Just reading that album name makes me feel grimy. Do I really want to sit through more than an hour of music by a band named Limp Bizkit? Just in case you aren't aware, and I'm going to blank this out for the people who don't want to know, the band gets it's name from a game frat boys supposedly make pledges play. The pledges stand in a circle and attempt to jerk off onto a biscuit. Whoever is the last to ejaculate has to eat the biscuit. If you want to read those last 2 sentences feel free to highlight them, but I recommend you don't. Remain unaware until your dying days. And no, I'm not making it up.
Aside from that, this is a band that seems to be universally hated. Off the top of my head I can remember a general sense of the type of shitty music they play. It's a sort of hard-rock mixed with rap in the vein of Rage Against the Machine (but less angry) or 311 (but more putrid). None of their songs are springing to mind, and popular opinion certainly hasn't been kind to Limp Bizkit or it's lead singer Fred Durst in the last decade or so. I'm writing this review on a Friday after a long week and I have a migraine. Not that I suspect it will matter.
The album opens with a vocoded introduction that warns me, "This is not a test. This is reality." I know, I'm actually listening to this crap. It's among the worst days of my life. No need to rub it in. "Limp Bizkit is in the house!" Well shit. Nothing quite like leading with a name drop, and saying, "In the house!" as if everyone were excited you showed up to the party. Imagine how dead a party would be if Fred Durst actually showed up and expected everyone to act as if it were totally awesome he were there. I think I've heard enough. That's only the first minute of the album.
I've just realized that the cadence to the intro is exactly the same as the title track off Kraftwerk's Trans Europe Express. Perhaps this was meant to be some type of homage? I never thought I'd find myself waxing nostalgic about listening to Trans Europe Express, but Limp Bizkit has done it. Amazing.
So "Hot Dog" contains so many uses of the word "fuck" that I don't want to even use the word any more. It becomes so lame coming out of Fred Durst's mouth. He even has the gal to lift the chorus from a certain Nine Inch Nails song. "My Generation" tries to be a homage to several much better songs, especially the eponymous song by an infinitely better band. I'm getting the feeling that Fred Durst loves talking about himself and how awesome he thinks he is and how much shit people talk about him. Maybe if he shut his stupid ugly face nobody would be talking about how much they hate him.
OK, I know this "Rollin' (Air Raid Vehicle)" song. I guess I should have known this was Limp Bizkit because the band self name-checks a few times. "Livin' It Up" is dedicated to Ben Stiller for some reason. It begins by sampling "Life In The Fast Lane" which again only makes me think of better music I could be listening to, instead of listening to Fred Durst talk about himself and famous people he knows.
"The One" is actually not that bad. Probably because Fred Durst has decided to drop the whole, "I'm a badass rapper," shtick and is actually singing in a more reserved manor about something other than him being an awesome badass rapper. My best guess is this song is an introspection about the night he and his girlfriend finally hooked up. I'm actually pleasantly surprised. On any other album this would be nothing special but for Limp Bizkit it's a revelation. I'm also impressed by the band's arrangement of the Mission Impossible theme in "Take A Look Around." I don't know if I like the song or not, but their derivation of the source material is interesting.
I will say that the second half of the album has been much more pleasant. The mix of rap and hard rock was a poor choice of genres for Limp Bizkit (among other poor decisions). "Hold On" is very grungy, similar to early-to-mid era Stone Temple Pilots. I know, most people will think that faint praise, but STP is one of my favorite bands, so I wouldn't use that comparison lightly. UPDATE: I just checked the track listing and Scott Weiland, lead singer of STP, was a featured guest on that track. So that figures.
Well, I was being pretty complimentary for a while, but the reprise of "Rollin'" completely ruined that. Especially since this track featured members of Wu-Tang Clan and DMX name-cecking themselves. So this album features a re-mixed version of what I'm pretty sure eventually became its most popular song. Good to know that Limp Bizkit was willing to ruin their own music.
The last track features an interview with Ben Stiller where he basically says he thinks Limp Bizkit is amazing. Why? Because only they have successfully combined heavy metal, rap, hip-hop, thrash, and whatever. There's an extended sequence where Stiller's somewhat obnoxious laugh is looped over and over for about 3 minutes. I don't know what the point of that was or why I listened to the whole thing.
So... how to sum that up? I don't know. I was ready to say that maybe I had misjudged Limp Bizkit after hearing "The One" and "Hold On," but the last two songs were really terrible, and reminded me the first 7 songs were also awful. Maybe Limp Bizkit could have created a better album by focusing on the better tracks, particularly the ones where Fred Durst doesn't rap about how cool he thinks he is. It's kind of a shame that Limp Bizkit decided to be a rap-rock fusion band, because if they had just been another grunge band I think I might have liked them. Certainly I wouldn't hate them, and I'm betting their reputation would be a lot better.
I know I liked a few tracks and generally say that a few good tracks mean an album is good. But Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water not only has one of the dumbest album titles in history, it's also got a ton of shitty music. The good is outweighed by a metric ton of shit. So 2 stars. But for once I kinda feel bad about it.
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