New York Times, NY
May 12 2005

Critic’s Notebook
>From Punk to Rap, the Varied Guises of the Hard-Rock Sound

By KELEFA SANNEH
Published: May 12, 2005

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.

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Judith Schlieper for The New York Times
The protest-metal band System of a Down performed this week at Irving
Plaza in New York.

Excerpts of Songs by System of a Down and Limp Bizkit

Forum: Popular Music
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.