Re: Students perform antiwar interruptus during MTV Eminem video

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

> As the students were scuttled out, Fred Durst, the show's guest, reportedly
> shot them dirty looks and scoffed at them. Apparently El Dursto can dish out
> faux youthful rebellion but he can't take the real thing.

The New York Times, July 24, 1999, Saturday, Late Edition - Final

Where Hip-Hop and Heavy Metal Collide

By ANN POWERS

As lead singer of Limp Bizkit, the band currently at the top of the
Billboard album charts, Fred Durst has created a million-dollar persona by
acting like the least likely to succeed. But Mr. Durst is not the loser he
would like people to think he is.

Within Limp Bizkit's sludgy, hip-hop- stained rock songs, Mr. Durst
expresses emotions that endear him to teen-agers: frustration,
vulnerability and a sense of moral outrage. He embodies the stern
self-righteousness that can surface among young people when they feel
ignored and powerless. At Hammerstein Ballroom on Thursday night, he
encouraged his fans to unleash their negativity and reach the good feelings
buried below. But as he conjured the "positive vibes," he screamed, "Leave
me alone!" Mr. Durst's social conservatism was just like that of a
talk-radio host: he played the schlumpy, marginalized Everyman who just
wants a chance to live without interference from a bunch of weirdos. He
denounced freeloaders in "I'm Broke," preached against promiscuity in "No
Sex" (and blamed women for the impulse in "Nookie") and expressed a
libertarian competitiveness in "Trust?"

Limp Bizkit turned these square sentiments into rock by matching them to an
urge to destroy. The tantrum-like music switched from meandering heavy
metal to thrashing hard core in odes to catharsis like "Break Stuff." This
mix of anger and brutality seems disturbingly right-wing, but that's where
Limp Bizkit gets complicated. This band's principled fury enables it to
cross a crucial border in rock. That boundary is musical and cultural, and
it has to do with race. Limp Bizkit's members belong to the first
generation of rockers to have grown up with mainstream hip-hop. These
musicians are the 1990's equivalent of the rhythm-and-blues-loving stars
who invented the classic rock sound of the 1960's.

The consciousness surrounding this process is different in this era.
Hip-hop loyalists, strongly aware of the racial exploitation that haunts
rock's history, have long distrusted white artists who lay claim to the
style. Such artists have to find their own form of credibility, or else
evoke the dreaded 1980's pretender Vanilla Ice.

Musically, Limp Bizkit achieves authenticity by matching heavy metal, the
music of the white working class, with hip-hop. On Thursday, the band's
guitarist, Wes Borland, wore the garb of a horror-movie killer (slasher
films are metal's film equivalent) and blended breakneck thrash-metal
chords with spacey progressive rock interludes. DJ Lethal used his
turntables as a metal guitar, riffing expansively and going for effects
instead of rhythm. John Otto on drums and Sam Rivers on bass never even
tried to get funky, instead steering hip-hop's breakbeat-based structure
into a backbone for power chords.

This makes for a hybrid that would be more interesting if the band did not
constantly mire itself in boring tempos, and if Mr. Durst had any talent as
a singer. His limited range was clearly exposed when Aaron Lewis of Staind,
the night's opening group, outsang him during the ballad "No Sex." Mr.
Durst's rapping engages when it gains a flippant tone, but he seems to
prefer desolate moaning.

Most irritating, though, is Mr. Durst's outsider stance, through which the
band gains emotional credibility. He behaved like a man of the people on
Thursday, at one point moving through the crowd all the way to the
ballroom's balcony. But to feel connected with Mr. Durst, his fans must
relate to his estrangement. He expresses that alienation mostly against
women, and implicitly against anyone who does not share his moralistic
views. It is strange to see rock-and-roll, so often a force against
prudishness, take this puritanical turn.




Louis Proyect
www.marxmail.org


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