Thursday, April 8, 2010

Day 12: A song from a band I hate

There aren't really many bands or artists who I'd genuinely claim to hate - plenty that aren't to my tastes, and plenty that I don't think are any good, but hate? That's a strong word, and I try to reserve my hatred for those people and entities who truly deserve it. Liars, hypocrites, child-abusers, the Amish...you know, real arseholes. Simply making bad music isn't usually enough to warrant that sort of ire, and life's too short to waste valuable hatred on the merely-distasteful.

There's Sting, of course. There's always Sting. But he's not technically a "band", and besides, as the Artist Formerly Known As The Police he'll always be able to fall back on the fact that his early stuff was, much as it pains me to admit it...pretty good.

But however hard I try to pretend I'm above that sort of petty shit, there are always going to be a few exceptions. Off the top of my head, I can't think of any currently-active groups which I truly loathe, but if I look back a few years, to the turn of the millennium, and cringe as I recall this bunch of knuckle-dragging, cretinous dickheads who were once among the biggest bands in the world...



You see that face? Take a good look at that face. Violence may not be the answer, but I'm small and petty enough to admit that Fred Durst has a face I'd really, really love to stamp on. Hard.

I'm not prone to hyperbole*. But if Hitler and the Devil got together one night and fucked themselves up a little hatebaby, and the mutant hellspawn grew up mean and ugly....if that happened, then Limp Bizkit would be the Bad Kid who leads little Damien astray as he hit his teens. Bad, ugly people making bad, ugly music for an audience of bad, ugly morons. The quintessential soundtrack to the mindless violence-and-rape-fest of Woodstock '99, the point where rap-rock finally, irrevocably lost its way, the forerunners of all that would truly stink about mainstream rock music for most of the decade to come...I really, really hate this band. This is the first song by them which I recall being fully aware of, so while it's far from their worst, it's still probably the one which best sums up quite why they still set my teeth on edge.


*lie



Yeah, I suspect that the point of this entry was probably supposed to be to find a song I like by a band I hate. But there really aren't any - plenty of decent songs from bands I otherwise dislike (if it makes you feel any better, pretend I chose 'Light My Fire' by The Doors, and mentally fill in the blanks), but I honestly can't think of any produced by a band I genuinely hate. So this monstrous carbuncle on the arse of popular music will have to suffice.

Don't worry, no-one's going to force you to actually listen to it.

3 comments:

Pål Hellesnes said...

You are so very very right on this one, Mark. But you forgot to add that they (and their co-conspirators) also are guilty of that awful crime of being white middle-class people pretending to be rebellious outcasts.

Mark Patterson said...

That sort of posing doesn't really bother me too much if the music they produce is any good, though, and most people grow out of that phase anyway.

Besides, if we were to dismiss white middle-class posers, I'd have to get sniffy at Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, a good two-thirds of the Clash, and almost every Norwegian metal band ever, just for starters. And really, who's got the time for that? It'd be like getting upset because the Residents don't really have giant eyeballs where their heads should be.

Oh, and it'd also rule out the only bit of Sting's career which I actually enjoy.

Anonymous said...

My hatred of them was cemented by this fuckery:

http://www.blistering.com/news/newsdet.php3?ID=2583