To Be Reborn in the Butt Rock Era

Back in 2001, the Internet was a sprawling, wide-open space where finding niche communities and obscure information felt like a genuine exploration. There was a certain serendipity to stumbling upon a new band on Napster or discovering a forum dedicated to a shared passion. The algorithms hadn't yet learned to predict our tastes with such unnerving accuracy -- they hardly existed.

And in this space, there was freedom to explore the uncharted, unreconstructed emotions and ideas of youth -- rage, anger, horniness. For a few years, someone opened a window, and for a few years, it really knocked the entertainment industry on its ass.

It was in this less manicured digital world that the sounds of Butt Rock thrived. Bands like Creed, Staind and Puddle of Mudd, with their earnest-but-dumb and angst-ridden lyrics, heavy guitar riffs and stadium-ready anthems, dominated the radio airwaves and MTV.

Their popularity, while often derided by critics, spoke to a generation grappling with identity, uncertainty and the transition into adulthood. Their music was raw, often unpolished, and undeniably present. It was, against my will, the soundtrack of my adolescence.

The reason I bring these bands up is that an interesting thing has happened amid the poptimistic renaissance of the '20s -- young people have started to embrace those critically derided Butt Rockers. It's now fairly common to see a 17-year-old in baggy jeans and a Korn T-shirt. Creed's "One Last Breath" is ever present on social media. Nickelback has gotten a popular reassessment after years of being the, ahem, butt of jokes.

There are, as far as I can tell, a few reasons for this. One is that the pop culture nostalgia cycle has clicked over to the late '90s and early '00s -- in the words of Staind, "It's Been Awhile." Another is that the teenagers coming of age now are the children of my peers -- people who went to school during this time and are now middle-aged. Their kids are simply digging through their dusty CD binders.

But my theory is that it has to do with the meticulous millennial curation of good taste, itself a reaction to the Papyrus-font free-for-all of our younger years. You see, the world at large has become more connected via the Internet and smartphones, and our pop culture landscape has become much more curated and, to use a word the kids use, iconic.

That is to say that today's pop landscape is meticulously crafted -- each artist a brand, their image and sound carefully managed and disseminated through precisely targeted social media campaigns. Our stars are not people; they are ideas, symbols and icons of our burgeoning empire.

There is Beyoncé, the goddess of capitalism; Sabrina Carpenter, the sexpot; Lana Del Rey, the femme fatale; Charli XCX, the party girl; and Chappell Roan, the queer party crasher. With the exception of perhaps Roan -- who seems to struggle with emotional regulation and throws the occasional temper tantrum -- you are unlikely to ever hear these stars go off-brand, generate controversy or ever let on that they are, in any way, shape or form, well, human.

They are projections. They are icons for marketing demographics, carefully sculpted and whittled down to sell the most product possible. They are the manifestation of your social media algorithm.

But whether intentionally or not, I find it interesting that these two pop cultural moments have converged. At a time when the children of Christina Aguilera (who was great, by the way) have ascended to the throne, along come the Limp Bizkits, the Deftones and the other angry kids in the lunch room to challenge them.

The cultural arbiters and gatekeepers looked to bury them, to rewrite the pop culture story, as every generation of cultural critics does.

The first salvo was the veneration of the bands of New York's garage rock revival -- The Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Interpol -- in books and documentaries like "Meet Me in the Bathroom."

If you were a bit creative, the arrival of these bands around 2000 did feel like a breath of fresh air, and they were popular for a bit. The Strokes were on MTV2 (and sometimes MTV), and even as late as 2003 I remember seeing people wearing their band T-shirts in Fort Worth at TCU. But their reach and sales were minimal compared to Nickelback, or Limp Bizkit, who was going gold in hours. People were eating that shit up.

The reality is that unless you were specifically tapped into music in high school, you were not listening to Interpol -- that was college kid music, and even more so, it was college kid music for people who went to NYU, Columbia or RISD. Which is to say, it was the music of people that now write about music for major publications like The New York Times and The Atlantic.

The second move was to create space between this music and the Butt Rockers. We saw this in the condemning set of documentaries that came out over the last few years about Woodstock '99. Inferred in these documentaries was that there was a straight line to be drawn between Woodstock '99's misogyny and Trump-era MAGA-ness.

This, of course, ignores the fact that men in that millennial age group voted for Kamala Harris in higher numbers than any other male age group or that Butt Rock tended to attract more than its share of outcasts, arty kids and, yes, even LGBTQ+ fans. Or the cultural touchstones that followed -- the Iraq War, which most Democrats supported; the financial crisis, which politicians on both sides exacerbated; and the relentless psychological manipulation of social media, which legacy media wed itself to in its last gasp of relevance and reach.

But there is no doubt that Woodstock '99 is to be condemned. I, like many others, watched the televised reports with a mixture of fascination and horror. The initial excitement surrounding the revival of the iconic music festival quickly devolved into scenes of overcrowding, soaring temperatures, exorbitant prices, and ultimately, violence, fires and allegations of sexual assault. Limp Bizkit, who played a scorching set at that Butt Rock-laden event, received much of the blame for not doing enough to cool down the aggressive crowd.

I was not a Limp Bizkit fan in high school, aside from a song here or there on the radio. They weren't for me. But since moving to Jacksonville, I have become oddly defensive of them, as they started from here and their sound is driven by the buoyant, jazz-inspired drumming of John Otto. For some reason they are seen as the poster boys of everything that went wrong at Woodstock, even though frontman Fred Durst did try to channel the crowd's negative energy into something positive, and even though other bands were much more flagrant.

Like, for instance, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, whose bass player, Flea, performed nude at the event and who egged the actual riot on with a rendition of Jimi Hendrix's "Fire," even as fans tore down equipment and started actual fires. Hollywood, it seems, protects its own.

Limp Bizkit, though, will not seem to stay buried.

What's missed in this hyper-demographic jocks-sluts-freaks-stoners-and-nerds revision of history is that people in those days did not view music with the same hyper-identification.

Sure, you would have your favorite band, and sure, there were kids who were metalheads. But these were small groups, and oftentimes they were short phases -- maybe a few months, even. The reality is that oftentimes the same kids burning Limp Bizkit CDs were also downloading Dave Matthews Band live sets and watching Mos Def on "Chappelle's Show."

That's especially true for jam bands and Butt Rock. Both existed outside the tightly controlled mainstream pop sphere, offering a sense of belonging to those who gravitated toward their respective sounds. Both were fueled by Napster (the aforementioned live sets; Limp Bizkit actually went on a tour sponsored by Napster and was one of the biggest supporters of the new technology).

Also, it's worth noting that Bizkit has very recently sued its record label for hundreds of millions of back royalties. It's almost like the band that continually challenges the notoriously corrupt record industry is also the one most criticized from an era full of bands behaving very badly. Funny how that works.

The ability to freely share music online democratized access to a vast library of songs. It empowered listeners to explore beyond the curated playlists of radio and MTV, contributing to a more fragmented and individualized musical landscape, even as certain genres like Butt Rock ascended to mainstream dominance.

Remember in the years before teenagers had been sold trip-hop (which I loved), rave culture and a host of other things that while exciting, didn't have a lot to do with what it actually felt like to be a teenager in the middle of Nowheresville, America. Butt Rock and its snotty little brother, pop punk, felt good. And oftentimes, these bands came from the Jacksonvilles, Inland Empires and Omahas that most kids actually grow up in.

This is nothing new. Garage rock took a hormonal and angry turn in late '60s as drugs entered the picture. The '70s were full of anxieties over the meathead rock of bands like Grand Funk Railroad and whether or not they even got what the '60s were about, man, and bands like Judas Priest would take that to even darker extremes. The '80s saw hardcore punk bubbling under the surface even as the music industry sold the androgynous hedonism of hair metal (which looks oddly similar to the pop landscape of today).

But we've decided to repress it in the modern media landscape. For all of our hand-wringing about teenagers' mental health, about social media, about whether or not they use politically incorrect language -- we seem more afraid than ever of just letting these kids be angry. We seem unwilling to admit this is a part of being a young person.

And I believe this is largely because Woodstock '99 is a stand-in for that other thing that happened around that time, the thing we don't want to talk about.

The tragedy of the Columbine High School shooting in April 1999 cast a long and dark shadow over the end of the millennium, and we still haven't figured out how to deal with it -- gun control is stalled and these shootings continue.

It was a horrific event that exposed the vulnerability of schools and the potential for extreme violence within seemingly normal communities. The aftermath sparked national conversations about gun control, mental health and the influences of media on young people. I watched it on TV as it unfolded live, and it is burned in my memory.

My guess is that many millennials took the same subconscious message away from that event that I did -- "I don't want to be the bad guy." All of a sudden, my anger felt like something to be deeply ashamed of and to hide deep inside. And I have carried that fear into middle age. And some part of me did think that the scapegoats of the times -- violent video games, Marilyn Manson -- were to blame.

And, to an extent they were. These were also cynical extensions of an entertainment industry trying to extract as much money as possible from our Baby Boomer parents via us. And the artists gladly played along to get paid. I mean, how many dour songs can you really write?

The funny thing is Limp Bizkit always seemed to get this -- they could never stay that angry for long. There was a silliness to their sound, one that was informed as much by Jacksonville's local heroes 69 Boys and Quad City DJs as it was Korn. They were, in many ways, closer to those original rap-rockers Faith No More as they were anyone else. "Break Stuff" is an eternal song because of its honesty and even a certain amount of self-deprecation. Lead singer Fred Durst isn't "dangerous," "right now, he's dangerous." It is a moment.

This is why the Butt Rockers are the yin to the pop yang -- you cannot have one without the other. These are human thoughts. These are not icons. These are people, smelly ones, who feel and think and get it wrong. Humanity will, in the most inelegant ways, create space for its own humanity again and again.

By the time we made it to college in 2003 and 2004, we had mostly left the anger of Butt Rock behind. Bands like The Shins dominated our iTunes libraries, and we were more focused on our own forms of hedonism -- day-glo dancing, artistic exploration and intellectual gluttony.

Because by this time, things had gotten heavy and weird. We had seen our schoolmates ship off to Iraq and Afghanistan. We were experiencing the security crackdowns of the Patriot Act and the terror thermometer. 24-hour news was driving a steady drumbeat of party messaging into our psyches. A lot of our parents had divorced. There were tremors in the economy. We had grown up, and our era had begun in earnest.

The Third Wave of Emo would crest around this time for younger millennials. For them, anger and angst would be stuck with a form of self-pity. Instead of "despite all my rage I am still just a rat in a cage," it was, "I am a rat in a cage and I need so badly to rage."

Looking back at the documentaries on Woodstock '99, it's easy to dismiss the event as a colossal failure, a cautionary tale of misplaced nostalgia and corporate mismanagement. However, it also serves as a potent symbol of the era's contradictions.

The desire for a unifying musical experience clashed violently with the realities of greed and a lack of foresight. The anger and frustration that boiled over in the crowd arguably mirrored some of the angst present in the popular music of the time.

Or, to put it another way, trap a bunch of young people in a capitalist nightmare and see what happens. Anger without a channel burns the landscape.

So that brings us to the present age and the Butt Rock Revival. As much as I'd like to write it off as a cynical nostalgia cash grab or to just ignore it for its poor taste, I'm empathetic. I think it's no surprise many of these same kids are trending rightward in their politics. They are burning their own channel in the world through their anger. They have been sent mixed messages about social media (it's bad! But also literally everything is on it!). Their language has been policed. Their feelings have been policed.

And for what? Things are not changing. They aren't getting better. The people up top, still out of touch, are getting paid. Those of us who suffered through the excesses of neoconservatism don't want to admit that our liberal and left-wing Obama-era leaders look just as clueless, just as censoring and just as hypocritical as they did. And in school, kids are still getting shot at. Paychecks are still getting smaller. Life is getting heavier.

In the meantime, they've been spoon-fed brands, icons and ideas instead of real people with real feelings. Beneath the marble, the fire of humanity burns. Now give me something to break.

How will it all play out? I can't tell you. I can just tell you I see it, I get it, and I was there once. It will all pass by, and another era will be born. But let this one kill the last one. It deserves to die.