Every once in a while, I’ll go back and watch music videos that were popular in the late 90s and early 2000s, and I say this with as little hyperbole as possible, but the wonderment I feel towards Limp Bizkit ever being one of the USA’s top music acts has to be similar to the way Germans feel about allowing the Nazis come to power, or that so many of their countrymen were complicit in the Holocaust. Fred Durst has since become a movie director and is soon to become CBS sitcom star, but his reunion with original Limp Bizkit guitarist Wes Borland didn’t go nearly as well, and the band recently got dropped from Interscope, the label they’d been with since 1997. It seems someone vastly overestimated how much we’d all be loving this sh*t right here.
At one time, Jacksonville’s Limp Bizkit could do no wrong. The band’s powerhouse album Significant Other debuted at #1 on Billboard‘s “Top 100 Albums” and sold in excess of 16 million copies around the world.
Even Limp Bizkit‘s poorly-received (and horribly titled) 2000 effort Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water is in the record books as the all-time fastest-selling rock album.
That would be the “The Guinness Book of Insanely-Depressing Statistics,” I’m guessing.
Now the one-time rap-rock heroes are music industry goats: the band’s latest studio album – Gold Cobra, released over the summer – has only managed to sell a measly 63,000 copies prompting a parting of the ways with Interscope, Bizkit’s longtime major-label imprint.
What’s even more shocking is the fact that Cobra was the first to feature the group’s original line-up since Starfish and it still failed to make even a pebble-sized dent.
For their part, the band is acting like this is good news.
“… Finally we have been able to get off our label and become independent,” frontman Fred Durst offered last month during an appearance on the Poolside With Dean Delray podcast.
“Poolside with Dean Delray.” My God, that name sounds exactly like the kind of podcast Fred Durst would be on. I feel like I have to put sunscreen on my sleeve tattoos just typing it.
So what’s next for the group? Touring in other countries where the band’s legacy is better appreciated, according to Durst.
“We do very, very good on our touring, and we mainly tour outside the United States,” said Durst. “It seems like in the United States, man, they’re waiting on a song, they’re waiting on a hit, and the rest of the world doesn’t necessarily operate that way; they’re, sort of, career people.” [SunshineSlate]
My favorite part of this story was the album cover for Gold Cobra. Holy hell get a load of this thing:
My God, the crude artwork, the lazy, idiotic innuendo…. (“So you see, the girls with the bikinis and tramp stamps have the hots for this obvious phallic symbol, which you’ll be able to tell by their tongues hanging out and panting like dogs…”) it’s like they weren’t even trying. It doesn’t look like a Limp Bizkit album cover so much as the hand-painted cover of a Belarussian knock-off of a Limp Bizkit album cover.
[Thanks to Eibmoz for the tip]