The looks in the eyes of establishment politicians and status quo gatekeepers must’ve been that of sheer terror as they watched the audience at Woodstock ‘99 destroy their surroundings to the symphony of Limp Bizkit’s “Break Stuff.”

A crowd, purely motivated by the awkward rapping of a white guy in a backward cap and the three grimy guitar chords of a gangly player in black and white body paint, set fire to structures, collapsed gondolas and reveled in pits of mud and sweat. 

To the modern eye, it’s perplexing. 

Fred Durst commanding the masses to “break stuff” as if he were the leader of some new age revolution seems absurd.

Nowadays, Durst is more of a punchline than a prophet. 

The songs are considered cringe and outdated. A product of a specific window of time when white guys could semi-rap over distorted guitar riffs and it was considered cool. 

That music was, of course, called nu-metal. Or nü-metal if you’re really rad. 

Limp Bizkit was just one of many bands in the nu-metal subgenre. Plenty of them still exist in some capacity today. 

Bands like Linkin Park, Deftones, System of a Down, Slipknot and Korn are still very popular.

Obviously, some of them expanded their sound to go beyond nu-metal. And some of them were more nu-metal by circumstance than actual sound. 

Nu-metal also holds an interesting spot as the beginning of the end for rock music in the mainstream. 

In the 2000s, hip-hop and EDM began to take over as the mainstream sound and by the 2010s, bands like Nickelback represented the death rattle of radio rock as other genres took center stage.

Perhaps nu-metal didn’t kill mainstream rock. 

In fact, nu-metal seemed to be rock music’s response to the growing popularity of hip-hop. 

The word “nu” is quite symbolic. It’s a stylized way of saying rock/metal must adapt to the new millennium. 

For whites, genres like punk rock or grunge represented anti-authority, anti-status quo music. 

But by the late 90s, both subgenres were essentially dead. 

Punk rock shifted to pop punk and became less about middle fingers to the government and more about being in love with the popular girl at school. It got soft. 

Kurt Cobain died in 1994 and grunge died not long after. For young white men in 1999, both subgenres were relics of the past. Their dad was a punk rocker. Their older brother listened to Nirvana. 

Nu-metal was the last bastion of the white male anti-establishment genre. 

It was a response to the corporatization of the American workforce. To a country that was taking its citizens and sticking them in cubicles to work under fluorescent lights for 40 hours a week. 

The brain-dead nature of American jobs made someone just want to break stuff. It made them want to punch their boss in the face and take a sledgehammer to their computer. 

Just look at three of the most popular films of 1999 – “Fight Club”, “The Matrix” and “Office Space.” Three films about white guys in corporate jobs who find ways to rebel against the system they are stuck in. 

But ultimately, the angry nu-metal kid grew up to be a sad, post-grunge man. 

And then a new generation – who lived entirely without nu-metal – was born. 

While nu-metal had gone away, white male rage had not. It only continued to fester, bottled up inside the minds of millions with no outlet to express it. 

Instead, it simply bubbled just under the surface. 

In a world filled with talk of social justice and political correctness, the white male began to feel looked over. The world was no longer his. 

And it was then that alt-right pipelines like the manosphere and MAGA came in to fill that void. 

Anti-authority sentiment transitioned into resistance to social change.

Right-wing extremism was anti-authority in the sense that it rejected female empowerment, racial diversity and social justice as institutional pillars of modern America. 

And with false prophets like Donald Trump, Andrew Tate and Nick Fuentes fueling the fire, the pipeline began flowing strongly. 

There are many branches of this pipeline: incels, chuds, red pill and 4chan groypers, for example. 

Nu-metal, no matter how cringe it might’ve been, was the better source of white male anti-authority sentiment. 

Its absence has led to grifters, extremists and bigots taking root by creating scapegoats and pointing the way at a “righteous” path headed right towards the cliff’s edge.