From an initial perspective, Seinfeld and Fred Durst’s nu-metal band Limp Bizkit stand as two antipodal points in the culture of the late 1990s. Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David’s famous creation soared to heights of comedy, weaving complex tales built upon social norms, interpersonal relationships, and a rejection of easy emotion. Durst, meanwhile, screamed out garbage music about shoving cookies up someone’s “yeah!”
But if you try to force the two together—perhaps by laying the vocals from the band’s 2000 hit “Break Stuff” over the show’s bubbly, bass-heavy theme song, as YouTube user JJ P recently did—some weird parallels begin to form. After all, Seinfeld really is a world where “Everything is fucked, everybody sucks.” And what line could capture the thesis of the show’s take on inter-gender relationships better than Durst’s repeated assertion that “it’s all about the he-said, she-said bullshit”? The more you listen, the more you realize that the Bizkit’s over-the-top anger is just an expression of the show’s no-hugging, no-learning philosophy, as interpreted via rap-sung howling. Durst even sings about packing a “mother-fucking chainsaw,” a clear allusion to Mr. Cosmo Kramer and his tendency to burst through doors, the only way to make headway in the nihilistic universe that Jerry Seinfeld and Fred Durst shared together for a few beautiful years more than a decade ago.