
What Chester Bennington Taught Me About Life, Art and Being Different.
Say what you will about Linkin Park, but they were a hugely successful band with “Meteora” selling over 27 million records becoming the best selling Alternative Songs album of all time.
I have some of the fondest memories of these albums as a kid in the early 2000s bringing together kids from all different backgrounds. It was the intensity, hype and angst of “Hybrid Theory” that resonated with me as an adolescent when I was angry depressed or confused about the world around me, Linkin Park seemed to mirror the feelings I didn’t understand and gave me a way out, with my portable CD player and headphones I could escape.
Me and my friends would spend hours learning Linkin Park songs on guitar and would play every album over and over again till we knew every word. Even the album art had a huge impact on my own art and creativity with the mix of western art and Japanese anime introducing me to some of the coolest illustrations I had seen in a CD book and inspiring some of my best work in art school.
Linkin Park, throughout their entire discography took risks doing new things like using drum machines and turntables, introducing hip hop concepts collaborating with Jay Z, even changing their entire sound in their later albums because Chester never wanted to stay the same, he always wanted to evolve and be different.
Linkin Park was different in a time when I was surrounded by the same country music and cookie cutter pop songs everyone listened to in my small Mississippi town. Me and my friends were the outliers, the different ones, we had piercings and died hair and drew all over the covers of our notebooks. Linkin Park may sound dated now, but I will never forget how Linkin Park showed me it was ok to be different, it’s ok to feel upset, and it’s ok to try new things even if they don’t work out the way you planned.
I remember seeing Chester at Warped Tour a few years ago, he wasn’t performing but just hanging out, shirt off dancing around enjoying the music. That’s how I’ll always remember him: Full of life and the music.