Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water by Limp Bizkit

Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water, Limp Bizkit's third album, hit stores on October 17, 2000, and it's the sound of a band cashing in every chip it won with Significant Other the year before. The Jacksonville crew was at full strength: Fred Durst barking and sneering up front, Wes Borland bending his guitar into strange new shapes, Sam Rivers on bass, John Otto on drums and DJ Lethal scratching and sampling, with Lethal and Josh Abraham sharing production.

This is nu metal and rap metal at their most swaggering and unapologetic. The riffs drop like dumbbells, the grooves bounce, and Durst sounds angry at everybody, all the time, which is exactly the point. "My Generation" is a chest-thumping rally cry, "My Way" rides a slinky, skittering loop into a stomping chorus, "Take a Look Around" stalks along on a tense, cinematic build, and "Boiler" slows things down to a bruised, brooding crawl.

The numbers were ridiculous. It moved 1,054,511 copies in its first seven days, faster than any rock album had ever sold in America, crashed in at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, and went on to top 6.7 million in the US alone, with platinum certifications in 13 countries and another 10 million sold around the world. It was also the last Limp Bizkit record with Borland until The Unquestionable Truth (Part 1) in 2005, and the classic lineup wouldn't make another full album together until Gold Cobra in 2011.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.