His voice felt softer, more complex an antidote to the jock theater of nü-metal-masculinity. In this context, it felt safe to admit I welcomed Mike Shinoda and Joe Hahn’s beat and synth work as a respite from the genre’s usual onslaught of distortion guitar, sought after Bennington’s vocals for their gentle melodic moments as much as for their unrestrained rage. We regarded Reanimation like the Animatrix (we never got around to considering it canon but liked that it existed). We liked Gorillaz and Dance Dance Revolution. Our Linkin Park fandom was mostly made up of first-generation immigrant kids under too much pressure from parents to achieve at all costs. Those kids, frankly, thought Linkin Park was for nerds, and they weren’t wrong. Every alt kid on the schoolbus had Korn or Limp Bizkit or Slipknot on heavy rotation, but the pals I shared Meteora with weren’t the kids I cut class or browsed deviantART with. Linkin Park’s songs were nightmares that rarely named their monsters instead they mapped cartographies of emotional response to trauma in vivid, honest detail.īy the time Meteora came around three years later (slicker, guitars ceding some space to electronic production), we were passing freshly burned CD-R’s of it around homeroom with pride. Bennington’s writing was inspired by familial trauma, struggles with drugs and alcohol, and a history of childhood sexual abuse, but the lyrics hardly addressed those things directly. The lyrics spoke of internalized self-policing, paranoia, claustrophobia, feelings of inadequacy, physical and emotional abuse, dissociation, fear of failure. It echoed back the alienation we felt but couldn’t yet voice, of pain that was never validated by the adults in our lives because we were meant to “grow out of it.”
The blood sloshing around my young brain pooled in response to the choral swell on “With You.” Long before I had ever heard of mindful breathing, my breath slowed for a moment of peace on “My December.”ĭepressives of a certain age for whom Linkin Park was formative recall Theory as a blessing. I walked down hallways and Bensonhurst streets in a gait synced to “Papercut”’s rhythm section.
#Linkin park discography is chester bennington dead Patch
The copy of Theory in my Discman seemed to patch directly into my physical being. You get all of the feelings, with none of the coping mechanisms. I was freshly submerged in middle school, which is one of the most emotionally unforgiving times in a person’s life. Linkin Park’s iconic debut Hybrid Theory came out in the fall of 2000. His death would have been deeply tragic no matter the timing, but for it to take place at the apex of a summer I spent revisiting his band’s discography after a long time away felt like a cruel coincidence. When I got news that Chester Bennington was dead, the last thing I had tweeted was a semi-serious theory that Linkin Park’s song “Papercut” was about the Panopticon.
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