Limp Bizkit - Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water

For one week in October 2000, Limp Bizkit were the biggest band in America by a margin nobody has matched since. The third album moved 1,054,511 copies in its first week, the largest opening ever recorded for a rock record, and held No. 1 for a second week on the way to six times platinum. Whatever you think of the band, this is the high-water mark of rap-rock as a commercial force, and it has not been approached in the twenty-five years since.

Terry Date produced most of it alongside the band after early sessions with Rick Rubin fell apart, with Swizz Beatz turning up on a few cuts. The formula is Fred Durst at maximum provocation over Wes Borland's guitar, which remains the genuinely interesting element here: angular, texture-obsessed, and far weirder than the songs strictly required. "Rollin' (Air Raid Vehicle)" and "My Generation" were inescapable on radio and MTV, "My Way" gave the record its most durable hook, and "Take a Look Around" bent Lalo Schifrin's Mission: Impossible theme into a stadium riff and picked up a Grammy nomination for Best Hard Rock Performance. Xzibit, Method Man, Redman, DMX, and Scott Weiland all turn up across the seventy-five-minute running time.

Critics were merciless at the time, and the band spent the next decade as the punchline for everything that went wrong with nu metal. Two decades of reappraisal later, the record plays as what it always was: loud, obnoxious, absurdly well-engineered, and completely of its moment.

This remastered double LP spreads the album across four sides on opaque grey and brown vinyl via Interscope, a color pairing that, given the title, was clearly chosen on purpose.