Drummer Rob Bourdon grew up idolizing the limitless groove of funk and R&B musicians. The album was called Hybrid Theory for a reason (it would have been the group’s name too, if someone else hadn’t beaten them to it). Linkin Park were committed to making sure you knew their tastes lay beyond just riff-o-rama.
Bennington was particularly adept at self-analysis, explaining how the tide of anxiety inside of him could retreat only to return as a crushing wave of depression, or watching the last remnants of serotonin circle his mind’s drain like black tap water. The pair switched perspectives and laced verses through one another with guile, playing out a bracing dialogue between id and superego.
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To anyone tucked under a duvet running their portable CD player hot, this was a revelation. Bennington and Shinoda were clear-eyed in facing down topics of duplicity, control, psychological and physical abuse, and suicidal ideation at a time when few ventured that far. Once they found a comfortable nook within vein-popping catharsis, this duality became the heart of Linkin Park’s music. On early versions of “A Place for My Head” and “Points of Authority,” it seems as if Bennington and Shinoda are reading from different sheets entirely. Even after Bennington was installed, Hybrid Theory’s demos show just how far they had to travel before arriving at anything resembling synergy.
The group had been active for three years before the departure in 1999 of original singer Mark Wakefield (who went on to both manage Taproot and design the cover for System of a Down’s Toxicity). Today, it’s hard to look past the buddy act of Bennington and Mike Shinoda as the skeleton key that unlocked Linkin Park’s appeal for a wider spectrum of listeners. Rather than re-re-evaluate the era in which they found fame, the 20th anniversary reissue of Hybrid Theory-featuring over 50 unreleased tracks, B-sides, remixes, live performances and rarities-encourages a closer examination of why this band went supernova. In making themselves small, they became colossal. They sang about being filled with tension, feeling betrayed by the light, wishing for a way to disappear. They knew the nu- was loaded: Their blend of rapping, screaming, and circuit-bending rendered them suspect to the double-denim dinosaurs of rock crit, so they built a street team on chatrooms and trained in on untapped admissions of despondency and failure. Nu-metal would seem the obvious category, but even though Linkin Park were saddled with the tag at the time, it was an awkward fit.
Yet on lists of the best metal, hard rock, emo or straight-up rock, Hybrid Theory is often conspicuously absent, as if no axe-worshipping subtribe is willing to adopt it as their own. You’d assume being the only diamond-tinted rock album this side of the millennium might afford a smidgen of clout. With global sales of 32 million-including 12 million in the U.S., a million of which has come in the past three years- Hybrid Theory is the highest-selling debut in any genre since 1988’s Appetite for Destruction.
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For those who witnessed Bennington buoyant and free on stage just weeks before he died, the burden of presence is hard to shake.Īll of this weighs heavily on 2000’s Hybrid Theory, already the most popular heavy music of the 21st century. He worked through years of sexual abuse and drug addiction on stage, on record, and through community outreach. His death in 2017 was by all accounts a shock: to the band, to his family, and to the legions across the world who treated him as an inspiration, not just for his power as a singer, but for his dignity in recovery and honesty in relapses. The defining characteristic of Linkin Park’s music was how accessible it made the tools to deal with trauma, an offering intended both for their fans and Bennington himself. Chester Bennington was 41 years old when he lost the battle he spent life urging people to overcome.
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