Fred Durst is standing with his hand on the detonator, counting down to oblivion. It’s May 1999, and MTV have invited Limp Bizkit to the Bahamas for Blow The Boat: Isle Of MTV Summer Launch, a televised summer moshfest with two express goals: firstly, to showcase two new tracks – I’m Broke and Nookie – from the band’s soon-to-bereleased second album, Significant Other, and secondly, to… well, blow up a boat.
Looking back now, the correlation between the two is anyone’s guess, but as Fred pushes down the plunger that detonates the explosives packed into the small sailboat moored a few hundred yards away, sending stern and bow rocketing sky-high in an inferno of flames, the symbolism is hard to miss. Over the previous few years, nu metal had become the dominant sound within the metal scene thanks to the likes of Korn, Deftones and Coal Chamber and Limp Bizkit themselves, but, like the boat that Fred Durst has just blown up, it’s about to explode everywhere.
Until that point, nu metal had largely been kept at arm’s length by the gatekeepers of mainstream culture. But suddenly this downtuned, groove-heavy, hip hop-influenced mutant noise had become too big to ignore.
Between the year 2000 and the end of 2003, the whole world went nu metal. The likes of Limp Bizkit, System Of A Down, Papa Roach, Disturbed and Linkin Park produced million-selling album after million-selling album. Their music muscled its way into the upper regions of the chart, onto TV shows and into movies, and into the worlds of video games, wrestling and extreme sports. Nu metal engendered its own community and look: kids in baggy jeans and studded wristbands gathered in parks, town centres, shopping malls and clubs up and down the country. Nu metal went from outsider scene to being at the centre of everything. As Serena Cherry, singer and guitarist with Brit-metal ragers Svalbard and a former teenage nu metal fan, puts it today: “It was so much more than a genre.”
Korn are rightly credited with pioneering nu metal with the release of their self-titled debut album in 1994. That record, whose tar-thick grooves drew on hip hop as an inspiration and whose emotional angst owed as much of a debt to grunge as it did to metal, sparked an avalanche.
Nu metal’s first wave broadened metal’s boundaries. Limp Bizkit’s debut album, 1997’s had fused the swagger of Cypress Hill and the Wu-Tang Clan with the energy of 80s punk bands such as Black Flagfor good measure (covering 80s pop songs was a very nu metal thing to do, reaching critical mass in 2001 with Alien Ant Farm’s cranked-up version of the old Michael Jackson hit
