In 2001, Wes Borland left Limp Bizkit after losing all of his money in the post-9/11 stock crash, as he told MTV: ‘Bells start going off, like, ‘This is what it feels like to sell out.” I’m enjoying all the perks of [Limp Bizkit], but I feel my heart is going black, because this is not what I’m called to do. The little voice inside my head says, ‘You should be somewhere else. You should take the risk. You should let it go.’” I think they’ll be better now that I’m gone. I think I held them back from being their best, because I was so against all the things that were going on. I could have probably gone on and still played the part of the guitar player of Limp Bizkit, but musically I was kind of bored. If I was to continue, it would have been about the money and not about the true music, and I don’t want to lie to myself, or to them or to fans of Limp Bizkit.’
‘The original statement said the split was amicable, and I would say that it is, but that doesn’t mean that we can, like, hang out. It’s gonna take a lot of time to heal. There’s definitely not any bad feelings, but it’s not like we’re going to have lunch anytime soon.’ Durst responded to this by doing his best to give Borland even more reasons to avoid having lunch with him. He attempted to strongarm Borland into rejoining by posting Borland’s email address on the band’s website and telling fans to ‘email Wes and tell him to come back to his family’.
Borland naturally did not appreciate being doxxed, and commented on Eat the Day’s website: ‘I have to say that I immediately wanted to shut the account down, but ended up leaving it up for a while to see what kind of response I got. Although I did not read the hundreds of e-mails themselves, I took time to browse over the subject titles. 75% or more of all the e-mails pleaded for me not to return. I was amazed. Thank you all for the support. You again have let me know that you agree with my decision.’ Ross Robinson was among the supporters of this decision, as he told NME: ‘He’s happier than he’s ever been in his entire life. He’s not a bitter person at all. He called me up and he was laughing out of joy… It’s the same exact thing as from the beginning. He quit before the band did the first record. He’s following his heart. He’s a person of integrity. He doesn’t sell out for money anymore.’
Durst didn’t agree with Robinson’s assessment: ‘I’m glad that you people read my news recently about Mr Borland. He’s received your emails and has responded negatively, but that’s no reason to give up. He replied by saying that 75% of all his emails were telling him to never be with Limp Bizkit. I’m glad some of you feel that way, but we don’t and we’re not fair weather friends. We love Wes and have done so through our good and bad times… The fact that we are all different is what makes our chemistry so good. We learn from each other’s mistakes. We don’t need justification for reasons. We’re very happy to be alive and would be happier sharing our lives with our family. Our core family… As for Mr. Borland, he is very bitter at the moment and feels glad that you support his decision and so he should. We support him too, but we know why we’re all here and we want to extend open arms that will remain open forever. We want to grow and reinvent for ourselves and we will always WANT to do it with our real family.’
The band replaced Borland with Snot guitarist Mike Smith, only to record an entire album then scrap it. A second attempt spawned their aptly titled fourth album, Results May Vary — a commercial and critical flop, widely considered to be their worst record. Tensions with Smith led him to leave the band. Durst then somehow convinced Borland to give up his principles and rejoin. Perhaps he agreed because the ramifications of his financial decisions finally hit him. He reflected on his decision to quit in 2020: ‘I look back on this it’s just like, ‘God, you’re an idiot.’ And everyone listening to this will think I’m an idiot too, but this is how hard-headed I am and was at the time.“They were like, ‘All the money’s gone, you lost all your money in the stock market. We have touring set up next year and you’re gonna net 5 million next year.’ And I said, ‘You can shove it up your fucking ass. I’d rather be poor.’’
The band returned to Ross Robinson for the first time since their debut and promised their fans a return to that heaviness and rawness. It’s surprising that Robinson agreed to this, as he’d repeatedly prided himself on turning down the band’s sophomore record. Just five years earlier, in a 2000 issue of NME, Robinson stated that Limp Bizkit were no different than Britney Spears: ‘[Fred is] willing to do whatever it takes and so is she. I don’t know, maybe it’s a race to sell more records. Y’know, that’s their game. It can’t last too much longer, but if it does, good for them… It seems like people are able to be fed cotton candy with no substance. They just keep eating it and surviving off of it. I don’t understand how they can live off of this cotton candy.’
Nonetheless, Robinson finally agreed to work with them again, and the result was a 30min, 7 song EP — The Unquestionable Truth (Part 1). I couldn’t find any information on where this EP was recorded or who engineered or mixed it, but it sounds huge, with wide guitars and a fat bass sound. It feels a bit more polished than most Robinson productions. Drummer John Otto was unavailable to record the EP due to personal issues, so he only appears on ‘The Channel’. NY hardcore drummer Sammy Siegler (see Glassjaw’s debut) does a solid job filling in on four songs. The band sounds a hell of a lot tighter here than they did on their debut (but a good bit looser than on any of their work since), and it’s clear they’re trying to stretch themselves musically, but the quality of the results is highly mixed. It ultimately feels like the band was trying too hard to be taken seriously and missed the mark. Durst is especially out of his element.
It seems Durst had become uncomfortable with his class clown image, so this EP was an attempt to change that. For the first time, he wasn’t going to write about himself — instead, he was going to lean into Rage Against the Machine imitation and try to write about serious social issues. This works about as well as you’d expect (the album cover’s confused iconography says it all). The most absurd result is ‘The Priest’, a song about child sexual abuse in the Catholic church, which features brilliantly nuanced lines like ‘My evil is thirsting for more. I need a new outlet to feed. What can I do? I’ve got an idea, I think I’ll just become a priest. Deceiving them with my belief, I’ll preach about what life is worth and cover my sins with the church. My demons can run around free. No one will suspect a thing. I’ll show them its okay to lust. A priest is who children can trust.’
It’s the most dynamic track here, with grooveless hushed verses exploding into dissonant riffing. The bridge features Durst’s first attempt at the patented Robinson meltdown, and the results are… interesting: ‘Oh my God, I’m watching TV, but I can’t — oh, what’s this world coming to? I see a priest molesting children. I see terrorists blowing up buildings. I see someone in rage, killing Dimebag on stage. What the fuck is this? What the fuck is this? I got a kid. Should I send him to Sunday School? I got a kid. Should I send him to Sunday School so you can FUCK him? Oh no, no, you ain’t gonna fuck him. How ‘bout this? I DON’T FUCKING KNOW who I can trust in this world, and I’m gonna blow.’
‘The Channel’ is similarly on the nose: ‘I don’t like the radio, I don’t like TV. They’re selling so much shit these days, and the shit is not who I wanna be. I don’t like officials, using rank to pretend they’re not crooks. I don’t like the tricks played on kids in those shitty teen metal books. I don’t like my heroes to kill themselves with the drugs.’ And of course he’s gotta throw in a little misogyny for good measure, following that with a self-roast: ‘I don’t like the whores that try to fuck you for your game. I don’t like my childhood and do not need somebody else to blame. I don’t like this music, I don’t like this band.’ One can’t help but wonder what effect Fred thinks his music is having on the kids.
In ‘The Story’, Durst tackled the downfalls of fame and gossip rags over syncopated downtuned riffs. The lyrics clearly demonstrate why Durst’s attempts at pivoting to serious topics don’t work. It’s not just that they’re embarrassingly on the nose and confused — it’s that even when attempting to look outside of himself, he still ended up making everything all about him. Sorry, Fred, but Zack de la Rocha you are not. Thankfully, he realized this approach didn’t work, got over his identity crisis, and has spent the rest of his career staying in his lane.
As for the music, it’s not just a return to the heaviness of their debut — it’s the heaviest this band ever sounded. Opening song ‘The Propaganda’ immediately announces that it’s moshing time with a fast chugging riff — it’s the band at the absolute top of their game. Durst can’t help but ruin it all, of course, with lyrics like ‘Life is just a big bowl of cherries / A bunch of fairies screaming to be scary’ and ‘Fucked over for the times I’ve been grateful / Fucked over led to times I’ve been hateful / Main attraction, fuck you in your pussy mouth’. As this is a Robinson production, we’re unfortunately back to hearing Durst’s singing without any touchups. This is immediately obvious in the back half of the song, where he sings a bizarre and pitchy melody that almost sounds like it’s in the wrong key. Borland steps in and saves the day with a compelling wobbly lead.
Sadly, the opening track is the best the EP has to offer. ‘The Truth’ starts with a Tool-esque intro, only to explode into a full embrace of uninspired RATM worship before returning to some classic Borland riffing. The noise riff in the verse is one of the best on the album, but Durst’s awkward rhyming once again gets in the way. The hip-hop side of the music has been drastically reduced here, only appearing in the brief interlude ‘The Key’, which almost feels like an obligatory concession. As such, DJ Lethal feels sidelined for most of this EP, though he does contribute some appealing ambience here and there, even if it’s subtle.
That ambience underscores the quiet closing ballad, ‘The Surrender’, which is otherwise centered around clean guitar arpeggios, harmonica, and classic Durst self-pity. Halfway through, Durst gets more impassioned, Borland plays a noise solo, and it all turns into a bit of a mess. Really, like many of Robinson’s mid-2000s productions, the whole EP feels a bit messy and oddly vibeless. This is partially due to the reduced hip-hop elements in the music, which provided a lot of the character in the band’s older material. But it’s also Robinson — whatever magic he’d sometimes brought to the table earlier on had largely evaporated by this point, and I can only imagine that this wasn’t a project he particularly cared about to begin with.
If Borland was returning to the band hoping for a payday, Durst was quick to sabotage that. In an odd display of ‘principles’, he decided to eschew advertising and promotion and make the EP an underground release. This led to renewed tensions between Borland and Durst, as Borland told MTV: ‘When he came to us with the idea of not promoting it at all, and not touring, we were like, ‘Huh?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, it will be great — like we’re starting from the underground all over again. I just said, ‘Um … all right. So we’re going to release a record and not promote it and not tour, and this is going to do well how, exactly?’ It was like, instead of firing an armor-piercing round out of a 10-story cannon at the moon, we got out the BB gun. Maybe he was already unhappy with the music, and he didn’t really want to put it out there. It was definitely self-sabotage. I don’t think Limp is actually very relevant [to] people anymore. We’ve been one of the most hated bands in the world for a long time, and I just think people are over it. I have never really been a fan of what we’ve done.’
Unsurprisingly, this release also flopped. The band announced their intent to follow this with a Robinson-produced full length sequel, but it never materialized. By early 2006, Borland was already regretting his decision to rejoin: ‘I haven’t quit, but I’ve also decided to stop thinking about Limp. I’m not going to keep trying to breathe life into a dying animal. It just ground to a halt. We just basically stopped talking. I feel bad for the fans that think something’s actually going to happen with Limp. It’s not happening. The Unquestionable Truth (Part 2) is not coming out. If it does, I’d be super surprised. But you can never say never. Anything’s possible. As of right now, none of my future plans include Limp Bizkit. I can’t keep my life in a holding pattern, and I can’t think of a band that’s completely inactive as my main project.’
The band managed to release an unrelated Durst-produced album, Gold Cobra, in 2011, then resumed work on The Unquestionable Truth (Part 2) with Robinson. In 2013, they signed to Ca$h Money records, changed the title to Stampede of the Disco Elephants, and started to release singles. Before the album could be released, the label deal disintegrated and the album vanished into the ether. The 2010s were a messy period for them, filled with hiatuses, Borland and leaving and rejoining the band yet again, Lethal leaving and rejoining the band, and health issues. They finally released their brief sixth full length, Still Sucks, in 2021. With that record, it felt like they’d finally become comfortable in their own skin and owned their goofiness. Personally, I find that preferable to Durst’s attempts at being someone else on this EP — but I also can’t deny how hard ‘The Propaganda’ grooves.
