Fred Durst did a reddit AMA yesterday afternoon. In the early hours of the AMA, the top comment was simply "lol" (this has since been deleted), so Durst faced a bit of an uphill battle for a while with the general reddit community. Durst pushed through, though, and it was an entertaining, informative AMA. Thanks, Fred.
His AMA reminded me that for most of Limp Bizkit's career, Durst directed almost all of their music videos. There are a few exceptions, but for the most part Durst gets the sole director's credit, especially in the 1999-2000 era when Limp Bizkit was brand new band and a household name.
So today we're watching a video that is a cornerstone of the Limp Bizkit branding expereince, 1999's "Nookie", directed by Durst.
The concept of this video is pretty simple. Limp Bizkit are playing some sort of unauthorized show for some fans in some sort of alley. Durst spends a lot of time performing for the camera while walking down some streets, and we get a lot of shots of Limp Bizkit setting up. At the end, we learn that this was definitely an unauthorized concert, as Durst is being put into a police car at the end. Someone must've forgotten the proper permits.
What happens in the video is really immaterial, however. The video (like many videos) is really about giving Limp Bizkit something to do while we get a look at them. What we're really watching is their attitude and their style, and with Limp Bizkit, that attitude and style is carefully controlled.
This video in particular set the tone for Limp Bizkit's extensive use of branding through music videos, something the artists of their time were starting to utilize more and more. It's a means to differentiate themselves by offering a consistent image that any brand manager could be proud of. In the case of Eminem, it was his bleach-blonde hair and white t-shirt. In Fred Durst's case, he was almost always wearing the same basic clothes: jeans, some sort of shirt, and a red baseball cap backwards with the MLB logo in the front. Did it work? When I say Fred Durst you probably think red Yankees cap, and he didn't create that impression by putting out high-concept videos.
Just like any franchise (like a Panera or perhaps a Taco Bell), you can walk into any Limp Bizkit video of that era and be pretty confident that you are going to see the same basic branded elements: Durst's mascot-like adherence to his own dress code, Wes Borland's crazy eyes, and a muted/cooler color temperature that consists of mostly blue, white, and red. More often than not, it'll be a performance video. It's not like Limp Bizkit were just lazy, it's that they paid attention to consistency.
The point of brand management is to get people to remember you, and the result of Limp Bizkit's early brand management is still relatively good name recognizition. Compare that to an artist like P.O.D, who haven't been so lucky. Limp Bizkit was able to do it very effectively without being gimmicky, and "Nookie" is a classic example of this.
