Fred Durst & Post-Irony
Anyone who grew up in North America in the 1990s knows who William Frederick Durst is. It is possibly also the case if you grew up in Europe at the same time. He’s one of these public figures who was extremely popular until he wasn’t. His band Limp Bizkit dominated the charts and inspired my generation to a polite and harmless rebellion that more or less consisted of breaking stuff and listening to his music.
To most mortals, Limp Bizkit disappeared sometime around 2004 after their fourth album Results May Vary BOMBED with critics and audiences alike. People were just tired of their shit.
The world had moved on to other (less interesting) things like The Strokes and whatnot.
If you ask anyone in the street to name the two albums they’ve released in 2005 and 2011, they probably couldn’t tell you. I didn’t remember they existed until checking out their Wikipedia page for this article. The Unquestionable Truth (Part 1) and Gold Cobra (although I remember seeing this one at Walmart) could’ve not existed and it wouldn’t change anything about the way people remember Limp Bizkit or think about them in any way. Their once visceral connection with teenage anger was now a cultural non-event. No one who once cared about them wanted to break stuff anymore.
There were two ways Fred Durst could’ve gone from there. He could’ve chosen to lead Limp Bizkit in the legacy phase of their career, tour with Korn, Hed P.E or whatever for the rest of their lives and make good money signing Nookie and Counterfeit to aging, nostalgic BBQ dads. He could’ve also reinvented himself and used his built-in celebrity to usher a second, more earnest act to his career. I thought it was the direction Durst headed after releasing the clumsy, but not uninteresting The Fanatic in 2019. Somehow, Fred Durst chose neither of these two options. Instead, he ushered in the second act of Limp Bizkit’s career, which is super duper weird.
The problem with post-irony is that it’s not fun (or meaningful)
In 2021, Fred Durst deleted all his previous photos from his Instagram account and uploaded the photo I used in the header without giving any context whatsoever.
I usually love when celebrities do that. Durst was obviously teasing a new project and this look was just outlandish enough to make people speculate whether he was shitting us or not. If he played his cards right and teased us some more for a couple weeks, it could’ve been a bigger story than it was. But Fred Durst wasn’t shitting us and he wasn’t teasing anything interesting either. Only a new Limp Bizkit called Still Sucks anchored around the gimmick that Fred Durst looked old enough to be your dad.
They basically resumed their career, except Durst wears a new costume on stage now.
They started touring and debuted their low effort lead single Dad Vibes weeks after the mysterious photo was released and it didn’t really sound any different than anything Limp Bizkit produced after they lost the capacity to write a compelling hook. It was just a bad Limp Bizkit song. The crowd was split : half was delighted that Durst stopped trying and decided he was still big enough to cash festival checks and half didn’t see the fucking point of another attention deprived hasbeen cluttering their mental space.
Limp Bizkit had successfully transitioned from suburban teenage anger to post-irony. A form of humor where you behave like you’re being ironic without any subtext. Fred Durst started behaving like a fifty years old suburban man from the seventies not because he wants to make fun of fifty years old suburban men or it’s what he fears turning into. He started behaving like a fifty years old suburban man because it looked silly and it would get the media talking about his band again and he was right. The kids call it shitposting. It’s not fun nor clever. It’s not anything.
Still Sucks feels like an old annoying neighbor dropping by to say hello, now that he’s vaguely aware that his old self was annoying (but he really wants to talk to you). It was a great opportunity to start anew, take a new direction and get up to speed with their old audience, but their post-ironic stance was a thinly veiled cop out. Guitarist Wes Borland admitted that they’ve been in the studio seven times over the last ten years and sometimes even in different studios. So it’s not like they even tried to record anything serious. The media was kind because Limp Bizkit has become somewhat of a legacy act and that it was profoundly unpretentious and unthreatening, but no one is going to remember Still Sucks, just like no one is going to remember Gold Cobra from 2011.
It’s a high effort shitpost. It’s meant to be forgotten.
Why the fuck is Fred Durst like this?
It’s the interesting question, right? Well, I have a theory about that. I’m not going to ever blow anyone’s mind by saying Fred Durst was never all that much into Limp Bizkit. That he recruited musicians he’s never really been friends with. He primarily wanted money and fame, but he’s too uncompromisingly goofy to be just another ghoul for money and fame. There’s something else going on here.
If Limp Bizkit was so popular, I believe it was because they were a literal (almost post-ironic) embodiment of feelings in late nineties youth. Bands like Korn and Linkin Park were the soundtrack to these feelings, but Limp Bizkit decided to look like the young people who were feeling these feelings and to state them as bluntly as possible in their songs. That’s why he got Break Stuff, Nookie, Counterfeit, Rollin, My Way and a lot of other idiotic bangers that expressed exactly how it feels to be an angry sixteen years old white boy. Limp Bizkit was the zero degree of nü metal. There was a demand and they supplied as bluntly as they could and it worked. For better or worse it worked.
Still Sucks was an effort to once again speak the language of youth. To create a character who would be memed and reappropriated by internet culture. In many ways it was their failed attempt at a Hotline Bling. Once again, Fred Durst had made the correct cultural read. He just underestimated the apathy of the times and the crowd he was targeting with his marketing efforts. Sincerity was never part of his emotional vocabulary.
My theory is this : Fred Durst is like a djinn. It’s what happens once a social trend has reached the peak of its powers. It appears in its most literal, unambiguous and metaphorical form and tries to deal itself to people. It manifests itself for what it truly is and while it might work for some time, having our literal values sold back to us is going to work only for the time we hold these values and Fred Durst’s big mistake is that he’s targeting people who are undergoing important change in their lives. Who are maturing and moving out of their angry and destructive phase. That’s why his efforts are doomed to fail. His brand is ephemeral. I had forgotten Break Stuff even existed until I watched the Woodstock 99 documentary on Netflix the other day.
We have most away from a music business that is primarily dominated by music. Artists’ personalities and social media presence are almost as important as the music they record and market to us now. Taylor Swift and Kanye West being two leading examples. But these guys record music with passion and sincerity. They are earnest about two they are even if who they are is an elaborate construction.
That’s the one thing that has eluded the otherwise very clever Mr. Durst: you can be whoever you want to be if you have a strong bond to your audience. Otherwise, you’re just shitposting. It's fun in the moment, but no one pays their bills with it. He can sing the old hits on stage until he's blue in the face. If he's not actively trying to make new, significant music, no one's gonna care once the gimmick has become familiar. Man, I just wished Fred Durst had bullets in his creative gun. He'd be a lot cooler if he did.
Silver lining in that is: if Fred Durst is trying to squeeze money out of shitposting, maybe we're on at the dawn of a new sincerity.
