Why did Trent Reznor even bother to write a diss track about Limp Bizkit?
For all my fellow Gen Z readers learning about the prehistoric age of the 1990s, the beef between Limp Bizkit and Trent Reznor is basically the millennial equivalent of Kendrick Lamar versus Drake.
You could definitely tell they were American because this fight was nothing like the rivalry between Oasis and Blur, which had played out a few short years prior to the shock and awe of the entire country within these aisles. Where the great Britpop battle of 1995 revolved around a few choice words and perhaps the odd threat of physical violence, our transatlantic counterparts had clearly learned nothing from this showdown blueprint.
Instead, they decided to write a diss track. In some ways, the more you look at it, the more you realise that the tensions between Limp Bizkit and Reznor really were pretty similar to what we see now in the rap and hip-hop worlds, not least with Lamar and Drake. Yes, in a lot of ways, old habits die hard, but it just proves that nothing is really ever dramatic if we’ve seen it rehashed time and time before.
The feud began not with any sort of personal skirmish, but simply because Reznor voiced the fact that he thought the rise of nu-metal in the late ‘90s, in turn with Limp Bizkit’s frontman Fred Durst as the poster boy, was a bit low-brow compared to his own stratospheric standards. But as with all things involving bravado in music, this soon escalated into something far more histrionic on both sides – and neither one was going to let it go.
After a few bruising sentiments were exchanged, not least from Reznor who said of Durst in light of his infamous performance at Woodstock ‘99: “Let Fred Durst stick a piece of plywood up my ass.” This subsequently kind of opened the floodgates for the diss track battle to begin. Reznor delivered the first punch of sorts, when he took aim at the entire music industry and Durst in particular in the video for ‘Starfuckers Inc’, where he smashed a plate with his enemy’s face on it.
Clearly, Limp Bizkit felt it was right to fire back with all guns blazing. They did so in the form of ‘Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavoured Water’, fit with the lyrics of “a nine-inch nail’ll get knocked the f*** out” and an interpolation of the rival band’s mega-hit, ‘Closer’. Of course, the overarching question in all of this is simply ‘why?’. The answer, in a lot of ways, is that’s just the world of rock and roll.
At the end of the day, Limp Bizkit and Nine Inch Nails are cut from entirely different cloths and represented totally opposing ends of the spectrum as far as the fractious ‘90s music scene. Any hint of the next big thing and audiences moving along was always bound to get the big dogs’ – in this case, Reznor’s – back up, but choosing to play it out in the manner they did is simply a matter of style over substance.
They say the American dream had died long ago by this point, but was that really true when they were still vying for the Stateside crown?
