0.4.1 - I am, what I want you to want, what I want you to feel
I'm notoriously bad at being stoic. I'm good value at weddings and funerals, or wherever emotions are running high, because I will be stood there, trying to keep myself in check, while silently leaking tears like a tap with a broken seal. I cry at movies, and TV shows, and books and sometimes (at the right times), at songs. I used to be kind of embarrassed or ashamed at this inability to be stonefaced and uncaring, but as the years have gone on, I've become more accepting of it. Having empathy for others, and to feel the emotion inside and around you, whether it's cynically manipulated there with TV soundtracks and shocking character deaths, or whether it's a genuine moment of grief or pain or joy shared with someone near you, is something to be celebrated.
This video makes me cry every time I watch it. I just clicked on it again to check I was linking the right one, and it made me cry again. Unlike the Girls Aloud article, we're going to start with the bummer part here because the context is what makes me cry. Mike Shinoda and Chester Bennington formed the beating heart of their band's music; close friends and collaborators since the late 90's when their band was also called Hybrid Theory, they deftly avoided the trap of releasing a debut self titled album by changing the band name to Linkin Park on the cusp of the new millenium. They wanted to be called Lincoln Park, but because the domain was already camped and very expensive, took the cheaper route and changed the band name to a bastardised version so they could secure linkinpark.com at a more budget-friendly rate. For seventeen years they worked and recorded and wrote and toured together, and in the early stages of the stadium tour for their seventh studio album, One More Light, Chester Bennington took his own life.
I'm not going to speculate why, the rest of the internet is out there for that, but like most suicides, we'll never really know the answer. As documented, I've had my own down moments, and I've been there too a few times - there but for the grace go I, as it were. What makes me cry about that video in particular is that, in that performance, with Mike playing a few simple piano parts and singing maybe 8 lines of backing vocals, the echoes of his dead friend come back to life through a room full of people who know every note and every word of his music, and for a moment, they are back together onstage, doing what they had always done. It breaks my heart.
I certainly didn't set out this week with the intention of listening to and writing about Linkin Park, though I always suspected I would get to Hybrid Theory and Meteora as part of some retrospective on nu-metal and my complicity in its success. Instead, like much of my inspiration, this was founded in an unrelated conversation, specifically about Dangerdoom and their The Mouse and The Mask album I listened too last weekend. While talking about it with Matt, we discussed the MF Doom collabs, and talked about The Gray Album (Danger Mouse mashing up Jay-Z's The Black Album with the Beatles white album); I mentioned my own fondness for the Collision Course EP, which is a combination of Jay-Z and Linkin Park songs and samples. That, in turn, reminded me that I had watched the livestream of Linkin Park's announcement of their new lineup, going back on tour following the death of Chester Bennington which happened last September, and I knew they had a new album out.
"This will be easy", I thought stupidly, "I can listen to Hybrid Theory and Meteora which I love, and then Collision Course*, then there's probably like one album after that I've not heard, and then their new album with the new lineup. Should be an easy one to knock out in a day while I do other things." As you can see from the image above, Linkin Park may have passed from my consciousness (and the collective consciousness of other people I asked, none of whom had listened to any Linkin Park albums after Meteora), but that didn't stop them relentlessly putting out new music, releasing an album every two to three years from 2000 to 2017. Let's start at the beginning.
Yes, Linkin Park (Original Flavour Edition, in this case the Hybrid Theory/Meteora/Minutes to Midnight era) are meme shorthand for a certain type of teenage angst that's entirely mockable. These are lyrics written to be made into overdramatic AIM status messages. This is the sound of your parents not understanding you. I could go on. But if music exists as a communal expression of emotion, a way of connecting our psychological states in a way that makes us feel understood, and not alone, why would the existence of the soundtrack to overdramatic teenage angst be any less valid a form of expression? And separate to that question, if the music has fire and energy and it grabs your bottled up frustration and fear and insecurity and makes you want to express it through dance, or voice, doesn't it carry it's own inherent value as a piece of art?
This is the dichotomy of early Linkin Park to me. I have issues with the 'grunge' label applied to the bands in that grouping simply because they don't really sound that much alike or operate in a shared set of musical styles or influences - all they share is a geographical proximity and a shared aesthetic and fashion sense. This diaspora of sound is perhaps not so pronounced when you examine the label "Nu-Metal" in the same light, but to my mind Linkin Park always had a degree of credibility with the rap world that wasn't shared by the other members of the Nu-Metal Big Three, Korn and Limp Bizkit, which I guess is how you end up getting collaboration opportunities with Jay-Z and Busta Rhymes. Their sound is closer to Run DMC than Aerosmith on the Walk-This-Way-O-Meter, and the fact the band has always features a dedicated DJ/Turntablist in Mr Hahn has made their commitment to being a true fusion act, instead of a rock-band-with-one-bad-white-guy-rapping, more convincing. From a metal side, Chester Bennington has one of the great metal screaming voices of all time, and the interplay between his heartfelt and anguished wails and Mike Shinoda's staccato verse delivery exists at the heart of why their music blew up like it did.
Like a lot of stuff I've spoken about before, Linkin Park were prime MTV2 fodder, which is definitely where I saw the videos for Crawling and In The End; by this time we were also spending many Friday and Saturday nights in dimly lit alternative music venues until 2am, and if you're at a club and you're not sure if the girl you like likes you at all in that way, and you are a little drunk, Linkin Park playing in the background gets etched into your soul along with a hundred cringe-worthy memories.
Hybrid Theory is the thesis statement, but also the least refined and most overwrought and juvenile in its lyricism; If you were born any time before 1988 you can probably hum the tune or sing a few lines from In The End or One Step Closer or Crawling; after many repeated listenings, and possibly because of overexposure, it feels like all the singles off here are overshadowed by the album deep cuts. I have a far greater fondness for Points of Authority and With You than any of the radio singles; by contrast the singles from Meteora are the high points of the album; if you've never listened to a single Linkin Park song and you feel like indulging an old man, go listen to Faint; I think its the platonic ideal of what a Linkin Park song is. The entirety of Meteora doesn't move to far from what brought them to prominence, but the angst is less raw, the poetry more considered, the subject matter more varied and nuanced. It's also literally the point at which I, and everyone I knew, stopped listening to them.
Readers, I was not prepared for there to be six more studio albums after this.
I don't know what happened to make Minutes to Midnight so invisible to me after the success of Meteora. I can only assume that collectively, everyone had just moved on to different things. The lead single released from it has over a billion Spotify plays, the fourth highest of any Linkin Park song in their entire catalogue, and the very first time I heard it was this week. I was hesitant to include this album in the trinity with the first two, but it's still what I guess you would consider "Nu-metal" era Linkin Park. Much like the transition from debut to second album, this again feels like its taking away some of the rough edges, but also like we had passed through the goldilocks zone and come out of the other side; Hybrid Theory, too jagged; Minutes to Midnight, too safe, too clean, too smooth; Meteora, just right.
So what do you do once Nu-metal has passed on? Well, if you are Linkin Park, you start to play with your whole sound to try and find something which keeps you in the public eye. It's also possible the band had already made its money by this point and they were just making music because they enjoyed it, without the pressure to be successful or conform to peoples expectations.
In forecasting circles this is what we call a Linear Negative Trend
So, in retrospect, do I feel bad about being amongst the 5.5 million people who never listened to an album after Meteora? Missing Minutes to Midnight might have been an oversight, but the nine-hundred-thousand die-hard Linkin Park fans had some years in the wilderness ahead of them.
With some apology, I'm going to breeze rapidly through A Thousand Suns / LIVING THINGS / The Hunting Party here; the main point of interest for me was for each of these albums I had to choose to categorise it as something other than "nu metal"; the distinctive fusion which made them who they were was starting to go missing; sometimes its veering in the direction of radio friendly rock; in other times, more contemporary metal; in either case these albums are like the doppler effect of a band driving towards obscurity, each a more distant echo of the noises they used to make as they travel further and further away from their origin.
This culminates in extraordinary fashion in One More Light which is as downtempo balladic rock as you can get. I listened to it, slightly agog, as Linkin Park sang songs which wouldn't feel at odds with the average output of Country Music Radio. Its a shame this is the least interesting, most vanilla of their post-heyday albums as it's also the last album they released, and the tour they were undertaking when Chester Bennington took his own life. As often happens, his passing reignited an interest in their music. There was an excellent tribute concert for Chester which is viewable in its entirety on the Linkin Park Youtube channel. It also makes me cry when I watch it. In part because of his untimely death, One More Light became their best selling album in some years. But, without Chester, the band went on hiatus, any future plans uncertain.
In September of 2024, a countdown timer appeared on Linkin Park's website. On the 5th of September, the band (or rather, what was left of the band, with a new drummer as Dave Bourdon, the original drummer, declined to return and had distanced himself from the rest of the band following Chester's death) appeared on a livestream to announce a new album, a new lineup, a new tour...and a new lead singer, leading immediately to controversy.
Now, when a woman becomes part of a thing long beloved of young men and controversy ensues, I am usually prepared for a large dose of stupid internet misogyny to rear it's ugly head. Emily Armstrong, former singer for Dead Sara, certainly had the background and the vocal chops to step into the role - she can growl and shriek in ways to resonate the pure emotion of the lyrics she's singing, and the melodic vulnerability for the quiet introspective verses. I watched the livestream, almost on a whim as it had been served up to me by the algorithm and I wasn't doing anything else at the time, and I thought she acquitted herself admirably, both singing classic Linkin Park songs and filling Chester's role with aplomb, but also in her performance of their new single, The Emptiness Machine. The controversy came almost immediately after.
The internet being what it is, a few things very quickly came to light; Emily Armstrong has (at least through her parents) strong links to the Church of Scientology. However, if that disqualified you from a successful media career, it would be less popular, and we'd had significantly less music, TV, and movies than we do now. The more damning criticism was her support of her (perhaps former) friend Danny Masterson, who it was claimed she had defended/spoken in support of after very credible sexual assault accusations were levelled at him. Following that, relatives of the Bennington estate were all contacted for comment, and none of them had much positive to say about Mike Shinoda or the reformed Linkin Park. Emily quickly put out a statement distancing herself and contextualising her apparently insignificant involvement in Danny Masterson's case, but the damage was already done.
Which is a shame because I think From Zero is pretty solid. It's not early-Linkin-Park good, but it stands head and shoulders above the wilderness year albums as something which sounds both like that classic Linkin Park taste that you crave, but with an exciting and modern twist. I think Emily's vocals, and a return of the great rap/scream interplay and genuine chemistry her and Mike Shinoda have on the tracks makes for a fun listen; They sound like a band inspired by, influenced by, but ultimately different to Linkin Park.
And maybe that's what they should have been - the start of a whole new chapter; leave the ghosts behind and forge on without wondering what your dead friend would make of the decisions you had to take to get here. The allure of the brand is strong, sure, but how much value does it really have now, seventeen years removed from the height of its relevance? It doesn't stop you playing the songs on tour. I don't know, this one feels hard to know what the right decision is. I like that Mike Shinoda gets to keep making music, and I don't hate their new direction, but I do wonder when, when I get a flea in my ear about music again in five years from now, if I find I've missed two more Linkin Park albums, or if this is the last postmortem breath of something which should have been laid to rest long before.
*Unfortunately, Collision Course is only an EP and not an LP so cannot count towards my final album tally. It's still excellent and I still listened to it, for the record.
