Nu metal icon — and notorious rabble-rouser — Fred Durst has a long history of weird beefs, but this latest altercation is bizarre even for him.
In audience-shot videos from a recent show in Istanbul, Turkey, the 55-year-old Limp Bizkit frontman laid the smackdown on a drone whose operator dared to fly it too close to the stage, likely seeking to record unauthorized, up-close footage of the boisterous bandleader.
The drone got owned, as Stereogum notes, during a "low-key breakdown" in the middle of the band's 2000 hit "Take A Look Around." As soon as the diminutive machine caught Durst's eye, he began motioning with one finger for it to fly closer, like some kind of rap-metal anglerfish — and once it was within arm's reach, he knocked it out of the air with one clean hit from his microphone, drawing applause and cheers from his fans.
As a longer video of the spectacle shows, Durst told a security guard to "throw [the drone] out into the crowd" before pacing around as if cooling down from a fight and then going to the back of the stage to speak to someone. Though the fight-seeking frontman looked mighty fed up throughout the drone dust-up, he seemed to even out when he returned, and asked the crowd if they were "ready to get down."
With cheap, camera-equipped consumer drones being increasingly deployed into unsuspecting airspace, it's become commonplace to see them at concerts and sporting events — and reactions to them vary widely.
In perhaps the most headline-grabbing recent incident, the 1990s punk rock band Green Day was whisked off stage by security last September after another unauthorized drone was seen flying above their show at the Detroit Tigers' baseball stadium, causing the band to be whisked away by their production crew.
As Consequence of Sound reported, Mr. Bungle's Mike Patton also attempted to put the pain on a drone during Slipknot's Knotfest festival in Chile back in 2022. Like Durst did three years later, the funk metal vocalist beckoned the drone closer before swinging with his mic and blowing it an air kiss, but the drone was too fast for him, veering out of the path of his microphone and whizzing off.
The remote control-wielding cowards behind these dumb drone incursions may achieve varying amounts of success when trying to film their faves — but whoever tried to fly up on Durst learned the hard way why Limp Bizkit's best-known song is called "Break Stuff."
More on musicians: Scientists Taught a Robot to Play the Drums and He Is Shockingly Horrible at It
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