“SHOTGUN”: A DETAILED ANALYSIS OF THE NEW LIMP BIZKIT SINGLE

I got home from last night’s ridiculously, ludicrously fun Dillinger Escape Plan’s show at The Music Hall of Williamsburg in the wee hours of this morning to find a new Limp Bizkit single, “Shotgun,” in my inbox. (The above cover art was apparently done by Wes Borland. Good to know he’s multi-talented.) And even though I was riding high on the buzz of DEP (and other things) and should have just gone to sleep, I decided, no, let me listen to this right now, and in doing so take my joy out back behind the barn and shoot it dead.

And shoot it dead I dead.

There’s a lot about this song that is just bad in a regular, fairly boring way — like the main riff, which is pretty standard 120 Minutes stuff.

But then there are parts of this song that are so phenomenally terrible as to be truly worthy of the name “Limp Bizkit.”

Take, for example, the lyrics. I’m not going to go through the entire song line by line because holy shit I can only take so much, but I will go through the second verse and chorus in detail just so you have some idea of what I mean when I say “This song could seriously be responsible for starting World War III.”

The verse begins thusly:

Woke up in the morning in the county jail
And I can’t remember yesterday that well
Hell I can’t remember when I slept that well
I told this girl I been fucking to get my bell

Okay, so right away, Fred Durst has lost me. And, no, not just because I can’t remember hearing about Durst spending time in a county jail recently, if ever. Rather, because I don’t know what the phrase “go get my bell” means. I even looked up the word “bell” on Urban Dictionary to see if there some was some slang usage of the word with which I am unfamiliar, but none of the provided definitions really seem to fit. Am I just really old and uncool? Is Durst hip to some terminology which escapes me? Did he just make up some meaningless rhyme because he knows his audience is too stupid to understand that he isn’t really saying anything? Seriously, if anyone knows the answer, please drop me a line. I’m curious to know what the fuck this rocket scientist thinks he’s communicating.

Also, great work rhyming “jail” with “well.”

Also, great working rhyming “well” with “well.”

Douche.

The verse continues:

‘Cause I pop
Pop
Pop off the rockship

Yeah I don’t really know what that means, either, but Durst keeps saying it throughout the song.

You probably heard it all before
Baby not this
This a shout to you ladies with the hot tits
(Whoa!)
Courtesy of Limp Bizkit on some rock shit
(C’mon!)

I’m sure the ladies with the hot tits are flattered.

By the way — just wondering — how the fuck did we end up here a mere stanza after waking up in the county jail and having said time in the county jail be the best night’s sleep our hero has enjoyed in some time? I mean, a guy who has a good night’s sleep in jail but doesn’t quite remember how he ended up there sounds like kind of a deadbeat, right? And not, like, an adorable deadbeat, like a character Bruce Willis would play. Like a real, full-on deadbeat, like Charles Bukowski would write about (or just like Charles Bukowski, for that matter). So why did the verse begin describing such a character and then suddenly become about hot tits?

Also, he says that we’ve “probably heard it all before,” but “not this” — but then his big reveal is that this song is for fine-breasted women. Does Fred Durst seriously think we’ve never heard a song about boobs before? Is he completely unaware of the entire discography of the Los Angeles glam scene of the 1980s?

Now here we go
Start it up
Should I remind you motherfuckers I don’t give a fuck?

Again, the segue here is so poor that I don’t know what we’re talking about. What does Durst not giving a fuck have to do with anything else he has said so far? And why is he telling us he doesn’t give a fuck now? About what does he not give a fuck? Everything? Jail? Hot tits? And what did we do to provoke such lack of giving a fuck? What is this song about?

(Hell no!)
I never have
(Hell yeah!)
I never will
And I will always understand how the haters feel

If you understand how the haters feel, then why are you still rapping? CUT IT OUT, DICK.

Let me tell you people what you need to know
You gotta plant a lot of seeds for your weed to grow

I’ve never actually grown my own weed and, believe it or not, I do not know much about the process. So, I dunno, this advice may be true. That being said, I still don’t know what we’re talking about here. Did you go to jail for growing weed? And even if you did, how is this particular fact about the weed-growing process relevant to your story? Did you get caught when they found all the seeds? And what does this have to do with hot tits and you not giving a fuck again?

You also to know when you need to run
You hear that?
[sound of a shotgun being racked and fired]
That’s the sound of a shotgun

I love that he tells us what the sound we just heard is even though we just heard it, and it’s an easily recognizable sound. It’s not like anyone would hear that sound and think it was a peacock mating call or something.

But, still, I have no idea what the sound of a shotgun has to do with anything else that has been said thus far. I guess he’s in jail because he didn’t know when to run and leave his seeds behind. Luckily that girl with the hot tits he’s been fucking is bringing him his bell, so I think it’s all gonna work out okay.

Everybody jumps from the sound of a shotgun
In my neighborhood everybody got one (x4)

I tried to find out where Fred Durst lives now, but when I Googled the phrase “Where does Fred Durst live?”, I got distracted by this discussion thread from Elite Fitness:

Which is a fair enough question (Although the answer seems fairly simple to me: “He’s rich and famous.”), but how is that relevant to fitness? The same way hot tits are relevant to the county jail, I guess.

ANYWAY, Fred asserts that everyone in his neighborhood has a shotgun, although I have a hard time believing Fred lives in the rough part of town and/or the deep south. I dunno, it’s just a hunch I have, that he lives in a big house in a nice neighborhood with no crime or hunting. I could be wrong, though. He says it four times so he must really want us to believe it.

And this assertion is followed by the next really truly spectacularly heinous aspect of this song — namely, Wes Borland raping a baby lamb with that strap-on with the blade on it from Seven for twenty-five seconds. Seriously, I don’t know how else to describe it. It is the single worst guitar solo I have ever heard on an actual record being released by an actual band of some note. It seems to be going for that whole John Frusciante less-is-more aesthetic, and I guess to its credit it does seem to have some structure to it, but mostly it’s just kinda like “What the fuck is that sound he’s making with his guitar and why is he making it and who told him that was acceptable and then decided this should be in the lead fucking single for this album?” If Borland had just looked at some pictures of Kai Greene for a few seconds until he became aroused and then ran erection-first into a guitar, he might have made a more pleasant sounding solo. In any case, it certainly would have been shorter.

And then the song concludes with thirty-five seconds — thirty-five motherfucking seconds — of DJ Lethal scratching over a sample from “The Streets of Cairo” (although the members of Limp Bizkit probably know it as “All the Girls in France”) interspersed with rhythmically-timed shotgun blasts.

Let me repeat that again, in case it somehow didn’t register the first time:

This song concludes with thirty-five seconds of DJ Lethal scratching over a sample from “The Streets of Cairo” interspersed with rhythmically-timed shotgun blasts.

Christfuck, I can’t believe anyone is still going along with this in 2011.

And thus, Limp Bizkit re-claim their title as The Worst Band in the World. Step aside Winds of Plague, Emmure, Oceano, Vampires Everywhere!, Attack Attack!, and all other pretenders to the title! THE BIZKIT IS BACK!!!

-AR