It seems to me the reality that people who struggle with mental health challenges, aren’t the only ones who give into suicide, is more evident now than ever. Relief, when it comes, is a spasm.The loss of Linkin Park lead singer, Chester Bennington, by suicideĪn open letter from UMTR2ME founder, Jimm Greer, in response to the loss of Linkin Park lead singer, Chester Bennington, by suicide:īeing a survivor of a suicide attempt myself, it’s so hard for me each time I hear the heartbreaking news that another person has taken their life by suicide. The crowd hollers when he pushes into his upper register at the end of the chorus-“Hung-ryyyy!” Bennington himself seems to prefer this bit-the part where he gets to bend and wince, to embody and release whatever pain he’s internalized. This, to me, still feels like an acute summation of a particular kind of seething masculinity: How do we vanquish or neutralize the anger that sets us apart? What will it take tonight? Bennington jogs out to do Eddie Vedder’s verses. “Who’s drunk enough to be in a singing-out-loud mood?” Cornell asks the crowd, pacing back and forth. There’s video online of Bennington and Cornell performing “Hunger Strike,” a track Cornell first recorded with Temple of the Dog, together. “I tried so hard and got so far, but in the end it doesn’t even matter,” he sings on the chorus of “In the End,”an early single. His lyrics were frequently doused with fatalism, yet he never seemed like a nihilist Bennington was merely vexed by the futility of his love.
I’m not certain how else a person might come to sing like that.
In the past, Bennington has spoken about being the victim of child sexual abuse-he told the rock magazine Kerrang! that, when he was seven, he was routinely tormented by an older friend-and much of his work seems fuelled by a deep and otherwise unarticulated anguish. His manifestations of rage are often so unflinching as to feel threatening. Sometimes, in the midst of a particularly furious run, it can seem as if we are actually hearing his vocal cords separating, fraying, going up in flames. It was easily the most popular and omnipresent new rock band of its decade.įor me, Bennington’s singing has always felt athletic, determined, wildly urgent-like a long-distance runner just barely hurling his depleted body across a finish line. (Its follow-up, “Meteora,” from 2003, sold twenty-seven million.) Those numbers are staggering: it’s treacherous to conflate commercial success with other triumphs, but to deny Linkin Park its cultural significance feels egregious. Yet Linkin Park’s breakthrough LP, “Hybrid Theory,” from 2000, sold thirty million copies worldwide.
The culture has a way of revising and reasserting certain narratives, even historical ones now, when tasked with evoking the sound and aesthetic of rock music circa 2000, it is simpler to recall a cabal of fashionable, New York City-based bands (the Strokes, Interpol, LCD Soundsystem, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs) whose aesthetic and ironic posturing has endured and blossomed. It is sometimes hard to locate its vestiges in the air. In 2017, Linkin Park’s sound-a convulsive and visceral synthesis of rock, rap, and industrial music-feels like a curious relic of some long-ago era. The Linkin Park singer Chester Bennington, whose body was found on Thursday, was sometimes wrongly dismissed by critics.
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