Results Varied: Memories of Nu Metal
Are musical awakenings a thing? Sometimes, I hear people talk about the first time they saw a beloved pop star in a music video or the first time they listened to a certain riff and how it changed their lives forever. Recently, I’ve been thinking about when and where I fell in love with music myself. I have mixed feelings about the memories that surface.
As I recall, the first band I ever liked was The Beatles. My brief fascination was the result of a primary school teacher’s influence and culminated in my friends and me forming a Beatles tribute act. To be clear, none of us could play anything. Nonetheless, we took great joy trying to imitate the Liverpool foursome’s greatest hits in an attic full of an older brother’s instruments.
While a love for The Beatles sounds as good as a music snob’s origin story as any, I never liked them enough to bother my parents to buy me an album. My nine-year-old self just didn’t see listening to music as a viable pastime yet. Instead, my first album would be something that many would argue is less cultured.
Sometime after The Beatles tribute act ceased, I was shopping with my mum, feeling bored, when a song came over the speakers. I instantly recognized the tune. After all, it was a famous one: the theme of Mission Impossible. However, it was being played in a style of music that was louder, heavier, and angrier than anything I’d heard from my parents’ classic rock and pop record collection. It was certainly different from anything composed by Lennon or McCartney. And there was some guy not quite rapping, not quite singing, and not quite screaming over the top of it all.
My mum didn’t pay the song any mind. But I was enamoured. I’d never thought of music as being ‘cool’ to that point, not even when it came to The Beatles. But I thought this song by some unknown group was really, really, freaking cool. And when I learned it was, in fact, part of the official soundtrack to Mission Impossible 2? It only seemed that much more dope.
In the following weeks and months, I realized that other kids at school also liked this ‘Mission Impossible 2 song,’ which was actually called ‘Take a Look Around’ and performed by an American group called Limp Bizkit. They’d also taken an interest in a litany of other similarly abrasive tunes they’d discovered and pinched from the bedrooms of older brothers and sisters. As I’d later learn, these now chart-bothering songs represented a type of music called nu metal.
On our playground, CD players containing these nu metal records were moved around like contraband, holding a similar reverence to ‘naughty pictures’ and snuck-in sweets. They were for listening to via headphones only, and they were to be kept from the ears and eyes of our teachers at all costs. Still, that didn’t stop us from singing along to any sections with foul language or imitating how we thought we should be dancing and jumping around to these tracks. Sure, they weren’t quite as fascinating as shiny Pokemon cards. But man, they came pretty damn close.
Of all the new music I discovered on my school playground, one album stood out among the rest: Linkin Park’s Hybrid Theory. This record, for which I still hold a soft spot today, was more polished and melodic than the other nu metal records I had heard. But it was just as much of a sonic behemoth beneath its high production value. I simply had to have it. And, after what I’m sure was a long spate of nagging, I managed to convince my parents to get me a copy from the store.
On the way home that day after procuring my new album, my dad suggested we play it on the car stereo. I was hesitant. Linkin Park was not as foul-mouthed as some of my previous discoveries, but I still had this feeling that I was not meant to have this type of aggressive music in my possession. But, intrigued to see what they thought, I relented.
By the time the first riff of the opening track, ‘Papercut,’ had played, my parents were already complaining about the “noise” coming from the stereo. And I think we made it to the post-second-chorus bridge of track 2’s ‘One Step Closer,’ where the now-late lead singer Chester Bennington triumphantly screams, “Shut up when I’m talking to you,” before they ejected the CD.
To my relief, I wasn’t in trouble, but my parents assured me that they thought this music was not “real music” before handing my CD back to me. And in my mind, that settled it: Linkin Park and nu metal were hella cool. Certainly, they were way too cool for Mum and Dad to understand. And I’d spend the next several months playing Hybrid Theory on repeat (via my PlayStation) as loud as I dared to remind them how much more rad I was and would soon become once I hit adolescence (spoiler: as it turned out, I would not be a very cool teenager).
I didn’t realize it at the time, but I had just taken an important step in separating my identity from that of my parents. And in this nu metal, I’d also found a gateway drug to a vast world of rock, metal, punk, and more. It just so happened that my gateway drug of choice was also one of the most hated genres of music ever.
To its detractors, nu metal was to metal what many argue pop-punk was to punk: a cynical attempt to capitalise on a subculture and sell a simplified, more accessible version to those who would otherwise have little interest in that subculture (you know, teenagers).
In nu metal’s defence, its mid-nineties primordial soup consisted less of Black Sabbath and more of new-wave goth à la Depeche Mode alongside funk rock. Listening back now to genre-forerunners Korn’s self-titled debut, I hear erratically tuned guitars, jarring transitions, and literal wailing tears, but not much that tethers its sound to anything born in a Birmingham garage.
Still, whether you love or hate nu metal, one thing is undeniable: nothing can stay ‘nu’ for long.
From my vantage point in the UK, nu metal seemed to come in on a wave of American-flavoured degeneration, crashing ashore alongside other anti-cultural touchstones such as Attitude-era wrestling, The Jerry Springer Show and shock rap. But by the time I hit my teens, the heyday of nu metal was already in the proverbial rearview mirror, its hangers-on swiftly appearing dated and tacky. While I couldn’t shake the alt-rock itch nu metal had left me with, I increasingly turned to groups with sweeping hairdos, MySpace pages, and overly long song titles to scratch it.
Don’t get it wrong, I still loved to sing along to nu metal anthems with friends, but now I did it with an eye for irony and humour. And it was often Limp Bizkit’s back catalogue that provided no shortage of unintentionally hilarious gems. I’m talking about such classic lyrical spins as:
“Maybe life is up and down, but my life’s been what till now? I crawled up your butt somehow, and that’s when things got turned around”
and
“Ain’t it funny how time flies? (Huh?) Out of sight, out of mind (yeah right). Once again back, it’s the incredible, Subliminal, the inFredible D”
I won’t pretend I was a connoisseur of good taste or lyrical genius in my early teens. But even I felt embarrassed for Bizkit front man Fred Durst’s attempts at lyrical prose, and I didn’t have much embarrassment to spare. Still, dumb fun is still fun if you can turn your mind off for a while, right?
But then, Limp Bizkit released Results May Vary, a cursed record that found Durst taking full control of the band’s creative direction following the departure of guitarist Wes Borland and which managed to both mark and encapsulate nu metal’s demise.
I remember watching Kerrang! TV (a now-defunct British music channel that played pop rock) one day when the music video for the lead single of Results May Vary, ‘Eat You Alive,’ beamed through my parent’s television for the first time.
In the video, Fred Durst, adorned in a dirty white vest, has taken a young woman (played by BAFTA and Golden Globe-nominated, Thora Birch) hostage and is now forcing her to watch his band perform. Some would say that’s a terrible fate at the best of times. But again, this is Results May Vary era Limp Bizkit. As a result, we’re ‘treated’ to stuff like Durst telling Thora (and whoever he originally envisioned as the song’s subject — Britney Spears being one possibility) that there’s “no doubt” that he’d “love to sniff on them panties now,” while shaking a megaphone in her face and doing a little dance number.
As young and immature as I was, I remember watching this strange performance and feeling a bit queasy, even if the main riff did have a bit of a kick. To this day, the song, regardless of any metaphorical intention, still sounds to me like the anthem of every creep and abuser who interprets words like “no” as a challenge to overcome.
But there was another side to Fred Durst on the new Bizkit record: sad Fred Durst. And this unhappy Durst is perhaps best exemplified on the album’s second single. That single being the awful slow-mo cover of The Who’s ‘Behind Blue Eyes’ (which starred Halle Berry as a love interest in the music video, an odd reminder that these guys once ruled the world), where Durst complains that “no one knows what it’s like” to have feelings, be disliked and be a blue-eyed, white guy.
The rest of the album follows the lead set by these two singles, switching unceremoniously between brash, boastful, and generic rap-metal (“Gimme a mic so I can rock it right y’all”) and a slew of self-pitying downer ballads (“I remember high school, man I hated high school. It was like prison with bullies always putting me down”).
Looking back, it’s clear that Durst was trying to work through some personal demons. But because he was paid to do his therapy in public, the album yo-yo’s between his new desire for introspection and his public-facing masculine persona that must remain unblemished. Never on the record do the two become intertwined, and so nothing is learned by the time the album’s last guitar riff fades out.
“I blame you,” Durst sings (sorta) in ‘Behind Blue Eyes.’ And in a way, I think that particular lyric and that song summarize not just the album it came from but part of the initial legacy nu metal left behind. Like a whirlwind of self-pity, nu metal could lash out at the world in destructive and often exciting fashion. However, its biggest flag-bearers struggled to go much beyond that.
Of course, it would be unfair to judge nu metal solely by what is considered the worst album of its most notorious band, which came towards — and perhaps even rushed — the end of its tenure. But I believe Results May Vary remains, as a review in Dot Music would declare at the time of its release, “a fascinating document” of a genre’s demise.
Yet, taking a look around today, it almost feels like nu metal never actually went anywhere. Genre heavyweights Korn, Linkin Park, and Limp Bizkit have all completed massive tours and produced new music in recent memory. Search results for nu metal are as high as they’ve been in twenty years, and even Creed is back to bothering the charts after blowing up on social media. Against all odds, it seems nu metal is as popular as ever.
Is it a simple case of nostalgic Gen-Xers and Millennials trying to reclaim and make peace with their bombastic past? Maybe. Perhaps it’s just another TikTok microtrend. Or maybe it’s because, in an era where people increasingly feel less agency in a chaotic world, nu metal’s simple message of “fuck ya’ll” feels accessible, easily repurposed and transcendent.
The music may not have changed, but the world has. I certainly know I have.
Today, I’m too old for guilty pleasures. I’m no longer burdened by that adolescent need for music to represent who I am and what I’m about. I also no longer feel the need to preface any poor taste with ironic detachment. And I’m certainly not above singing “It’s all about the he-said, she-said bullshit” at 2 a.m. in an alt-rock club.
Nu metal may have been a fad, but it was my fad. And all these years later, those ‘tacky’ nu metal songs still find themselves nestled between all the other music I may not have discovered without it. Regardless of what else nu metal is or may yet become, its successes and its failures, that’s pretty cool.