In search of the Federline Factor

There are plenty of films and TV programmes that dissect the origins of classic albums. They compile old studio footage and live performances from the era of the recording. Individual members of the band reminisce about the sessions. Producers and hangers-on add background detail. You get a sense of how the music took shape; how some things were a result of happenstance, good luck, or leaps of blind faith, while other things took time and hair-tearing perseverance to get right. You gain an understanding of the group dynamic, whether it was a loose democracy that sprung from a mutual understanding of each other as musicians, or was the result of everybody falling in line behind a benevolent dictator.

 

You don’t get any of this with terrible albums. Nobody wants to dwell on something that absorbed months of their life and turned out to be a creative and/or commercial failure. Paul Gambaccini will probably never appear as a talking head in a documentary, reminiscing in awed transatlantic tones about the creative death rattle of Men Without Hats. The producer Nigel Godrich will never be filmed next a dimly-lit mixing desk, recalling the many late nights he spent perfecting a shitty eighties drum sound for an album that everybody hated.

 

When a baying mob assembles with the express purpose of hurling abuse at your latest musical tour de force, there’s an outside chance that it’s because your band is ahead of its time and you’ll have to wait until 2015 before anyone understands the significance of what you’ve created. There’s an equal possibility that you’ve upset a lot of people in the media and now they’re getting their own back. However, it’s probably because you’ve made a bad record. 

 

Metacritic is an online resource that compiles the review scores awarded to albums, mainly by the US-based and online media. These are averaged out to give an overall impression of how well a record was received upon its release.

 

With a remarkable 15 percent, Playing With Fire by Kevin Federline has the lowest rating on the website by a wide margin. On the basis of this kind of reception his album should be a brutal, unprovoked assault on the aesthetic sense of every sane man or woman. Laboratory rats that are played samples of the music under quarantined conditions should have gnawed each other’s ears off within the first thirty seconds. The very subatomic particles that help transmit the sound to all living organisms capable of hearing it should be taking advantage of their innate quantum strangeness to blink out of existence. 

 

The disappointing thing is that after bracing yourself for something so extraordinarily awful that you’ve placed a precautionary cushion under your chin to give your jaw something soft to drop onto, the first song on the album isn’t bad. The World Is Mine, which opens on a decent Peter Pan/pirate analogy, even displays evidence of flair and intelligence. Federline’s delivery is nothing special but he projects rhythm and confidence as he swaggers around making extravagant claims of ownership over “every rock, every bird, every animal”, like some doped-up toddler. I'm not sure how thrilled the author J. M. Barrie would be with the image of his creation, Captain Hook, walking “through the concrete jungle wit’ just a scale a pound of weed, no seed, sippin’ on OE.” I’m assuming that Federline’s proposed global rule extends to the copyrights of fictional characters from children’s literature. The backing track is an ominous, heads down groove; a broken whistling refrain echoing over icy ripples of electronic sound, that segues into a bobbing reggae-lite bounce in the chorus.

 

In fact, a lot of the music on the album is of a fairly respectable standard. I don’t know how much personal input Federline had, but it’s clear that he worked with people who knew what they were doing and who tried different things. It’s probably no accident that the heavy synth chords that descend into Lose Control are reminiscent of the Wagnerian pop that provided Britney Spears (at the time Federline’s wife) with her early hits. Kept on Talkin' is clever idea – the title “You kept on talking” repeating on a stuttering loop in the chorus, painting a picture of Federline’s detractors as going round in circles, while he flows freely in the verses. Best of all is the supremely chilled-out Privilege where pin-point guitar loops hypnotically over a heavy bassline. 

 

As much effort has gone into the music, thematically this album doesn’t wander very far from a few well-thumbed clichés of the genre. For a man who claims ownership over the entire planet, Kevin Federline has very narrow fields of interest, none of which he seems inclined to explore in any great depth. A typical lyric sees him rolling in a variety of top of the line sports cars, dripping with high-end brands, occasionally high on weed, the object of desire for every heterosexual woman.  

 

A lot of this empty boasting is a half-step up from the school playground: he’s so well known that he can get a table in an exclusive restaurant without having to wear a tuxedo.  His one earring cost “more than your budget”. When he’s not out flaunting dress codes with his million dollar ear-jewellery, he’s handing out “ass kickins like diplomas”. 

 

These ostentatious displays of wealth and status reach a zenith on Crazy, where he drags his wife in front of the microphone for a cut and paste duet that lacks the strange chemistry of Lee and Nancy, or even quaint charm of Sonny and Cher.

 

On the same track Federline grossly overestimates the value of his lyrics with a claim that “every single word is worth thirty grand, or maybe more”. I did a quick word count of the song. Allowing for repetitions of the chorus, somebody somewhere owes Federline at least $14,280,000 for that track alone. No wonder the music business is in freefall. 

 

Playing With Fire opens generically with a montage of news reports, each focusing on different unsavoury aspects of Federline’s character. At the time of recording, his marriage to Britney Spears had made him a target for unscrupulous paparazzi, leaving him with more justification than most to feel persecuted and that people were out to get him. However, like everything on this record, it gets blown completely out of proportion:   

 

America's Most Hated is founded on the absurd conceit that, in 2006, Kevin Federline was the most despised man in the USA (whenever he mentions this, an incredulous backing vocalist shouts “What?!” as if reacting to news that K-Fed has been indicted by the UN for war crimes). The track acquires an additional level of inadvertent humour as a result of a narrative framing device which sees the rapper relating his woes to a waitress in a bar. Periodically he breaks his flow to order more drinks.

 

A lot of the material on this album is unintentionally funny. Rather than coming off as embarrassing, or so bad that it’s good, it’s often revealing or unwittingly self-effacing. “I’m one of a kind with a wonderful rhyme”, Federline raps in one self-contradictory couplet. On paper it reads like the kind of thing Dick Van Dyke might have said to Mary Poppins, before doing a spritely tap dance on some Victorian roofing slates. In A League of My Own he warns people not to get him confused with a lion. The video for Lose Control sees him dressed in an unflattering white suit and hat, rapping in a heaving club, full of people who seem to be completely unaware that they are in the company of America’s most hated celebrity, and who appear to be dancing to a different song. Later in the video he’s seen, still in the club, sitting in a crowded booth, being totally ignored by those on either side of him, as if he’s shoehorned himself into the space by brute force. “I'm rolling with a team”, he says at one point during the song, but in the video his friends are nowhere in sight. 

 

For all the smirks, jibes and barbs aimed at Playing With Fire - including my own - it isn’t a bad album. A hard one to get excited about, maybe, but if you heard one of the better tracks at a party or in a club you probably wouldn’t raise an eyebrow. You might even find yourself nodding your head along to it. It’s lazy in places but that hardly differentiates it from any number of lazy records. Critics focused their ire on the limited range of subject matter, but dope, money and girls is hardly virgin territory for hip hop; plenty of other records have been made on the back of this contemporary rebranding of sex, drugs, and rock and roll.

 

The knives were out for Federline the moment that he announced his career as a rap artist; there was a consensus that this former backing dancer and model, who at the time was embroiled in one of the great white trash romances of the decade, had lucked into a position where he had the financial wherewithal to bankroll a music career. In a genre that prizes realness, the resounding opinion was that he hadn’t earned his stripes and therefore wasn’t genuine. The ensuing album was a product of his celebrity, rather than his celebrity being a product of the music, and so, in the eyes of the critics, it lacked authenticity. From the moment of its conception, Playing With Fire was doomed never to be taken seriously. One of the dangers of making a record exclusively about yourself is that you invite people to look very hard at your life.

 

The internet dry-heaves under the collective weight of people who passed out drunk at parties, and subsequently ended up being photographed with their trousers down around their ankles and various sexual come-ons scrawled across their buttocks in permanent marker, often accompanied by helpful arrows.  I imagine that both the victims and the perpetrators of these frat house dramas are the same people who might have enjoyed The Bad Touch by The Bloodhound Gang: a song that attempted to put Darwin’s theory of evolution to some practical use as a pick-up line, with its chorus: “You and me baby ain’t nothing but mammals so let’s do it like they do on the Discovery Channel.”

 

The parent album, Hooray For Boobies, was an hour long trawl around the bottom of the barrel. It reaches a high watermark of sensitivity during a song called Magna Cum Nada when vocalist Jimmy Pop laments, “Toxic Shock Syndrome gets more girls than me”. 

 

The group’s follow-up, Hefty Fine, was released in 2005, following a six year hiatus, to critical hostility and a relatively indifferent public. It is currently the second-lowest scoring album on Metacritic and therefore one of the worst things in the world, on a par with locust swarms and volcanoes.  

 

In reality it's an album of mixed messages; the tone implied by the sleeve art, which features an overweight, naked midget (who bears a passing resemblance to the comedian Phill Jupitus) trapped inside a wooden crate, belying a surprising level of depth beneath the surface scatology.

 

Balls Out is archetypal nu-metal: electro-pop bolted onto stuttering rock guitars and some really shambolic rapping. The real surprise is Jimmy Pop’s raw, untreated vocal during the chorus – the sound of a man with limited range and power bellowing at the top of his voice. Maybe this is what the band meant by “balls out” - putting everything on the line and exposing your limitations. It’s a great moment in an otherwise unsatisfying song. 

 

Foxtrot Uniform Charlie Kilo has a title that surely wouldn’t impress anyone over twelve years old. A Green Day/Blink 182 clone, the chorus is worded in a peculiar fusion of legalese and sexual innuendo, while the verses are filled with images so bizarre that they transcend their vulgar origins and take on the aspect of surreal poetry. A suspicion lingers that if you were to read lines such as, “Marinate the nether rod in the squish mitten”, or, “Cannonball the fiddle cove with the pork steeple”, in a Scottish accent, they would sound an awful lot like lost poetry by the great Robert Burns. 

 

The Bloodhound Gang fall into the category of smart guys playing it dumb. Over four albums they’ve perfected a kind of high-end lowbrow humour. Hefty Fine is full of memorable turns of phrase - I’m The Least You Could Do commends “your crotchless jihad on blue balls”. This is a band clever enough to pull off a blatant, straight-faced pastiche of nu-metallers Linkin Park on Something Diabolical, but childish enough to include a track titled Diarrhoea Runs In The Family (24 seconds of someone with stomach problems on the toilet).

 

A good portion of Hefty Fine hovers uneasily between attention grabbing titles that skirt around the lowest denominator and lyrics that, while they may be crude, are thoughtful and well written. Even an unpromising-sounding track like Farting With The Walkman On turns out to be a dig at someone who thinks that no one hears their bullshit. Pennsylvania is a song of contrasting imagery - “spread out butt cheeks, pulled apart so just the air leaks” and “a heart with no name airbrushed on the license plate, of a Suburu that was registered in Pennsylvania”; it's the greatest love song Fountains Of Wayne never wrote. Only on the nine minute kiss-off, No Hard Feelings, does the intelligence and humour give way to unpleasantness.

 

Hefty Fine suffered at the hands of the music press and the record-buying public, with the former dismissing it as little more than a compendium of dick and fart jokes, while many fans disliked the muddled new direction. Six years is a long time in the music industry. In the interim a lot of the goodwill people felt towards the band had evaporated.   

 

In December 2000, the cumulative weight of decades of bad karma was suddenly brought to bear on the ailing Melody Maker. The cover star of the final issue of the iconic music magazine was the much sneered at Limp Bizkit frontman Fred Durst - the physical embodiment of a surly overgrown teenager, now photographed for posterity throwing the devil horns in front of a Christmas tree.

 

Three years later the band Durst fronted was walking wounded, slowly falling out of fashion and missing arguably its most talented member – the guitarist Wes Borland. Durst meanwhile had a bigger image problem than Kevin Federline, his botched relationship with Britney Spears having been executed with all the suave charm of a fumbling schoolboy. 

 

A lot of what made it onto Results May Vary (Metacritic’s third lowest rated album – worse than ice-cream headaches and kale) sounds like a watered-down rehash of better songs by other artists. 

 

Eat You Alive does a passable imitation of Tool, the relentless yelled chorus showing off the band’s key strength; their ability to write the kind of hard rock melodies that will turn a stadium audience into a churning flesh pit. 

 

Contrary to the band’s image as none-too-bright, aggressive nu-metallers, Durst spends a large part of the album wallowing in a kind of deep, poorly-expressed introspection. On Teenage Creamer (Radio Is Dead) he preaches hard won wisdom to a younger version of himself, while Underneath The Gun struggles to articulate feelings of stress and isolation.  

 

The most bizarre track, The Only One, is a plea to a girl to take things slow, featuring the kind of lyric you would normally associate with distaff R&B:

 

 

If the rest of the album weren’t so sincere and straightforward it would be tempting to view it as a subversive piss-take.

 

Overall, Results May Vary is let down by poor quality control and sequencing which sees the tail-end of the album weighted-down by a slew of weak tracks. Lightweight raps dominates the second half, most notably Red Light Green Light, whose phoned-in performance from Snoop Dogg lacks the poise and grace of Kevin Federline. A ‘Speak & Spell’-assisted cover version of The Who’s Behind Blue Eyes smothers the song in soft focus synths and, in doing so, loses both the raw edge of the original and the explosive, off the leash, middle eight. The band finds its footing in the closing minutes with Drown - a delicately smudged ballad that ends with the line, “Sometimes I feel like a fool, cause I'm so uncool. Forgive me.”

 

The lasting impression one gets from Fred Durst is of a man trapped in a state of perpetual adolescence; at times petulant and sulky, while on other occasions he comes across as considerate and thoughtful, if somewhat inarticulate. The album poorly was poorly received overall but did get some approval in the mainstream media. Q magazine thought it above average, while Caroline Sullivan, writing in The Guardian, acknowledged the diversity of styles but wondered if anyone still cared about the band.

 

If there's a common ground shared by these albums it's a wilful immaturity, summed-up as a blend of aggression, crude humour, and wild mood swings between unfettered self-aggrandisement and morbid self pity. 

 

The kind of person who might have forged a career as a music reviewer probably regards themselves as rather more sophisticated than this. They're unlikely to seek out music that reminds them of the more obnoxious moments of their adolescence. Brian Wilson’s teenage symphonies to God owe at least some of their enduring popularity to the fact that they side-stepped, or at very least cast in soft focus, the angry slam of the bedroom door, the simple joy embodied in a pair of naked breasts or a well-told dick joke, or the bittersweet feeling that even though nobody understands you, you are still awesome. Admitting that you enjoy the music of Kevin Federline, The Bloodhound Gang or Limp Bizkit is like telling the world that you haven’t grown-up, because as an intelligent adult you’re supposed to be above this. You’re supposed to listen to Slint and have long conversations about Bitches Brew. If you must use music to revisit your teenage past then you're supposed to do it through the prism of an "acceptable" band like The Ramones.

 

It’s beyond question that all three of these albums arrived with a lot of baggage in tow. Even before Playing With Fire was released, Federline was widely regarded either as a joke or as a sleazy opportunist, while were both the Bloodhounds and Bizkit were on the downward slopes of previously successful careers. Many reviewers extended their critiques beyond the music to include personal attacks on the artists, with some even going so far as to attack fans. IGN’s review of The Bloodhound Gang questions whether the band’s “audience can operate mirrors, let alone stereos”, while All Music Guide makes disparaging reference to Limp Bizkit’s “brainwashed legions”. 

 

Contrast this with the reception of a poor record by a more credible group and it’s hard to ignore a yawning hypocrisy. Around The Sun was a creative low point for R.E.M., yet enjoys a Metacritic score of 56 despite the prevalent tone in reviews being one of disappointment. Critics accepted that the band had gone off the boil and spared the individual members of the group from vitriolic personal attacks.  

 

There’s a sense that the albums that make up the Metacritic bottom three were not reviewed so open-mindedly, or judged entirely on their own merits. People came to them with open prejudice against the artists and negative preconceptions of what they were going to hear. They didn’t listen long or hard enough, or ask themselves the question: ‘What is good on this album? What works?’

 

None of these records are classics by any stretch of the imagination but they all have great moments. Maybe they come from a place that makes the enjoyment of them taboo to the mature, well-adjusted adult listener, but they are not bad albums.