Linkin Park Was a Great Band to Grow Up To

Chester Bennington's music was blunt and intense—kind of like teenage emotions.
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When I was a freshman in high school, there was an obsessive, three-week period where I wanted nothing more than to put Linkin Park lyrics in my AOL profile. This was around 1999, or 2000, and there weren’t very many spaces you could ably express yourself online; this was before Facebook, or MySpace, or even the halcyon days of AIM. It was right around when Napster became a thing, too, when the Internet was still accessed via dial-up and downloading anything took hours, which could all be undercut if your parents picked up the phone. Collecting all the tracks to Hybrid Theory took me an entire weekend.

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Specifically, though, I wanted to add the lyrics from “My December” to my profile because it was (1) almost Christmas, and (2) I was a grouchy, hormonal, mostly awful tween who was very confused about all the surprise erections he was getting, and the song captured all of that gloomy malaise like nothing else on the radio. Besides, I wanted my profile to look sensitive and Christmas-y because, as my teenage logic had it, girls would think I was deep? Or something. So I asked my friend Lindsey to show me how to do some basic HTML so I could swap out the default colors, and “My December” ended up being just the start. I’d spend entire afternoons tinkering with my AOL profile, getting the spacing juuust right and adding little ~*’ASCII flourishes’*~ to float around whatever sensitive lyrics suited my mood. It’s funny for me to think about, because some 12 years later, having learned HTML played a key role in helping me land my first internship in journalism. In retrospect, Linkin Park helped give my career shape.

On Thursday, Chester Bennington, Linkin Park’s lead singer, died by suicide in his home in Palos Verdes. He was 41, and he died on his friend Chris Cornell’s birthday, who similarly grappled with addiction. These last two years, I found myself listening to a lot of Linkin Park, mostly out of nostalgia, as the band’s first two albums transparently trafficked in the typhoon of confusing feelings that made being a teenager feel so shitty, and I just wanted to feel something. In some ways, it’s almost unfair that all the bad music you absorbed as a teen will always mean more to you than anything you encounter in adulthood. It’s also odd knowing the band you loved as a kid wasn’t appreciated beyond a narrow age window. At some point you distance yourself in favor of better, more respectable, more multi-dimensional music that allows room for the light touch of critical superiority—you grow up and read Pitchfork.

Their lyrics weren’t profound or nuanced, but they were perfect for playing loudly and obnoxiously in your car if you’d just had a fight with your first girlfriend and were stuck in traffic.

The band was never critically appreciated and had become something of an easy joke over the years, almost an anime Limp Bizkit. But it was Chester’s voice—soaring, crackly, brittle—that did more to define the band than any other element. There was a palpable tension whenever he performed, as if his throat could explode in a red mist from overexertion at any given moment. He channeled pain in such a guttural way that it allowed him to take otherwise forgettable songs beyond the bleak parameters of nu metal and into our collective memory. As Frank Guan wrote at Vulture, “It’s Bennington, with his lean but vigorous delivery, that raises them to the level of personal candor. It’s no accident that that young man desperate to get his pain across excelled at bridges, the crucial point where a rock song goes all-in.”

Linkin Park was quintessentially California in more than a few ways. Their lyrics weren’t very profound or nuanced, but their songs were perfect for playing loudly and obnoxiously in your car, especially if you’d just had a fight with your first girlfriend and were stuck in traffic. (They even had an Asian guy! Who DJ’d! At the time that sort of visibility in mainstream rock was a revelation.) From stories I’d hear from friends who ended up staying and partying in L.A., the guys in the band were cooler than most and always generous to their fans, inviting them into their homes to listen to music and hang out.

I didn’t listen to Linkin Park beyond their second album, Meteora, which is fine, I think. The band’s sound had continued to evolve, and my tastes had begun to splinter in another direction; often the waves of fandom only line up for brief periods before diverging. But Chester's death hit me like a gut punch, and I was still struck by how many functioning adults I went to school with had posted earnest thank you’s on Facebook, all because the band had played a crucial part in helping them navigate the broken early years of their teens. With Chester crouched low and howling in the foreground, Linkin Park articulated feelings that 13-year-olds never knew existed and that 18-year-olds wanted nothing more than to extricate themselves from. If you were lucky, they were exactly what you needed to hear when you needed to hear them, and for that, imagined or otherwise, they were perfect.