limpbizkit VS THE WORLD
If Korn’s self-titled 1994 debut represented nu metal at its rawest, purest roots, then surely no album better personified its rise to obnoxious, all-conquering glory than Chocolate Starfish And The Hot Dog Flavored Water. Limp Bizkit’s loud, lairy and ludicrously titled third record ushered in the moment where alternative music’s relationship with the mainstream reached critical mass. It was the album that confirmed a once unthinkable dynamic: metal was, even if only for a moment, the biggest genre in the world. True, Hybrid Theory may have arrived a mere week later to take things even further, but that album took a little while longer to become the unstoppable, history-making juggernaut we now recognise it as. Chocolate Starfish…, meanwhile, was an instant phenomenon; shifting more than a million copies in a week, it became the fastest-selling rock album of all time and completed Limp Bizkit’s evolution from metal’s outsider frat boys into legitimate pop culture icons.
“I never thought Limp Bizkit was gonna be as large as it was,” admits guitarist Wes Borland today down a phone line from his home in Detroit. “Then the record sold a million in the first week. It was just ridiculous. There was a point in which
