Limp Bizkit: The Rise & Fall In 10 Songs
3. Behind Blue Eyes
FALL
In 1996, Limp Bizkit made headway by covering George Michael’s Faith at live shows. The cheesy 80s pop sound spliced with Limp Bizkit’s angry breakdown at the song’s climax highlighted the band’s ability to take musical risks, and it paid off dividends.
It appears Limp Bizkit went back to the well for their 2003 release, Results May Vary, when they decided to cover The Who’s classic melodic track. Whereas the earlier George Michael cover was surprisingly enjoyable and won over live crowds everywhere, Behind Blue Eyes appears out of place and out of touch.
The cover recreates the essence of the original, but where Limp Bizkit excelled before by subverting the feeling of Faith to make it their own, they didn’t do much to enhance The Who classic. In fact, they did much more to tarnish the legacy of the song, as where the original Behind Blue Eyes breaks out from its introspective main riff towards the end and dives into a moveable, soulful solo, Limp Bizkit slow that part down further and just have DJ Lethal spin a digital voice repeating the initials of the band with the instructions to ‘say it.’
It is okay as a cover in that it doesn’t drastically differ from the source material (but it is worth saying that Fred Durst is no Roger Daltrey), but at a time when Limp Bizkit needed a single to bring them into the mid-noughties, this failed miserably.