In lieu of Chester Bennington’s apparent suicide this week, I thought it’d be nice to think about what Linkin Park meant to me growing up…
In 6th grade Hybrid Theory came out. However, I was still a bit too caught up in other rap-rock bands like Limp Bizkit and Korn to get into it. When Meteora was released in 8th grade, I finally gave Linkin Park my full attention. Where Limp Bizkt reflected my 6th grade thuggishness and penchant for jokes about genetalia, Linkin Park would come to mark a growth in my musical interests. In their music my own feelings of isolation, anger, love, and heartbreak were given voice.
I would listen to the Reanimation remix of My December when I was alone in my room and feeling like all my friends hated me. The beauty of that song and the solace I found in it during those times seemed to justify the feeling of sadness as something beautiful on its own terms.
When Meteora came out, I bought the DVD/CD combo which had a behind the scenes bit on how Linkin Park recruited a graffiti artists to give their music a new aesthetic. Cool. It was very very cool. As a privledged teenager who wanted desperately to escape the confines of his comfortable suburban life, that brief dose of art suggested that maybe there was a world outside of my immediate surroundings.
I had a thought sometime in my freshman year of high school that I didn’t really know what I should dress like. I attended a Catholic school that required uniforms so I couldn’t look at my peers. I turned to finding pictures of Linkin Park online and trying to emulate their style. Chester specifically had a flair about him that was masculine but sensitive, with his shaved head and huge earings contouring his cute puppy dog face.
Linkin Park paved the way for a lot of music I’d later get into. The ambient synths and beats that lined their songs made Boards of Canada go down like a Mai Thai instead of a shot of whiskey. And listening to someone rap over something that was a bit more subtle and somber gave me an affinity for more “underground” rappers like MF Doom and Shabazz Palaces who drift towards more atmospheric and somber beats.
While I can look back at Linkin Park and their first two albums and think “oh this is so lame, I had no taste,” the songs still bring up all those emotions I had as a kid. And now I still revisit their music when I need to rage. Cause that’s what their music was to me, pure emotion. And you don’t really grow out of that.
