May 12, 2005
From Punk to Rap, the Varied Guises of the Hard-Rock Sound
By KELEFA SANNEH
The New York Times
Contract disputes usually aren't much fun to eavesdrop on, but an exception must be made for Linkin Park, the deceptively mild-mannered rap-rock band that's feuding with its record company, the Warner Music Group.
Last week the Firm, Linkin Park's management company, issued an entertaining press release. Among other things, the statement said that Warner Music Group's stock offering might weaken the company's ability to "market and promote Linkin Park." This was a neat reversal, since the usual complaint about major labels is the exact opposite: they spend too much money marketing and promoting bands like Linkin Park.
Even more startling was the group's casual claim that they were Warner Music Group's "biggest act," a claim that echoes one made by the Warner Music chairman Edgar Bronfman Jr., who has described the group as "the biggest rock band in the world." Really? Linkin Park? Those rather anonymous-looking guys who recently did time as Jay-Z's backup band? How did that happen?
The answer is that Linkin Park triumphed mainly by not messing up. Less flamboyant and less mediagenic than their rap-rock contemporaries, the members surpassed the competition by working hard and keeping relatively low profiles. The band's second and most recent full-length album, "Meteora," has sold more than 10 million copies, even though Chester Bennington (the lead singer) and Mike Shinoda (the lead rapper) are hardly household names.
By contrast, look what happened to Limp Bizkit, once one of rap-rock's best-selling acts. After a string of hits, the lead barker Fred Durst became better known as a celebrity punch line than as a rap-rock frontman. More people probably remember his rumored fling with Britney Spears or that disastrous Chicago concert (the band was reportedly run off the stage; some fans later sued over the shortened set) than remember the group's 2003 album, "Results May Vary."
Indeed, things have gotten so dire for Limp Bizkit that the band has now embraced precisely the situation that Linkin Park says it is worried about. The new Limp Bizkit mini-album, "The Unquestionable Truth (Part 1)," released by Geffen, snuck into stores last week with virtually no marketing or promotion. This wasn't just a quiet release but a secret one: the band has made no mention of the CD in recent interviews, and many fans (yes, some remain) were doubtless surprised to stroll into record stores on May 3 and find a new Limp Bizkit release on the racks.
While Linkin Park and Limp Bizkit have been busy with (respectively) high-profile press releases and low-profile CDs, an unlikely contender has emerged as the country's favorite heavy rock band of the moment. The hyper-quirky Armenian-American protest-metal act, System of a Down, is in the middle of a whirlwind promotional tour that has included an appearance on "Saturday Night Live" and a so-called "guerrilla tour" (because the band is playing small venues) that came to Irving Plaza on Monday night. All of this is intended to ensure that the band's new CD, "Mezmerize" (American/Columbia), will enjoy one of the year's biggest debuts when it's released on Tuesday.
It's hard to imagine better evidence of the topsy-turvy state of loud rock. While Limp Bizkit bashes out chest-pounding rap-rock on an underground EP, System of a Down is on "Saturday Night Live" playing an antiwar song called, "BYOB," which has singer Serj Tankian exclaiming, "My God is of Bible blood with pointed ears."
The strange thing about Limp Bizkit is that Mr. Durst has always been at pains to portray himself as an underdog, even when his band seemed like a corporate-rock juggernaut. If he were a better lyricist (or a more likable celebrity), his self-pity might have been easier to swallow. As it was, you often had to ignore him in order to enjoy his band's surprisingly propulsive riffs.
The new Limp Bizkit mini-album marks the band's reunion with its adventurous guitarist, Wes Borland, and the songs are as loud and raucous as any Bizkit fan could hope for, full of gluey bass lines and exploding backbeats. Unfortunately, Mr. Durst's rants are as unpalatable as ever: his take on evil priests ("The Priest") falls particularly flat.
Still, System of a Down fans shouldn't be too quick to hop aboard the anti-Durst bandwagon: Mr. Tankian is hardly immune to awkward polemics. In fact, the two singers sometimes write surprisingly similar lyrics. One of these bands has a song that includes the words, "Crying freedom/ Handed to obsoletion/ Still you feed us lies from the tablecloth." One has a song that includes the words, "Rebellious at heart all along/ Is your leader a voice?/ Somehow you've replaced all your gain with a debt." Can you guess which is which?
If nothing else, the diverging tales of System of a Down and Limp Bizkit show just how quickly hard-rock paradigms can shift: at a time when the Latino post-punk noisemakers in Mars Volta seem poised to outsell the rap-rock dinosaurs in Korn, Mr. Tankian's self-conscious weirdness seems a lot fresher than Mr. Durst's red-hatted rage. So if the members of "the biggest rock band in the world" seem surprisingly nervous about their maintaining their stature, maybe they have good reason. All rock bands love pretending to be underdogs, but as Mr. Durst can attest, it's not always fun to become one.
