I'm not ashamed to say that—as a buck toothed, chubby and nervous 13 year old kid—Limp Bizkit were my life. While other hormonal teenagers found solace in writing diary entries or booting footballs against brick walls, my pursuit of choice led me toward moshpits helmed by Fred Durst. In accordance with his vision, I started wearing reverse Red Yankees hats to family dinners and re-labelled the sex I wasn't having yet as "nookie." One time, somewhere around the year 2000, I met Durst backstage at Reading Festival. He signed my t-shirt, and I have never come close to being as happy in a singular moment since.
The millennium was a strange time for music and in general. The world was in a deep juju of the Tony Blair years; before Afghanistan, 9/11, and the start of George W. Bush's presidency. Everything was not fine, obviously, but the cloudburst of imminent doom that gathers with every tweet about the world now was easier to avoid back then. Optimism, camo print, and wallet chains were deployed without a single whiff of irony. Perhaps it was these conditions—the only possible conditions—that allowed a group of four guys from Florida, one of whom only appeared inexplicably in full body paint, to earnestly combine rap and rock to become the biggest band on the planet. As memories of me attending a house party in enormous jeans will attest, it was a time when we were all much less crippled by the cyclical paranoia of self-awareness.
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