Audacious Claims: Nu-Metal Saved “Metal” From an Extinction Level Event.

With Linkin Park’s Chester Bennington assuming the role of messianic leader.

Jason Healey
The Riff
Published in
7 min readAug 29, 2024

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Kristina Servant from Lachute, Canada, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Music always finds a way.

A fellow Threader — that is, one who posts on Meta’s social media platform, Threads — put forth what he cited as an unpopular opinion. He wrote that metal would have died if it had not been for Nu Metal and, in particular, Linkin Park’s figurehead Chester Bennington.

Jebulon, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

There’s a potential for lost in translation here, and of course, a bunch of people responded to the assertion, but what you need to know is that the author adjudicated each of these contrarians as categorically wrong. And the more assured part of his argument was that metal, as a genre, in its entirety, would have died had not Nu Metal come along to save it. This discussion continued for a while, and I got to thinking that if there was a punchline to this joke, it was running perilously close to its expiration date.

Unsurprisingly, that expiration date came and went. It wasn’t a joke after all. And the unpopular opinion part was about Chester Bennington being the…

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Jason Healey
The Riff

Digital Agency Operations/MBA. Record Collector. Parent. I write about music, leadership, management & organisational culture.