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Crazy Town's tattooed valentine — a rap-rock love song floated on a borrowed Red Hot Chili Peppers guitar loop all the way to #1 in spring 2001. The softest thing the nu-metal era ever sent up the charts, from a band that never landed another hit.
A nu-metal song too weird for the genre, with a suicide reference chopped into its very title. 'Chop Suey!' landed on Clear Channel's post-9/11 list of songs radio was told to avoid — and became the defining track of every Kazaa queue and school-bus headphone share anyway.
![Video thumbnail — In The End [Official HD Music Video] - Linkin Park](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/eVTXPUF4Oz4/maxresdefault.jpg)
Linkin Park's landmark debut album, released October 24, 2000, blending Chester Bennington's soaring vocals with Mike Shinoda's aggressive rapping over heavy guitars and electronic production. The best-selling album of 2001 in the US, Hybrid Theory became the soundtrack to countless angsty bedrooms and defined nu-metal for a generation.
The Jacksonville metal band that defined nu-metal's MTV dominance. Fred Durst's backwards red Yankees cap and Wes Borland's shock-value body paint made them impossible to ignore. They broke through with a cover of George Michael's "Faith" reimagined as down-tuned metal. They became the sound of late-90s TRL, then evaporated just as fast.
George Michael's 1987 hit "Faith" was a four-week No. 1 and a defining pop moment of the '80s. Limp Bizkit took it and weaponized it: quiet verse, explosive down-tuned chorus, turntable scratches. The cover became the radio hit that broke the band to the mainstream.
The nu-metal manifesto that defined 1999. Limp Bizkit's second album landed at #1, Fred Durst's backward red cap became iconic, and Woodstock '99 proved the kids were decidedly not alright.