If you are unfamiliar with the sharp rise and steep decline of angry American rap/rock of the late 90s/early 00s, I simultaneously am in awe of, and feel sorry for, you. It was a weird time: people dressed in velour tracksuits, bright pink newsboy caps, and a lot of denim, and also the word “terrorism” entered the American vocabulary. We got into a war, but only kinda according the the US government, but with the boom of the Internet things that would have been secret in earlier conflicts were suddenly much more easily accessible. And some people got really mad.
Popular music at the time was all over the place, but teen pop specifically dominated (at least that’s how I remember it), and to music purists that was just the last fucking straw. And so Limp Bizkit was born.
Actually, no, that’s not their origin story, but that’s how I like to think it happened. I do, however, remember bands like Limp Bizkit constantly talking shit about bubblegum pop while likely jacking off to Britney’s Rolling Stone cover every night, so it seemed like without manufactured pop, nu metal wouldn’t have ever existed. Or at least they would have had a lot less to be pissed about.
In reality, Limp Bizkit formed in 1994 in where else but Florida, and according to Wikipedia, they wanted to repel people with their band name, reasoning that, “The name is there to turn people’s heads away. A lot of people pick up the disc and go, ‘Limp Bizkit. Oh, they must suck.’ Those are the people that we don’t even want listening to our music,” and that sort of just sums up their whole thing.
Amongst all the strange rap rock that they put out, my favorite song, and possibly their most popular, was a cover of George Michael’s “Faith.”
I could write you a whole post about why this is genius, but I’ll spare you.
All this is to say that sometimes nostalgic radio stations will throw on “Faith” or “Nookie” or if you’re really lucky “Rollin” and when that happens I always ask the same question: What’s Fred Durst up to these days?
Because I really can’t imagine a Fred Durst existing outside of 2001 with his backwards baseball cap, soul patch, and constant middle finger flashing. Some musicians evolve with the time, some musicians even make time evolve around them, but then there are those that are a product of and so heavily defined by an era that there just seems to be no way they’re living a normal, modern life somewhere. Fred Durst grocery shopping at Whole Foods? Fred Durst swiping through 30 photos of himself for the perfect Instagram selfie? Fred Durst Tweeting his thoughts on the Game of Thrones finale? Impossible!
So I fucking looked it up.
He’s made some movies, been divorced three times, scared the entire country of Ukraine into banning him and his music from entering the country, and gone vegan. And after all that, the band came off hiatus
Limp Bizkit is apparently touring and preparing to release a new album as soon as Freddie feels he’s been given the right message from God or whatever. At least I’m pretty sure that’s what he’s saying in this Loudwire interview. I’m sure that message will be something like “stick this up your ass.”
But even more interesting is his actual foray into The Gram and the Twitterverse. Fred joined Twitter in 2009, but only has one Tweet, likely due to old ones being purged, but I like to imagine he used Twitter only once, five years after he joined, just to retweet this:
I followed him immediately.
But perhaps even more perplexing is his Instagram which appears to solely be photos of station wagons. Aesthetically, it’s fucking great, but brand-wise? If you showed me this, I would never in a million years guess this belonged to Mr. Durst. And even if you showed me this video he has posted there, that would give me no clues:
Is this even him? I don’t fucking know!
I also followed this immediately.
But I think most exciting might be the fact he’s made a movie starring John Travolta that looks like it might just be Misery:
And look, I know Travolta is a crazy Scientologist and BattleField Earth…exists, but my god, do I want to see this. I mean, I think it actually looks good. Is that possible? There’s only one way to find out. I’ll see you on the other side, Dear Reader.
#calipoopbags
A.K. Caggiano 
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