The “fucking boring” band that Taylor Hawkins said ruined rock music
All of rock music was rattled the moment it was announced that Taylor Hawkins had passed away. The Foo Fighters drummer contributed a great deal to rock and was always adamant about keeping the genre exciting.
The next album that the Foo Fighters revealed following the passing of Hawkins, unsurprisingly, had many themes of loss and mourning attached to it. The record, But Here We Are, and one of the album’s leading singles, ‘Under You’, was dedicated to Hawkins and Dave Grohl’s mother, both of whom passed the same year.
I like to think that Hawkins would have loved this song. There were, without a doubt, many connections made to the difficult feelings of grief that come when you lose a loved one, but the album also wasn’t one which held back in what Foo Fighters (particularly Hawkins) championed, which was great rock music. The lyrics were incredibly sweet, but it was also undeniably a rock album, and it’s nice to think that Hawkins will have heard that record and adored it.
The drummer was never afraid to give his opinion about the music he liked and didn’t like. As is often the case with rock stars, if you asked him a question about an exciting element of rock music or a band making moves at a specific time, he was always happy to dish out both praise and scorn, depending on what he saw as appropriate. He did this when he was asked about Limp Bizkit, as he had strong opinions about the nu metal band and what they were doing to rock music as a whole.
Around the turn of the millennium, music found itself in an interesting state. Britpop had come to an end, and the birth of the indie boom and Meet Me in the Bathroom era of music was yet to come into force. People were looking for innovation, and it came in the form of nu metal, which was a strange blend of rock and rap music. There were a lot of bands making such music, but one of the most popular was Limp Bizkit.
It wasn’t necessarily that Hawkins was against the genre as a whole; rather, he was growing tired of bands who seemed to take to the stage in a bid to deliver an energetic performance but not try to sound good musically. Foo Fighters always found a line down the middle, where they made good music but also delivered it in an exciting way. Meanwhile, the musician felt that a lot of nu metal bands, particularly Limp Bizkit, didn’t care about making good music.
“Maybe I would have liked them when I was 14, but I like to think not,” said Hawkins. He tried to be charitable but ended up feeling vexed, noting, “There’s room for everything and somebody likes it, so that’s great. But do I like white guys jumping around rapping? No, I don’t. A lot of bands have got tons of energy, but they’ve got no songs. Or they’re just boring like the Goo Goo Dolls or whatever! I mean, what happened? Every band just looks like a fucking boy band now. It’s fucking boring.”
