> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.artbeforenoise.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Worst By Design - URL: https://www.artbeforenoise.com/chocolate-starfish-limp-bizkit-album-cover/ - Published: 2026-09-16T02:15:52.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-16T13:16:54.000Z - Description: Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water by Limp Bizkit - The most hated album cover of 2000 wasn't a mistake. It was all part of the plan. - Author: Craig - Tags: Hip Hop, Deep Dive, Limp Bizkit, Interscope Records, #toc, 2000s There's a certain kind of ugly you only get from someone trying very hard. I remember flicking past this one at one of the record stores in the early 2000s, doing a full double-take, and thinking: WTF? Five lumpy, grinning cartoon blokes lounging on a pile of hot dogs, clutching starfish that are unmistakably meant to look like arseholes made of chocolate. I like(d) Limp Bizkit, so naturally I purchased that CD. It took me twenty-odd years to come back and actually ask why it looked like that. Turns out that's the whole point. The [*Chocolate Starfish*](https://amzn.to/3S6Kvuo?ref=artbeforenoise.com) album cover wasn't a bad decision that slipped through some approval process at a major label. It was Limp Bizkit's guitarist sitting down and deliberately building the ugliest thing he could think of, then handing it to a record label that sold over a million copies of it in a week anyway. Nobody involved seems to have been under any illusion about what they were making. That's the bit that took me a while to properly get my head around. This wasn't a case of [good intentions gone wrong](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/album-covers-with-mistakes/), it was bad taste executed with total precision. ![Limp Bizkit Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water album cover from 2000, showing surreal pale humanoid creatures and starfish-like figures lounging in dark, hot-dog-filled water, with the album title in stylised lettering and a Parental Advisory label in the lower corner](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/2026/08/Limp-Biscuit---Chocolate-Starfish-and-the-Hotdog-Flavored-Water.jpg) Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water ## Album Anatomy | **Album** | *Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water* | | ---------------- | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | **Artist** | Limp Bizkit | | **Released** | 17 October 2000 | | **Label** | [Interscope Records](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/interscope-records/) | | **On the cover** | Five cartoonish, gremlin-like digital renderings of the band members, sprawled across a heap of hot dogs, woth a couple of them holding a chocolate-brown starfish shaped like a human backside | | **Decade** | [2000s](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/2000s/) | | **Get it** | [Amazon](https://amzn.to/3S6Kvuo?ref=artbeforenoise.com) // [Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/album/5mi7FKaWE5CtcOjdyxScA7?si=hRQvtMAtS7Cb0jcyotrrlg&ref=artbeforenoise.com) | ## The Joke Nobody Asked For The title alone should have been a warning. "Chocolate Starfish" was Fred Durst's own nickname for himself, borrowed from the fact that people had been calling him an arsehole in the press for the better part of a year. "Hot Dog Flavored Water" came from Wes Borland, who'd been standing around a truck stop staring at bottles of flavoured water and joked that they were missing a meat-flavoured option. Two throwaway lines from two different guys, stitched together into an album title that sounded, by Durst's own admission, like a made-up band name. He later described the whole thing as his version of [*Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band*](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/album-covers-that-reference-other-covers/#sgt-peppers-lonely-hearts-club-bandthe-beatles-1967)*.* Fred cast as the chocolate starfish, everyone else in the band cast as the other word in that joke. It's a funny way to describe an album that would go on to debut at number one, sell over a million copies in its first week in the US, and become the fastest-selling rock album in the country at the time. The joke worked. Commercially, at least. I mean, I did buy it. ### Listen to Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water [Chocolate Starfish And The Hot Dog Flavored WaterLimp Bizkit · album · 2000 · 15 songs![](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/icon/favicon32.b64ecc03-49e61fd8-7904-4f1e-a87f-e60d0fafd85e.png)Spotify![](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/thumbnail/ab67616d00001e024a31b146c7cf07705d912efe-a7019910-d8bf-48f0-ad88-bcf22960b86a)](https://open.spotify.com/album/5mi7FKaWE5CtcOjdyxScA7?si=1cc22f9696814d8b&ref=artbeforenoise.com) ## Wes Borland's Digital Nightmare Borland, guitarist, and the band's de facto [visual artist](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/massive-attack-album-covers/), built the cover himself. This wasn't a photograph or a painting; it's a digitally rendered pile-up, five squat, waxy, big-eared figures modelled loosely on the band, dumped on a bed of hot dogs like they'd been poured out of a tin. Every inch of the composition is doing something: bulging eyes, shiny skin, meat textures, a colour palette somewhere between fast food packaging and a bruise. Nothing is given room to breathe. It's the visual equivalent of someone talking over the top of themselves. That's not incidental. Borland has talked plenty over the years about wanting Limp Bizkit's imagery to be as loud and as physically uncomfortable as the music. Face paint, masks, elaborate stage costumes, and then this: a cover engineered to make people recoil a little before they even hit play. Rolling Stone's Gavin Edwards put it bluntly in 2024, calling the cover "tacky and gross" but conceding it "works as a warning label", you know exactly what you're getting into before the shrink wrap comes off. ## The Worst Cover Ever Made (Allegedly) That warning-label quality is precisely why *Chocolate Starfish* keeps turning up on worst-cover-of-all-time lists more than two decades later. It's not badly executed; the rendering is competent, the composition is deliberate, the joke lands exactly as intended. It's disliked because it succeeds at being repellent on purpose, which is a much harder thing to forgive than genuine incompetence. A cover that's accidentally bad is easy to laugh at and move past. A cover this confident about being gross sticks around and pokes you. There's also the small matter of timing. Nu metal in 2000 was already fighting a losing battle for critical respect, and Limp Bizkit were the genre's biggest, brashest target. A tasteful cover might have bought the album some credibility it clearly wasn't chasing. Instead, Borland leaned all the way into the noise, juvenile, garish, impossible to ignore, and matched it to a title that was already daring radio DJs to say it out loud. Whether you find that admirable or exhausting probably depends on how you feel about the rest of the record. When Rolling Stone put together its 2024 rundown of the worst album covers ever made, this one topped the list ahead of some fairly stiff competition including Roger Daltrey posing as a literal centaur, and Creed's dodgy Photoshop tree carving. Being singled out from that field says something. It's not that *Chocolate Starfish* is the most technically inept cover in that gallery. It's that it's the most committed to the bit, and commitment to an ugly bit apparently reads as worse than an accident. ### More Hip Hop Covers [Hip Hop - Art Before NoiseHip-hop album art up close - vinyl-era graffiti, glossy 2000s bling and the sleeves that turned rap into a visual movement.![](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/icon/new-box-logo-on-white-4d185bea-663b-4dd8-851b-383c80d73616.png)Art Before Noise![](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/content/images/thumbnail/ice-cube-hip-hop-f58ac62f-7aed-43b7-aa97-61b8d60347dc.png)](https://www.artbeforenoise.com/tag/hip-hop/) ## It Followed Them Onto Screen, Too The imagery didn't stop at the sleeve. The video for "Boiler," the album's final single, has Durst turning into a cartoon character and getting chased across the screen by a sea of hot dogs that morph into a monster. It's a direct visual callback to the same meat-and-menace aesthetic Borland had already put on the cover a year earlier. Whatever you think of the joke, the band was clearly happy to keep telling it. This was also the last video to feature Borland before he left the band that October, which makes it an odd, oddly fitting bookend: the guy who drew the ugliest cover of the year 2000 signing off with a giant hot dog sea creature. ## Ugly On Purpose Is Still A Choice What keeps pulling me back to this cover isn't the shock value, that wore off decades ago. It's that it's clearly a piece of brand design, even if the brand is "we don't care what you think of us." Every element reinforces the same message the music and the title were already sending. There's no gap between what the album sounds like, what it's called, and what it looks like sitting in a record collection. That's rarer than it should be, even on covers people actually like. I still wouldn't put it on my wall. But I've stopped putting it back on the shelf without a second look. Twenty-odd years after that double-take in my local music store, I've finally worked out that the thing I found off-putting wasn't a mistake I could feel superior about. It was a decision, made carefully, by someone who knew exactly what reaction he was chasing. Mission accomplished, Wes. Well done.