Culture
Carrie Underwood Performs Limp Bizkit Cover and America Needs a Moment
By BSN Staff, . BSN Network. Satire.
NASHVILLE, TN. Carrie Underwood, seven-time Grammy winner, American Idol champion, and woman who once made a 60,000-person arena cry with a song about a pickup truck, stood on a stage Thursday evening and performed "Break Stuff" by Limp Bizkit. This is a factual sentence written by a journalist.
According to attendees, the performance began without warning. One moment Underwood was between songs, accepting a glass of water from a stage assistant. The next, the opening bars of the 1999 nu-metal anthem about wanting to break things for no particular reason filled the arena at a volume that rattled at least two people's dental work.
"I thought I was having a stroke," said Dale Pritchett, 44, of Murfreesboro, who had attended the show with his wife to celebrate their anniversary. "Not a bad stroke. Just a stroke."
Underwood's vocal performance was, by nearly all accounts, technically immaculate. She hit every note. She committed fully. She did not appear to be doing a bit. A woman who has spent two decades being celebrated for the clarity and power of her voice aimed that clarity and power directly at the lyric "it's just one of those days when you don't wanna wake up, everything is f***ed, everybody sucks" and delivered it like a benediction.
The orchestra, which had accompanied her through the first half of the set with arrangements of her country catalog, adapted with what can only be described as professionalism under duress.
"Our second violinist is still not fully back," said the show's musical director, reached by phone Friday morning.
Reactions on social media split immediately into three camps. The first camp declared it a transcendent act of artistic reclamation, a classically trained vocalist exposing the hidden emotional architecture of a song everyone had previously written off as something that played during a mid-2000s montage of people destroying property. The second camp was simply the word "no" posted repeatedly by country music fans who felt a line had been crossed, though they struggled to identify which specific line. The third camp, largely composed of people who were in middle school in 1999, appeared to be experiencing something they did not have vocabulary for and were coping by sending the clip to everyone they knew without comment.
Fred Durst, the vocalist of Limp Bizkit, has not commented publicly. His silence is doing a great deal of work.
Cultural critics moved quickly. One publication called it "a landmark moment in the ongoing collapse of genre as a meaningful category." Another called it "deeply upsetting in a way that feels important." A third asked whether Underwood was "trolling us, healing us, or simply a woman who wanted to cover a Limp Bizkit song," and then answered its own question by saying it might be all three, which is the kind of sentence that gets written on days like this.
Pritchett, reached again for follow-up comment, said he and his wife had discussed the performance for the entire drive home and then continued discussing it over breakfast.
"We've been married nineteen years," he said. "We don't usually have that much to talk about."
The tour continues next week in Atlanta. The setlist has not been released.
The story we are making fun of: https://www.vice.com/en/article/carrie-underwood-just-covered-limp-bizkit-and-the-results-and-reactions-are-as-strange-as-youd-expect/