Alice Cooper is a fraud.
The granddaddy of shock rock, who peaked somewhere around the election of Jimmy Carter, is a prominent if not particularly meaningful fixture of Boomer adolescence, drawing bad reviews and raving crowds for his “Welcome to My Nightmare” tour and his muscular radio gems “School’s Out” and “I’m Eighteen” - scrappy, hummable tunes that helped define a generation.
But Cooper – né Vince Furnier – isn’t shocking at all. He’s really just theater, which should surprise no one. When I interviewed him waaaayyyyy back in 1986, he pushed back hard on all the media accusations that his art is really Satanism in disguise – a truly hilarious accusation in hindsight, but one that was actually taken seriously at the time.
“We’re not into devil worship and Satanism,” he told me. “I think maybe 2 percent of the heavy-metal bands out there are really into that. We’re just goofing around.”
Why is he telling us this?
I’m telling you this because the shock rock that today’s grandparents loved so much has since given way to rage rock, which on its face is far more disturbing that the wacky Nightmare on Elm Street theatrics of Cooper et al. It’s more primal, more immediate, more unsettling – and, at first glance, more authentic.
Unless you’re Limp Bizkit.
The five-man rap unit from Jacksonville, formed in 1994, wants to pick up where Rage Against the Machine left off. Frontman Fred Durst goes far out of his way to sound angry and indecent – and, to be sure, he’s no fluffy bunny on stage or on disc – but his lyrics draw comments like these from the rock press:
“In a less-serious vein, Limp Bizkit used the nu-metal sound as a way to spin testosterone fueled fantasies into snarky white-boy rap. Oddly audiences took frontman Fred Durst more seriously than he wanted, failing to see the intentional silliness in many of his songs.”4
Moreover, this band is funny, and comes across much like Steve Martin in My Blue Heaven, a murderous mobster who’s really an ironic goofball under the skin: the darker the snarl, the bigger the laughs.
Album titles like Three Dollar Bill, Y’all, Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water, Stampede of the Disco Elephants and Still Sucks should be a dead giveaway, and if not, tracks like “Nobody Loves Me”, “Stink Finger”, “Nookie” and “Snacky Poo” ought to clinch it: Limp Bizkit are class clowns masquerading as street warriors.
To be sure, Durst isn’t all smoke-and-mirrors; he writes about real things, not excepting weary, groaning failed-relationship themes. Durst is by no means the first songwriter to get a full album (Significant Other) out of a breakup; popster Taylor Swift is the millennial pacesetter in that domain. For Durst, it’s not really a Rumours moment; he’s doing The Way We Were as vaudeville.
But we digress: Alice Cooper isn’t the real touchback here. It’s The Who.
It was in 2003, on the band’s fourth album Results May Vary, that Durst chose to reach into the classic rock catalog for a new way to express his faux turmoil (which in reality never goes much deeper that his bad taste in girlfriends). His choice of Pete Townshend’s “Behind Blue Eyes” - one of classic rock’s most poignant ballads – was inspired: it not only opened Durst up to exactly the sort of artistic scrutiny his audience has never seemed savvy enough to muster; it also served up some truths about real deficits in millennial rock’s rhetorical portfolio.
The Who’s track, originally destined to appear on Townshend’s opus Lifehouse, ended up remaindered to the Who’s Next album in 1971, where it took up the role of misfit among the album’s more dramatic tracks (like “Baba O’Riley”). Released in the US (but not the UK), it underperformed on the radio, going to #34 and #24 on the Billboard Hot 100 and Cashbox respectively.
The song’s mournful opening - “No one knows what it’s like / To be the bad man / To be the sad man / Behind blue eyes” - features a simple acoustic guitar arpeggiating Em, the singer’s voice joined with lovely harmony on the last line. And so the song proceeds, in The Who’s rendering, until the jolting middle section of the song, which unexpectedly rocks out, changing tone entirely – surfing across a shocking lyric:
When my fist clenches, crack it open Before I use it and lose my cool When I smile, tell me some bad news Before I laugh and act like a fool
And if I swallow anything evil Put your finger down my throat And if I shiver, please give me a blanket Keep me warm, let me wear your coat
This sudden surge of aggressive energy, pushing away the reverie of the song in a dark and stormy moment, unveils the complexity of its layered emotions, hinting that the lyric’s sadness and anger are feeding on one another, and that this symbiosis is somehow inevitable. Townshend’s casual riffing and Roger Daltrey’s growly delivery seem somehow petulant – but unfailingly earnest.
The Limp Bizkit version starts off the same way – a gentle but sorrowful acoustic guitar, with atmospheric pads and echo coating Durst’s vocal, with edgy sound effects intruding. We’re probably paying more attention to his actual singing than we ever have before, until that pesky moment when the middle section comes...
...and we hear a Speak and Spell – that irritating toy from the Eighties that came to the world’s attention in the movie E.T. - intoning, in place of the rant, DISCOVER L.I.M.P. SAY IT! in disembodied machine voice. This happens four times, until Durst returns to repeat the first verse.
Put another way, Durst felt led to discard Townshend’s impassioned watershed purge with a pivot to Tickle-Me Elmo.
It goes without saying that this went down badly with just about everybody, from Bizkit’s fans to the rock press to Texas Instruments. Though the song did well internationally, it tanked in the US, and was voted the second-worst cover song of all time by the readers of Rolling Stone.
But even so, it’s not the Speak and Spell that truly unpacks what Durst is doing here. Look at the chorus lyric:
But my dreams they aren't as empty As my conscience seems to be I have hours, only lonely My love is vengeance That's never free
That’s pretty damn ouchy-vulnerable – which isn’t uncommon for the author of Tommy, bespeaks an honesty and directness that’s been in short supply since the Summer of Love. And it’s hard to imagine why Durst would set one of his own songs aside in order to make room for it, until we realize that, underneath his schlock and fake emo, he’s as big a fraud as Alice Cooper.
In choosing to pour his craft into a song with such a nakedly self-disclosing lyric, Durst is serving up a confession of his own lack of conviction, and in so doing he’s blowing the cover of his entire generation – and thereby keeping it more honest.
Comments