Chester Bennington

Laurie Laker
Jul 20, 2017 · 2 min read

I think the reason so many of us gravitated towards Chester and his music is simple — he was, he is, one of us.

Linkin Park came into my life when I needed them most, without even realising it. I’d just moved to a new country, on the cusp of adolescence, boiling with chemistry and change. Everyone I knew was on the other side of the Atlantic. The move hadn’t been my choice, but at 11 or 12, it was never going to be. I was an outsider, accented, acne-riddled, wheezy, brace-faced, short, foreign. Angry, confused, and, in my head at least, completely alone.

Hybrid Theory, that astonishing debut record, was one of the first albums I ever bought with my own money. I wore out two copies, I listened to it that much. Staying with my Granny in Exeter, after a particularly tense and angry day, I laid awake, replaying on my Walkman well into the night. In that single bed, beneath the Paisley-patterned duvet, I sunk into that music, I let it consume me. It’s one of the most profound musical experiences I’ve ever had.

Albums and EPs like Hybrid Theory, Reanimation, Meteora, Collision Course, and Minutes To Midnight were my touchstones, my go-to’s, my sonic safe spaces. There are too many songs to name, too many undeniable titanic tunes, but I’ve blown my throat out on those choruses, cried my eyes out at those words, punched walls and danced my face off to all of them. They brought me into a family, a community, largely unspoken and invisible, of people who felt the same, whose shades of darkness were never cut and dried. Those of us from the island of misfit toys, the ones with cracks in our imperfectly self-made armour, who never quite fit the mould.

Your legacy is so much more than your music, a monumental thing in and of itself. It’s a legacy of community, of courage, of incredible talent. Yours is a legacy of life, in those millions of lives you shared yourself with, those of us you brought from our darknesses and into your starlight.

We’ll miss you Chester. We thank you, we love you.

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