PISSING VINEGAR Vol. 2: Limp Bizkit
Written July 30, 2001

Okay, here's the situation...

I'm watching Ed's Big Wham Bam on MuchMusic a few minutes ago, and his usual "Smash or Trash" segment comes on. For the uninitiated, "Smash or Trash" is where a new video is played, and a panel of five or six people hauled in off the street votes on it, as in, whether it's a "Smash" or "Trash". Got it? Good. So, on this particular occasion, the video was 'Boiler', the latest from none other than Limp Bizkit. So I watched it. And it's dogshit. Mind you, it's not for lack of budget. There's special effects and explosions up the yin-yang. And, granted, there's some pretty cool stuff going on in the video. However, it's basically Fred Durst spending his entire poster and T-shirt revenue on some kind of crack-induced, warped, unintelligible "vision". Apparently, this "vision" consists primarily of scantilly-clad women with satellites shooting out of their mouths, and wigs that cover their mangled, pus-leaking, deformed heads. Oh, and by the way, Fred is inexplicably animated midway through the video (at least he's not dressed up in his gay biker outfit). As for the song itself, it is (as you'd expect) your basic, cliched Limp Bizkit song circa 2001. But here's the kicker... by five of the six people they pulled off the street, it was voted a smash. At this time, it should be duly noted that ALL SIX of the esteemed "panel" were teenaged girls. The most common (in fact, only) reason for this video being a smash? "It's different". Give me a motherfucking break. The song is not different, it's merely rehashed, downtuned notes, and the fourth single from an album with three decent songs on it. So it must be the video, right? Ed the Sock himself put it best when he said, "Watch Hellraiser 1, 2 and 3, you've seen the whole frickin' video". Futuristic, warped "visions" are certainly nothing new.

My point is this... there are two REAL reasons this piece of celluloid dogshit was heralded as such a work of art:
a) The ultra-commercial institution that is MuchMusic rarely plays videos that are truly "different", outside of specialty shows like "The Wedge" (which is aired at midnight on Fridays when next to no one is watching), and
b) The girls didn't want to seem shallow by saying "Fred is hot".

You want different? Teenage girls of the world, take my advice... if different is what you want, there's a hell of a lot better different out there. For different sounds, how about the dual-guitared punk-art-rock-metal stylings of At The Drive-In? Or the lush, multi-layered dark rock of Tool? If you wanna go back a few years (this will be classified as "classic rock"), pick up a Faith No More album BESIDES 'The Real Thing'. Or, for the more sensitive of ears, how about the laid-back, haunting melodies of Icelandic sensations Sigur Ros? And if it's different videos you want, they don't come much better made than the latest from Radiohead, "Knives Out". Request it, and set mind to Blown. Alas, they probably wouldn't play it on Much On Demand, since they're too busy playing "anonymous requests" (my conspiracy theory: those are requests from crew members, or the VJs themselves), or graciously honouring requests for the videos we've all already seen fifteen times today. Call me crazy, but aren't request shows there so we can see videos that aren't already drilled into our skulls with a frequency rivalling that of a Times Square hooker on quota day? But I digress, that's a rant for another day.

To bottom line this whole spiel, it's eerily apparent to me that, in an effort to stay on the cutting edge, too many people are claiming the whole "different" alibi. When, in actuality, SO many people are trying to be different that everything different has been pushed to the mainstream, and if you want to find something perfectly authentic in its individuality, it'll be mainstream by the time you discover it anyway. And to bottom line the bottom line, I don't think anybody knows just what the hell different is anymore. Well, I will be different (just like everybody else) in saying that I admit the lines between mainstream and offstream are becoming increasingly blurred. Face it, folks. We're living in a society that's calling Limp Bizkit "different", and giving Cake a top ten single. I implore you, faithful reader, be different. Buy a Creed album.