What Is Happening With Fred Durst?

Limp Bizkit singer Fred Durst has given us his share of wildly WTF antics.

Let’s start with the time in 2015 he praised Vladimir Putin as a “great guy with clear moral principles and a nice person.”

Or the time he was arrested for kicking a security guard in the head. At least figuratively, Durst bashed in many a head when his group’s nu metal rap-rock dominated MTV in the very late '90s. His casual anti-women, anti-gay dudebro-ness was Y2K jelly at its stickiest.

There was the time he talked to Howard Stern about banging Britney and when he fought with Carson Daly over a blow-up doll meant as an effigy of Christina Aguilera in an Eminem video — before the rapper went on to reverse-psychology his way into winning a Grammy by saying he didn’t “give a fuck about a Grammy.” Well done, Recording Academy.

Durst’s wardrobe followed the color palette of the U.S. flag, and he symbolized the worst of the time. His red baseball cap was as perpetually backwards as his entire being and seemingly glued to his head — that and his penciled-in goatee embodied early 2000s crapfest culture rollin'-rollin' in an era that celebrated default douchiness and aggression as virtuous masculinity.

Durst made red caps uncool before Trump and tarnished the Durst name before Robert “The Jinx” went on trial for murder.

And yet, even with all that, can we have an eye roll, please … the self-proclaimed “most hated” artist is now pulling a stunt straight out of Joaquin Phoenix’s weird-idea dream journal.

On Friday, Oct. 6, Durst and his band, Limp Bizkit, played a set at the Aftershock Festival in Sacramento. A simple U.S. flag adorned the stage. Guitarist Wes Borland came out in his signature black and white makeup. Durst was also in costume, we think. The singer came out looking like Howdy Doody, in full cowboy gear. He was practically missing a string on its back that says, "There's a snake in my boot," when you pull on it.

Behind the band, a sign lit up that read “Nu Metal Cowboy.”

If the term “Don’t California my Texas” were a person, it would be Fred Durst dressed up in Big Tex’s laundry. (Yeah, we know he's from Florida.)

Nu look, y’all.

Durst seems to be taking a Spam-greased page from gift-shop-cowboy-hat contemporary Kid Rock, who’s also never ridden a horse once in his life and who you just know calls his mom asking for help whenever a cricket makes its way into his McMansion.
At his height, Durst didn’t just appeal to male hormones and women who'd given up in life. Even in a wasteland culture of obscenely commercial music clinging to the pre-Napster glory days, Limp Bizkit were far from the soggiest radio shit to present itself as rock.

Some of Limp Bizkit’s songs were catchy as hell, and we all caught that shit like COVID. The group was about the nookie, the fun of being carelessly dumb and, of course, breaking stuff. They were a gag that paved the way for the era of peak idiocy soon to follow: reality stars who talked in baby voices even while cat-fighting, Ashton Kutcher's trucker hat era and no one batting an eye at the thought of Hugh Hefner’s old ball sack routinely smacking fame-hungry models as part of the gig.

This was the time actresses were contractually obligated to pose semi-nude for men's magazines, and Durst’s vodka-and-Red-Bull-body-shot reign kept strong, even as the band was blamed for inciting a riot during Woodstock '99, when the peace-and-love festival under Limp Bizkit and Durst’s performance of “Break Stuff” turned the audience into a Black Friday sale on steroids and cocaine.

So, yeah, much of the Fred Durst hate was deserved.

But this, this takes things just too far. Durst playing Aftershock with a sign that says “nu metal cowboy” is a level of irony that goes over our heads. He looks like a Honda-driving Frisco customer service rep trying to look red-dirty at Electric Cowboy, trying to tell you about a new guy he found named Charley Crockett. He looks like that guy who goes to Marfa for content and who bought his living room taxidermy on Amazon.

The band opened and closed the set with “Break Stuff.”

Limp Bizkit’s frontman canceled the band’s European tour last year, citing “health issues.” We're no doctors, but it looks a lot like the Fake Cowboy Syndrome caught last year by Glenn Beck.