Music by Graham
Jerry HoffmanLimp Bizkit
"Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water"
Flip/ Interscope
A robotic computer-generated voice opens up Limp Bizkit's enormously anticipated "Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water," stating, "this is not a test." Oh, but it is.
The hopelessly overlong (75 minutes?) "Chocolate Starfish," from its childish title and god-awful cover to its cloned song structures and manufactured rage, is nothing if not an endurance test.
Limp Bizkit's 1999 "Significant Other," and especially that album's incendiary "Break Stuff," mainlined a certain measure of disaffected rage. It was admittedly stoopid, but it rocked, in that 1999, throw-yourself-through-a-coffee-table kind-of-way.
But anybody looking for a growth from the red-capped wonder and his comrades need look elsewhere, because on "Starfish," Limp Bizkit relapse into adolescent immaturity.
Agression-wise, the loud, leave-me-alone creed "My Way" ("It's my way, my way or the highway" goes the chorus) should blast out of grounded teenager's rooms the nation over, and on the whole, "Chocolate Starfish" has that choppy, grinding nu-metal sound throughout.
But for the life of him, frontman Fred Durst can't bring himself to say anything that matters on "Starfish."
He dedicates "Livin' it Up" to Ben Stiller (who does that?) by saying the "Meet the Parents" star is his "favorite motherfucker"; on the same song, he raps, "I've seen 'Fight Club' about 28 times." So what?
Throughout, he swears just to swear, an effect which loses all its effect after the first song, the Trent Reznor-jab "Hot Dog" ("you wanna fuck me like an animal... but just know that nothing you do will bring you closer to me").
As a mouthpiece for Generation Y, which he is, Durst sure is uninteresting. His ode to them (whom he lamely dubs "generation strange"), "My Generation," is a degrading mess of a failed anthem; the "who gets the blame" breakdown arguably has nothing to do with anything. The Spice Girls' Pepsi song was a better generational theme.
Most of all, though, "Chocolate Starfish" is severely lacking an editor. When they dropped producer Rick Rubin about a day into the "Starfish" recording sessions, they lost the presence of an outsider who could have brought the album to a cohesive whole. Plus, coming just 16 months after "Significant Other," Durst and co. are simply void of material from which to draw an album, evidenced by their flushing it out with two versions of "Rollin'," their theme from "M:I-2," seven minutes of Ben Stiller laughing and a handful of messages from Fred Durst's answering machine.
But Durst is sharp. "Get retarded," he urges at the close of the "Rollin'" remix. At least he knows his audience.
