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 things got so big that I don’t remember getting them getting bigger.”
Things were already getting pretty damn big for Limp Bizkit by the turn of the millennium. In an era where metal’s 90s generation had all but prised the baton from its elder statesmen, Bizkit looked set to be the scene’s most successful, but controversial, graduates. A stint supporting Korn followed by abrasive debut album Three Dollar Bill, Y’all in 1997 would see them become one of the most talked-about bands in rock. Their cocksure mix of brawling hip hop and kaiju-sized riffs was drawing in a wide array of fans, but it also made them an instant target for metal’s more sneery quarters - accusations that their music and image was opening our world up for invasion by jocks and posers ran riot.
It didn’t matter: when Significant Other landed in 1999, it peaked at No.1 in the States and made the Top 10 in the UK, the likes of Break Stuff and Nookie providing metal’s biggest breakout anthems for a generation. It was also a record that saw them continue to court controversy: Bizkit’s set at the disastrous Woodstock ’99 was scapegoated for the widespread violence that marred the festival. The sales, however, kept coming in, and the quintet - Wes, becapped frontman Fred Durst, bassist Sam Rivers, drummer John Otto and DJ Lethal - now had enough momentum to become rock’s most significant band in a decade. And so, wanting to bottle that lightning, and after only half a year of promotion for Significant Other, the band knuckled down for album number three.