Linkin Park Steps Out

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The more biting criticism against Linkin Park is that its songs lack artistry. Lesley Gore's It's My Party and Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit are sonically distinct and generations removed, but they both used irony (Cobain: "Here we are now/ entertain us") and metaphor (Gore: "It's my party and I'll cry if I want to") to appeal to alienated teens. By comparison, Linkin Park's three biggest hits--Crawling, One Step Closer and In the End--are strictly confessional yawps. Here, the band offers no apologies. "There's a lot of music out there that our producer [Don Gilmore] describes as 'poor me' music," says Bennington, who says that much of the pain he sings about stems from physical abuse he suffered as a child, though not at the hands of his parents. "Don says he wants to listen to music to be entertained. That's not where we're coming from. We like to talk about things that we can relate to. When we write music, there has to be honesty in it. We're not trying to say, 'I've gone through this, you have to feel sorry for me.' We're saying, 'I've gone through this, and we know other people are too.' There's nothing wrong with looking in the mirror and not liking yourself sometimes. But there is something wrong with giving in to that."

Not everyone is able to distill the positive message. Last March Charles Andrew Williams, 15, walked into his Santee, Calif., high school and killed two fellow students. That morning he wrote out the lyrics from Linkin Park's song In the End--"I tried so hard and got so far/ but in the end, it doesn't even matter"--pinned the note to the speakers in his room and signed it to explain his feelings of despair to his father. None of the group members like talking about Santee, in part because, really, what can they say other than that the incident makes them sad? "Yes that kid connected with the lyrics, but so did a million other people, totally different kinds of people," says Shinoda, who feels that Linkin Park was vilified by a mainstream press that never got acquainted with the band's broader philosophy. The problem is that Linkin Park is a band, not a cosmology, and if the group wants to be genuinely uplifting, its members can't just declare themselves positive and leave it at that. Is a line like, "You try to take the best of me/ Go away" really positive? Sure, some kids may empathize with the sentiment, but the lyric hardly provides an adequate means of transcending loneliness and insignificance. Bennington and Shinoda have to find a way to get the message they truly advocate into their songs, and so far they haven't really done the job. For a band so heavily invested in trying to communicate clearly, they still have lots of work to do.

The good news is that Linkin Park likes to work. The group spent 325 days on tour in 2001, and it's already planning to release a remix album this spring and record new material as soon as the band's members can tear themselves away from the road. They were also an exceedingly young band when they wrote Hybrid Theory. They wrote what they knew. Now their lives are much more interesting. "Our next record could sound like anything," says Bennington. With a little more discipline, it could even sound like what they intend.