I hate to give Netflix credit for anything, anything at all, but I will power through: The streaming service has carved out a pretty decent niche for itself as the home of passable-to-good video game anime adaptations. Starting with 2017's Castlevania, a great show completely ruined by horrific allegations against its creator, and continuing with Arcane: League of Legends, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, and Castlevania: Nocturne—now with less horrible creators, I hope—the network has a solid enough pedigree to get me to check out shows based on games that I don't particularly care about.
Enter Devil May Cry, a game series I almost entirely missed save for its fourth installment in 2008, which serves as the basis for a new anime coming out on April 3. The network teased the opening credit sequence for the adaptation on Thursday, and for a game series that started in 2001, the show leans into the era by picking a recognizable nu metal song as the backing track. Unfortunately, the song is Limp Bizkit's "Rollin' (Air Raid Vehicle)".
I get why they went with "Rollin'" here; it's recognizable, it's a funny bit, and Devil May Cry has cheeky enough moments from what I remember in the games that winking heavily at the audience is par for the course. But it's a bad song by a bad band (who has bangers, don't get me wrong, but come on). It is so distracting that I could not tell you a single thing that the video contained besides the song and, uh, the color red.
Nu metal isn't what anyone would call a "good" "genre" of "music," but it certainly is an important one, insomuch as it was a crucial part of the late '90s and early 2000s. What constitutes nu metal isn't always clear; Deftones might only be considered nu metal–adjacent, though for my purposes they count, while non–nu metal bands have songs that spiritually fit in the genre, such as Nine Inch Nails ("March of the Pigs" predates the genre by a few years and doesn't really have any rapping, but I've always felt it fits, even if it would instantly climb up the rankings as the best nu metal song by a mile). If there's one thing that defined the genre, both then and now, it is that it was filled with mountains of shit, but if you look hard enough, there were some good songs in there, and while that might be the nostalgia of someone who was roughly between the ages of 8 and 14 in what I would call the nu metal era, you can do better than "Rollin'." You can always do better than "Rollin'."
With that in mind, I tapped the recesses of my brain—aided by a recent workplace conversation about the best nu metal bands that completely borked my already horrid streaming algorithm—to find a handful of songs that would have worked better, both as songs and as more fitting soundtracks for these opening credits, than Limp Bizkit's shit heap of a single. (Barry helped, also.) Leave it to WWE's Bikertaker next time, Netflix; it doesn't work there either, but at least it matches the quality of the product.
1. Slipknot - "Before I Forget"
2. System of a Down - "Chop Suey"
3. Korn - "Got The Life"
4. Linkin Park - "Faint"
5. Evanescence - "Going Under"
6. Papa Roach - "Last Resort"
7. Deftones - "Minerva"
8. Kittie - "Spit"
9. Limp Bizkit - "Break Stuff"
10. Flyleaf - "I'm So Sick"
11. Static X - "...In A Bag"
13. Rob Zombie - "Dragula"
14. Trapt - "Headstrong"
15. Powerman 5000 - "When Worlds Collide"
16. Staind - "Mudshovel"
16. P.O.D. - "Boom"
17. Disturbed - "Stricken"
18. Three Days Grace - "I Hate Everything About You"
19. Puddle of Mudd - "Control"
20. Getting hit with the realization that it could have been worse, much worse, than "Rollin' (Air Raid Vehicle)"
21. Crazy Town - "Butterfly"
