So the story goes: I had gotten a small sound system, I guess the term would be, for either my birthday, or a religious holiday, I don't really recall. This sucker had a slot for a cassette tape, and a CD player, two fuck-me speakers and a bass boost that I turned off in no time at all. It also had a headphone extension, which I used sometimes to listen to Phil Collins' Another Day in Paradise to cry when I couldn't sleep (a tradition that lives on, albeit with different music.) This was actually before I had gotten Ride the Lightning, but in any case.
I was collecting cassettes at this time, as CD's were too expensive. I didn't have the money to buy a discman, and a walkman was much more portable anyway. When the same mp3 site I'd been using clued me into a song called Pollution by one of my favourite bands at the time, I happened to talk to a schoolmate about it. He was strange, in that I never knew if we were friends or if we were enemies, or if I hurt him too much. He had been one of the scant few, and mostly innocent, targets of my rare and rather apathetic actions, but he was alright, and he loved Bizkit much as I did. He told me that he actually had their first album on tape, but it was impossible now, it was all CD's.
I don't know how many stores I went to. I remember losing my patience at the end of a very long day of bus rides, exhausting every possibility, and snapping: "No, I need this on a cassette, god damn it, I need it on motherfucking cassette!"
But no. CD's everywhere. This would, in later years, translate to "digital downloads everywhere." Some things never change.
Begrudgingly, I bought the CD. I spun it a couple of times, and it was pretty damn good, but I couldn't take it with me! Then a little "record" button on the tape player's row caught my attention. I bought an empty tape, popped it in, put the CD on, and transferred it. I emptied out the only Backstreet Boys album I had (yeah, I had one, if you must know.) Now for the sleeve... I had a scanner and a printer, both came in handy in creating a low-quality sleeve cut out of A4 paper, the track names written in Times New Roman on the inside of it, and I had my cassette copy of Three Dollar Bill, Y'all$. I was proud of myself. Alright, so it wasn't an official copy, but what could I have done? I had worked with the materials I had been given.
Now almost twenty years after the fact, Three Dollar Bill, Yall$ is, to me, the best album Limp Bizkit has ever recorded. Significant Other (1999) is a very close second, but one thing it isn't, is perfect. Three Dollar Bill, Y'all$ is perfect. The first thing I had noticed, even with Pollution was how raw it was, how much force was crammed into it. That's the thing, really, as this album isn't just Limp Bizkit's breakout (as arguably, Significant Other was what made them), it's also one of their hardest, most versatile albums. It's darker than its successors, it's harder, it has more of the downer moments that I adore(d.)
Yes, even when they are over-the-top enough to be tongue-in-cheek.
I mean, how else can I term songs like Sour, Clunk, Nobody Loves Me or even better, Indigo Flow, which is a tribute song, a shout-out song but manages to cram that special kind of dark into it? Or one of the best renditions of George Michael's Faith ever recorded? But it wasn't all just that, because the (to me) experimental Counterfeit, the breathless Pollution, the mid-tempo but plenty groovy Stuck and the white-knuckle tight Leech brought different flavours, different moods. It's perhaps before the band and, more like Fred, began to enjoy their fame a bit too much, because there is something very punk about it all. Very fuck-it, very our-own-rules, which makes it all the more special.
Thing is, maybe a year after the fact, I would discover another* one of those anime AMV's which were the first examples of memes. It was Limp Bizkit's version of Faith set to scenes from one of my favourite animes, Golden Boy. This was during the Bratislava years, and the CD that held this little AMV also housed what has been, ever since I watched it, my favourite movie of all time - Ghost in the Shell. But that'll be mentioned in its own separate entry.
For now, there is still the not-so small matter of the rest of the 2000 brigade. I'm thinking, a band that I had done everything I could to avoid at first, because their music video was everywhere, all the time, and I just hadn't found it all that amazing... yet.
I'm talking about Super Xero of course.
*Footnotes: 1- The first is of course the Final Fantasy IV-VIII compilation AMV set to The Offspring's Staring at the Sun. It had come out of a demo CD that a monthly gaming magazine I bought every month gave with every issue.
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