Fred Durst Announces Festival for the Uninvited, Somehow Without Irony

Disclaimer: This article is based on actual news from the real world – honestly! However, it has been sprinkled with a healthy dose of satire.

Limp Bizkit frontman Fred Durst has announced plans for an alternative music festival designed to welcome artists overlooked by Coachella, the Grammys, and other mainstream institutions, which is to say he has announced a festival for Fred Durst.

The pitch surfaced Saturday on X, where rapper Lil Wayne posted a genuinely affecting message about the annual experience of watching major music events proceed without him. “It’s truly a humbling experience when events like Coachella & the Grammys come around & like clockwork, I’m uninvited & uninvolved,” wrote the 43-year-old, who has 28 Grammy nominations, five wins, and a diamond-certified discography. The post ended “Iaintshitwithoutu,” which is the most emotionally honest sentence anyone has written on that website since it was renamed X.

Durst responded within hours. “Let’s start our own experience gathering and our own acknowledgment event to welcome all of the uninvited,” he wrote, signing off with a skateboard, a musical note, a heart, and a UFO, whatever the hell that was supposed to mean. He added that he had “a couple ideas” he’d been developing “for quite some while now”, which is generally what someone says when they have no ideas and haven’t been developing anything.  

Except he has, in fact, been developing exactly this. For roughly two years, Durst has been running what amounts to a functioning parallel music industry for artists the mainstream has filed in a drawer. The 2024 Welcome to Loserville amphitheater tour paired Limp Bizkit with rapper Bones, synthpunk act N8NOFACE, the Mindy Cohn-era actor Corey Feldman, and Riff Raff, whose job at each show was to stand at center stage and be insulted. Durst wrote, directed, and released a 17-minute mockumentary to promote the run. 

Limp Bizkit, for their part, have never played Coachella despite being a persistent wishlist act for festivalgoers who want to see “Nookie” performed in broad daylight. The band has played Woodstock ’99, which is more of an admission of guilt than anything, and is booked at Download Festival for the third time since 2009. This is not the schedule of a man denied access to the music industry. He just hasn’t ever played Coachella.

The proposed festival has no name, no location, no date, no lineup, and no stated business model, which places it roughly at the same development stage as most events Durst announces. Industry observers note that the artists most likely to participate, like legacy rap figures, post-peak nu-metal acts, Machine Gun Kelly, and whoever Riff Raff is currently friends with, already tour together constantly under various branding exercises, suggesting the “festival for the uninvited” may in fact be a rebrand of the festival circuit Durst has been headlining for fifteen years.

Durst and MGK’s new single, “Fix Ur Face,” drops tomorrow. The song title is believed to be unrelated to the festival proposal.

This story is based on fully factual news, but if we got it wrong, blame these guys, we’re just here to make it funny.