This Linkin Life: A Tribute to Chester Bennington, 1976–2017

For much of the time that I can remember, I was unapologetically apathetic about celebrities. I was one of the people who never really understood how fans of actors, actresses, singers, or bands, could care about them so much beyond their art and preoccupy themselves with the minutae of their daily lives. And when they died, I sympathised… then I moved on to the next news piece.
Two days ago, Chester Bennington took his own life. And I realized I wasn’t going to be moving on to the next news piece.
Linkin Park has been my favourite band for at least ten years. That’s about half my life so far, and at least three-quarters of the time that I have been listening to music (possibly more). My iTunes app prominently displays not just all their albums, but twelve out of fifteen of Linkin Park Underground albums, their yearly collection of unreleased songs and demos to the official LPU fan club.
I first chanced upon them through their single “What I’ve Done,” their most commercially-successful song ever, which was probably the case for many fans — current or former — as well. But unlike many, I did not first hear it as the main soundtrack on Transformers; my cousin had somehow found their music video, which we then watched together in shitty 360p on a slow-ass DSL connection (those were rough times). While it is still in shitty 360p, it has also remained my all-time favourite music video, Linkin Park or otherwise.
That was a personal turning point for me: it not only introduced me to a band, it drew me into a world of music. Of rock music. Of alternative music. Of hip hop music. Of electronic music. Of any kind of music, because goddammit, this band delved into everything. Even their debut album, Hybrid Theory, was aptly named because they never stuck to a predefined style. While Chester’s screaming rock and Mike’s rap were the two defining blends of this hybrid (Papercut is a great example), you couldn’t ignore Joe’s turntable scratching in Points of Authority and the hilarously-named Cure for the Itch (you’ll figure it out), or the hip-hop vibes of “High Voltage” — which, to be fair, wasn’t technically on the album, but was attached to the release of their debut single “One Step Closer”.
But it was honestly the Minutes to Midnight (MtM) era and beyond that really showed what Linkin Park was capable of. In that album, a reference to the doomsday clock, they tackled much more mature topics like war, death, climate change and natural disaster, a far cry from the songs of personal angst that people were used to. So changed the music, as well. MtM moved away from the rap-rock of Hybrid Theory and Meteora to a softer form of alternative rock, introduced Mike singing for the first time in “Hands Held High” and “In Between” (even doing it fully solo on bonus track “No Roads Left”), more piano, and had a generally more diverse range of music.
As it turns out, MtM was merely the band treading water. In 2010, they went all in with A Thousand Suns (ATS), a radical departure from anything that came before. Firstly, it was a concept album, meant to be listened in a single sitting from start to end; some tracks didn’t even have a concrete start or end, fading in from one to the next. ATS also went hard on the issues they initially touched on in MtM, dealing primarily with nuclear warfare (the title was a reference to an Oppenheimer quote from the Bhagavad Gita), but it was also backed up by others such as political dissent, death, hope and hopelessness, the impact of technology, and the end of the world. The music was a complete 180 — gone were the guitars, or at the very least reduced to subtleties picked up on a third listen. And in were electronic sounds, reggae drums, sample vocals from famous speeches, a full hip-hop-electronica track (in “Wretches and Kings”), the whole band singing (in “Iridescent”), and so much more. It was a full melting pot of genres, and to me personally, Linkin Park’s magnum opus.
If it seems strange that I haven’t touched much on Chester himself in a tribute to him, it’s because he’s inseparable from the band to me. While he hasn’t sang on every track, Linkin Park without Chester is, quite simply, not Linkin Park. Throughout the decade and throughout all those changes, his voice was a constant comfort I could return to through my earphones. And my god, what a voice he had. He had the highest of pitches, the sweetest of ballads, and the screamiest of screams (listen to him do it for seventeen seconds straight here). In a way he was the perfect frontman for a band like Linkin Park, because he was one of the few people with the vocal range that could adapt to any of the cutting-edge material that the band wanted to pursue.
Alas, not everyone was happy with the radical changes the band kept making. The backlash started with MtM, but grew to a ferocious roar in ATS, with many fans decrying the move away from rap-rock, calling them “sellouts.” This was an argument that I never understood; how could a band that was actively moving away from music that sold millions, in favour of pushing the boundaries, be selling out? As Mike said an interview, “(Our old sound) was easy for us to replicate, it was easy for other bands to replicate, and we just needed to move on.” They were doing the exact opposite of selling out; if anything, they were being true artists.
It clearly affected Chester, too: he had the most frank Twitter posts among the six, and would personally defend divisive works online against criticism. It was apparent without doubt that this was someone that not only cared deeply about his work, but about what the fans thought, too. And it saddens me that their recently-released album, One More Light (OML), received perhaps the most hate, because it was Linkin Park’s first pop album. If ATS was a radical departure, OML was an identity change — if not for the fact that the band would have most certainly tried to do something almost as crazy the next time round.
In a way, though, perhaps the negativity the band faced throughout these past few years wasn’t all that surprising. They reached their heyday early with their first two albums, the angry screaming supporting my generation through their teen angst years. Now, having moved on, no one wants to be associated with the years of cringe, and Linkin Park naturally became the band that people very much wanted to “grow out” of. Which is a shame; the band had grown with us, too. It was very much a catch-22 for Linkin Park; by changing, they had lost fans who wanted their core sound, but had they not, they would have simply become an easy caricature to mock — lyrics from old songs like In The End had in fact already become internet memes used in jest.
I identified strongly with how Chester openly felt regarding their music, and I stuck with the band. I forced myself to be open to their changes, even if it was something I usually wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole, and I found myself not only enjoying the music, but having new genres opened up to me. It is very much because of them that today, there are very few genres of music that I can’t appreciate at least a little bit. And like many other fans, Chester’s voice was there for me through the many tough times over the decade; on every album, as different as they were, there was something that could help me deal with sadness, pain, grief or loss. I only wish they hadn’t so closely related to his own suffering, too.
If you’re reading this as a former fan, or even if you’re not a fan at all, I do urge you to listen not just to their most popular songs of yesteryear, but their newer ones too. There are so many gems in every album; beyond the ones linked above, “Powerless” is a beautiful ballad from Living Things; “Wastelands” from The Hunting Party is a modern throwback to their old rap rock days, and “One More Light” (the album’s title song) is a heartachingly bittersweet representation of this whole situation. And there are many, many more. It’s fine to love Hybrid Theory and/or Meteora, but I firmly believe that the band’s legacy was less so about pioneering nu-metal, rather more being fearlessly diverse, and it would be fitting to honour that legacy through broad listening.
I never thought I would say this about any celebrity, but Chester, even though you never knew me, I will miss you very much. Linkin Park may or may not live on, but it really isn’t the band I know and love without you. You wondered who would care if a light goes out, in a sky of a million stars; well I do. We do.
