs?  Is there anything special about it at all?  The only personal problem Durst ever had that was interesting was having an alleged sexual relationship with Britney Spears and her lying about it because she didn’t want to be associated with a horny dirtbag, but even then it’s not interesting enough to write a song about (which is exactly what he did).  If you ask me they both acted childish about the whole affair but that’s neither here nor there.  Durst sucks, Spears sucks, Limp Bizkit sucks, and this album sucks.  A lot of rap nowadays seems to revolve around bragging about your skills be it professional or sexual, bragging about yourself, your money, or your possessions, and a lot of rap/rock is just the same only most of the time it’s got a white guy doing it.

I wouldn’t say the worst thing about this album is the bad lyrics or repetitive music.  What pisses me off is it reminds me of all the bad or inappropriate relationships I’ve been in.  Unlike most rap artists Durst doesn’t have a chauvinistic approach to women he simply doesn’t trust them and I can’t say I blame him.  Out of all the people in my life the ones that have caused me the most amount of pain and torment are women.  A man can bruise me, scar me, and break my bones but that shit heals.  I guess from that standpoint I can understand Limp Bizkit’s music but just because I understand it doesn’t mean I have to like it and I don’t.  At least not anymore.  This music just isn’t relevant to me anymore because I’ve grown up and can deal with these heartbreaks.  In this ever changing world we live in Fred Durst can’t get past the idea that a woman pulled the wool over his eyes and did what men have done to women for centuries. 

No more ironic words have ever been spoken than that uttered by Matt Pinfield on the outro:

“What the world needs now is a is a musical revolution.  We need some rock, we need something that has balls.  We need something with substance, depth, something with soul, some edge, some passion, some power.  Shit if it's going to be mellow, fuck man it had better have something, it had better mean something.  I'm telling, you gotta hit 'em with something hard, you gotta stick 'em with something Limp, like Limp Bizkit”

Yeah no part of me thinks this wasn’t scripted.

And don't think I haven't forgotten their terrible cover of Metallica's Welcome Home(Sanitarium) that Durst for whatever reason turned into a more personal statement.  But as bad as that was it wasn't nearly as embarrassing as Avril Lavigne covering Fuel.

A Look Back: Orgy Candyass

A look back – Orgy Candyass

“Dumb dumb dizzy dizzy dumb dumb dizzy dizzy dumb dumb dizzy dizzy dumb dumb”

Dizzy

“What's behind your painted face can you see the real pig in the mirror?”

Fiend

“If it stayed I'd never leave it. If that turned around I'd grieve the special dirty things that we used to talk about. I mean that loving you is strange and adored by me throughout.”

Stitches

Hmmmm I wonder if these lyrics are about women.  I think I heard somewhere that Jay Gordon, frontman for Orgy, is bisexual so in the interest of sexual as well as gender equality I guess it could be about a guy too.

Wow just look at these guys.  I'm gonna play cranky old man here but I really don't think five grown men should be wearing more makeup than the average corner prostitute.  Looking at this photo I can't help but think these guys were selling an image.

I stumbled across an old boombox and in it was a blank tape.  I played a minute of it just out of curiosity and then pushed the stopped button.  What came out was some awful sounding alt punk shit that I later found out from my brother was AFI(the tape used to belong to him).  When we were talking about it he said he made it sometime during high school and I told him, “Yeah man I don’t really dig the same shit I used to listen to in high school either.  I mean it’s not like I listen to Korn at all anymore.”  This discussion gave me an idea for a segment I could run on my blog where I look at all the stupid crap I used to listen to when I didn’t know any better because it was popular among teenagers that hated life and everything and yet despite their misanthropy and apathy felt alienated from the world even though that was the cause of it in the first place.  There’s stuff I used to listen to like Metallica that is ageless and I still listen to but there’s also a bunch of shit that I haven’t listened to since I graduated high school and with good reason.

                When I was in 9^th or 10^th grade Korn embarked on The Family Values Tour which showcased a lot of bands most of the Korn community either hadn’t heard of or didn’t get much airplay.  One of these bands was Orgy.  I had a lot of friends that went to this concert but seeing as I was underage and poor and my mother wouldn’t be caught dead at a Korn concert I was one of the few that didn’t show up wearing a Family Values Tour t-shirt the next day.  But my friends were going crazy over this band called Orgy that they saw there.  Later on the band’s singles were released as music videos on MTV and their popularity reached the mainstream’s and my attention.  Soon after they started getting radio play and you couldn’t escape that Blue Monday remix.  I didn’t even know it was a remix until I heard the original in the Wedding Singer.  By the time their second album was released interest in the band ceased.  Like before they released videos and singles to the radio but no one cared.  None of my friends who were self-professed Orgy fans a short 2 years early felt obligated to get the second album.  A lot of the popular music back then was rather disposable and we just moved on to the next big thing or whomever else toured with Korn.

                There’s a track on here called “All the Same” which is a pretty apt metaphor for this album.  Musically it is very different from most of the stuff at the time but lyrically it’s the same as everything else.  Let me ask you a question, what is more self-indulgent than an entire album devoted to bitching or whining about one relationship or another gone wrong?  Unfortunately this was a problem that reached across every musical genre at the time.  I think this was the very reason I started listening to alternative, hard rock, and heavy metal in the first place.  However well designed or intellectual your lyrics and no matter how well you sing them you still come off as a whiny cunt.  That’s why even though I think Adele’s got an amazing voice I can’t help but think she’s a one note artist because the content of all her songs seem to revolve around men that mistreated her.  The only time this does work is in blues but that’s because blues is a music defined by its own misery.

               

                Enough about the lyrical content how bout the music?  The music for the most part is good and also quite diverse.  The tempos rise and fall throughout the album creating different moods.  There are songs on this album that I can imagine a trendy yet tragically(and fashionably) depressed teenage outcast(Track 1 Social Enemies), some poor goofball trying to get into some dumbass’s pants at a dance club(Track 7 Blue Monday), and the goth crowd(Track 2 Stitches).

                I’ve been a little harsh about the lyrics or should I say theme of this album but after listening to it a few times ignoring the clichéd lyrics it’s very listenable.  I give Orgy’s Candyass a 78 C.  It’s not terrible but my interest in music, my personality, and maturity, has surpassed my need for this kind of music.  A large portion of this album is devoted to relationships and at the time I bought it I was barely interested in girls and had never been in a serious relationship.  The truth is even now I wish more bands were musically similar to Orgy on this album.

Blue Monday - This actually isn't a bad song and whatever I may say about this album I still love this cover.  That's not to say that I don't prefer New Order's version.

 This here is least visually appealing video I've ever seen.  The point of most music videos are the same as the singles released to radio stations.  It's to promote forthcoming albums or ones that have been recently released.  Music videos are designed to offer something artistic, sexy, or visually pleasing to those singles so you can reach wider audiences... or at least I think that's what they're for.  This one however just has the band playing in a motorized cube while the director looks at lyrics and points at stuff.  I can't believe he got paid to make this video.  I bet that asshole was laughing all the way to the bank.