The heartbreaking letter Limp Bizkit received before 9/11
For anyone currently in their mid-30s, casting their mind back to the socio-political climate of their formative years and retrospectively analysing its generational effects triggers a bleak rolling film of millennial underwhelm, ‘end of history’ economic stasis, and the terrifying chain of global events triggered by the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks and its disastrous conclusion in the Iraq War.
As Flower Power burnt draft papers in defiance of Vietnam, and the punks challenged class barriers both musically and socially, who were our crusaders stepping up to articulate post-1990s anxiety and War on Terror’s pernicious paranoia?
Well, not much, at least for the ‘kids’. While Radiohead was crafting some of their finest material, critiquing the UK-US foreign policy alliance and New Labour’s corporate wallow (less vociferous on Gaza now, though), nu-metal was storming the charts, a polished, glossy fusion of hip-hop and heavy metal that delighted every suburban teen and reviled by every old-school metalhead who had the misfortune of hearing Linkin Park’s cover of Nine Inch Nails’ ‘Wish’. While there are contenders for the high priest of nu-metal, the genre’s crowning royalty has to go to the ‘motherfuckers from Jacksonville’, Limp Bizkit.
Named after the sexual practice of ejaculating onto a biscuit and promptly eating it, incisive political commentary perhaps was asking for a lot from frontman Fred Durst’s juvenile, stroppy rap attack. To be fair to ’em, after the departure of the lead guitarist Wes Borland, they knocked their heads together for 2005’s The Unquestionable Truth (Part 1), a heavier EP that touched on propaganda and terrorism. Just as Durst teased with some reach for challenging material, in comes 2011’s Gold Cobra as if nothing had happened, replacing their ‘part two’ with another belly flop into chugging, oafish party metal.
As Limp Bizkit’s magnum-opus Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavoured Water was riding high in the charts and ‘Rollin’ was played every five minutes on the cable music channels, the devastating New York terror attacks that struck on September 11th, 2001, ushered a grim, new chapter in hawkish, neocon destabilisation, its effects still felt today. Masterminded by Al-Qaeda following attacks on a US Embassy and navy warship in the Middle East and executed by 19 volunteers primarily from Saudi Arabia, the attack claimed nearly 3,000 lives before hundreds of thousands more were killed in the resulting Coalition invasion.
Limp Bizkit’s connection to the WTC was a close one. Shooting atop the skyscraper’s roof for their VMA Award-winning ‘Rollin’ video a year before the attacks, Durst spoke to MTV in 2001: “We received a letter the day before the attack from the World Trade Center thanking us for letting them be a part of a video that just won an award. I had it framed. I found it very ironic, very bizarre that I received that letter on Monday, and Tuesday the attacks occurred. For me to have gotten to go to the top of such a great, powerful structure … to have those people embrace me and let Limp Bizkit spend 22 hours on top of the World Trade Center doing what we do. And for it to be taken down?”
It’s certainly an eerie anecdote and must have affected the band. It’s also fitting that Limp Bizkit of all bands share such a distinguished relationship with the Twin Towers, being one of only two bands to have performed on its rooftop — the other being a lip-synced ‘Enjoy the Silence’ by Depeche Mode for French TV in 1990. Soundtracking the innocence and apolitical complacency of a moment still luxuriating in post-Cold War triumphalism and oblivious to what awaited, Limp Bizkit’s dice with the WTC feels entirely apt and serves as a strangely fitting cultural relic from that era.
