was definitely not a good student in school. I was the teachers favorite dude, I passed 'cause I was like kissing my teachers ass, and pretty much I never did my homework. I don't even know how I made it. It was like a social event for me, it was a place to skateboard and rap and beatbox and break dance pretty much was what school was for me. But I did pass... I did graduate, because they couldn't stand me. But that's it. I'm a loser."

--Fred Durst

Few would deny that Limp Bizkit's frontman (and now sole creative force) suffers from a lack of eloquence. Indeed, part of the band's initial appeal was its inarticulate anger: simplistic rage-fueled lyrics pounded into the ground by heavy mosh-riffs, the auditory equivalent of a temper tantrum. This combination did little to endear Durst and company to critics, which merely helped fuel the reactionary hatred that was Limp Bizkit's lifeblood. But the above quotation reveals much more to the story of one of the most successful rock bands of all time. Durst's confusing and contradictory explanation of his educational career shows a man who struggles to put his past into a cohesive narrative. He says only by endearing himself to his teachers did he manage to graduate from high school, and then claims the opposite, that he was given a diploma as a form of expulsion. He sounds sheepish, as if he's ashamed to admit he graduated at all, and he tries too hard to come off as too badass for authority figures. Finally, Durst ends his story with self-deprecation, which functions as a means of escape. But that's it. I'm a loser. End of story. You can't say anything else about me. I'm a loser, it's over, I have the last word, you can do nothing to me because I have already done it to myself. This is the mark of a deeply insecure individual, a man continually reshaping his past to meet his present needs, and struggling to do so in a way that leaves him immune to persecution, which he perceives as imminent. This worldview, combined with ambition and luck, gave Limp Bizkit incredible success. It has also sown the seeds for their failure.

Fred Durst was born and raised in a small southern town to parents of humble means. Like many men of such stressful backgrounds, he clung to prevalent myths of masculinity. Aggression, sexual possessiveness, and violence marked his early adulthood. After spending a month in jail for beating up his wife's lover, Durst left everything behind and moved to Jacksonville, Florida. Having little to lose is easily transformed into an asset. The more one cares about, the more one can become beholden to and restricted by those values, limiting potential opportunities. Durst's values, as revealed in his music, are few. They revolve around two poles: hypermasculinized aggression (often taking the form of threats of physical harm, incitements to violence, and casual misogyny) and narcissistic self-loathing ("Nobody loves me"; "I'm lonelier now than I've ever been"). The axis to these poles is a persecution complex that make his values reactionary: he lashes out because he has been wronged; he hates himself because so many others hate him. From "Break Stuff": "I think you better quit lettin' shit slip / Or you'll be leavin with a fat lip." From "Nobody Like You": "I'm convinced that you hate / You hate me, you like / You like to see me cry."

"The future is easy because it doesn't exist, but the past is hard because it lasts forever," reads a line from Durst's diary. He is constantly haunted by the past. He cannot escape it. He cannot let it go. His only recourse is nihilistic rage: to destroy everything. The future does not threaten him because it is empty, but the future inevitably becomes the past, a vortex that keeps Durst pinned down and repeatedly flailing against everything and everyone.

This situation is a compelling angle for angst-ridden teenagers, struggling to become adults without the benefit of perspective that comes with experience. Teen angst has fueled the rock markets since Nirvana inadvertently revealed it to be a powerful marketing tool. Limp Bizkit effectively exploited this niche, and at the same time refined it. While the post-grunge landscape continually chased its own tail of despair, Bizkit offered a cheap, easy solution: hit back. Make sense of your world by interpreting your misfortune as an attack and strike back with overwhelming force. Durst's philosophy made him able to turn the world into a battlefield, allowing him to channel his energy through music as dumb, anti-intellectual, visceral, and cheaply satisfying as punching someone in the face. A haymaker is immune to any kind of defense, certainly immune to criticism. If the blow is ineffective, hit again. The pop landscape made it easy for this oppositional philosophy to take hold. TRL was at its nadir in 1999, and competition for the top spots on the charts were continually portrayed by host Carson Daly as a pitched battle, with fey, fabricated boy bands and pop princesses battling tough, trashy rap-rockers. Thus, Limp Bizkit defied harsh critics and sold 7.5 million copies of Significant Other, their most fully realized and successful album.

Significant Other made Durst more than a star: it made him an important and influential figure in the music industry. After garnering a VP position at Interscope, Durst had success signing neo-grunge acts Cold, Staind, and Puddle of Mudd. Limp Bizkit even began receiving critical praise, a result of tremendous record sales. Bizkit was praised (mostly by men yearning for the masculinized, commercially dominant rock-n-roll of yore) for making rock music relevant again by fusing rap and rock and conquering the pop charts. Durst was on top. His enemies were vanquished, rendered impotent. He was unassailable.

And thus, he was irrelevant. His values, whose simplicity blessed him with success, now restricted him. Reactionaries need enemies, and Durst had to find more to keep going. Public beefs with Eminem, Kid Rock, Trent Reznor, Christina Aguilera, and Britney Spears came off as overblown and pointless, especially now that Durst shared a fan base with those artists. More importantly, they provided little material for Significant Other's follow up. So Chocolate Starfish and the Hotdog-Flavored Water simply rehashed the reactionary rage-angst of its predecessor. A new value had entered the playing field, overriding the others and shaping the way Durst made music: he valued continuing success. He had something to lose now. His blind flailing had managed to strike gold, but now he had to do something he wasn't prepared for: he had to consciously focus on making popular music. His limits are palpable on the album. The songs lack the visceral sonic punch of Significant Other's strongest tracks, dragged down by excessive whining that is the mark of a powerful figure reacting against an already-irrelevant opposition. Attempts to get out of the rage-angst cycle turn into songs about nothing; on "Livin' It Up" and "Getcha Groove On" Durst's clumsy rapping and nonsensical lines ("Don’t hate me / I’m just an alien / with 37 tons / of new millenium / dum ditty dum"; "Got these laser beam mic checks / communicating through the genelec / high tech, keep you on the run now") ruin aspirations of injecting some hip hop bravado into the mix. The album is further dragged down by excessive profanity (excessive even for Limp Bizkit), an attempt to mask the hollowness of Durst's pseudo-rage. Finally, the mess is covered with a protective layer of purposely juvenile stupidity, the most obvious example being the album title and cover art. Once again, Durst attempts to pre-emptively thwart critiques by intentionally taking himself even lower. But that's it. I'm a loser.

The trick worked though. Chocolate Starfish sold a million copies in a week, a record for a rock release. It went on to sell over six million copies. But Durst found himself unable to repeat this trick for Bizkit's next proper album. Guitarist Wes Borland, generally regarded as the most talented member of the group, abruptly left the band (quoth he: "One day I said to myself, 'Oh my God, this is what selling out is.'"). DJ Lethal declared rap-rock dead, accusing other bands of excessively copying Limp Bizkit's style. Critics claimed excessively negative and violent music like nu-metal couldn't survive after 9-11 (a notion that may be an exaggeration, but if Durst does anything, it's read his critics). Durst claimed he would put aside all beefs and focus on making more positive music in the wake of September 11. Maybe he tried. He canned two entire albums before releasing Results May Vary (another title attempting to preemptively deflect criticism), an album that can only be described as abysmal. Its most striking feature is the almost total lack of the rage that made people buy Limp Bizkit albums in the first place: only three tracks even approximate the heavy nu-metal riffing of Significant Other, and Durst's screams are present in only the first single, "Eat You Alive." The rest of the album is a confusing sludge of noodly guitar, langorous drumming, and plenty of nasal crooning by Durst. The songs are simply poorly written: song structures change without reason or continuity, creating a mess of musical nonsequiturs without a catchy melody or hook to be found. The lyrics are still combatative and reactionary, now striking out against completely inarticulated enemies, but the rage is all but gone. Durst sounds defeated: his hopeless value system has drained him of his (already dubious) relevancy. He continues to react against his perceived misfortune, but his misfortune is that he has no misfortune, and thus has nothing to work with. "Take me back to yesterday / rolling dice and getting laid" he pines in "Creamer." Indeed, Limp Bizkit only functioned when they had nothing to lose.

Now they have everything to lose, and Results May Vary's chart statistics indicate Durst is indeed losing. After a third-place debut (selling 300,000 copies), the album quickly dropped off the top 20, and is currently nestled at 21. Both "Eat You Alive" and a cover of The Who's "Behind Blue Eyes" have failed to land on even the rock singles charts. Results May Vary will never go platinum, it will be lucky to go gold. Perhaps Limp Bizkit is the victim of changing musical tastes, of fickle ever-shifting demographics. Perhaps they're success was merely luck: they were in the right place at the right time doing the right thing. Perhaps they really needed Wes Borland. But regardless of all those things, Fred Durst had doomed himself from the beginning -- he could only succeed as a nihilistic failure.

During the recording of Results May Vary, Durst had the faces of Elvis Presley and Kurt Cobain tattooed on his right pectoral. Such a pathetic attempt to self-canonize oneself into rock history can only be regarded as a move of desperation, a testament to Durst's persistant, destructive insecurities. Some of those insecurities appear to be justified, and should they consume him, he only has two fates: pumping his bloated body full of too many pills or making a stab at legendary status with a gunshot.