“Give me something to break,” roared the Florida Man on MTV. All the lessons of musical innovation, of periods leading from one to the next, and the entire history of rock evolution, had led to this point. We had emerged from the somber Seattle Sound of the ’90s and the new bands in town hooked onto the deep emotional register of that music and expunged it of intellect and meaning. They screamed. They borrowed from every sound and mashed it all together. They broke genre and form apart and made something wholly new, newly ugly, something that appealed to the wrong people at the wrong time. It also worked. Everyone bought their records. More people bought their records than admitted to it. It was a sea change in music culture and Limp Bizkit rode the crux of the wave, identifying the crossover appeal between the bouncy beats of hip-hop and the hardness of active rock. The shockwaves were felt, as a kind of counterprogramming not just to regular pop but to the commercial vehicle of alternative and the marketing term of grunge. The energy of the ’90s permitted this. This is your culture: your trashing skateboarding soundtrack to a hard-nosed ’90s affront to common decency in music. Something that goes beyond rock standards and says that kind of reverence just won’t do anymore. Settle in as we detail the story of Limp Bizkit, the equally maligned and talented pioneers of nu-metal.