I always knew that Chester had a shitty life.
The thing about emotional songs is that independent of
quality, I can always tell whether
the emotions are real. Evanescence’s Bring
Me To Life was fake. The Killers’ Mr.
Brightside was real. Limp Bizkit’s Nookie
and Simple Plan’s I’m Just A Kid were
fake; You’re Beautiful, creepy as it
was, was real. Hell, I could tell even if they were from the same band – Clocks was all real brooding, while Fix You was just Chris Martin smoking waaaay too much dope.
All of Chester’s songs were real. All of them.
Having grown past the age of 10, I can see why people
dismiss Linkin Park’s discography so fast. Crawling
and Numb seem like cheesy,
over-the-top tracks dealing with ostensibly (and gravely in retrospect) serious topics. For a lot of people, those
tracks seem more like some adolescent angst than very real and very adult pain.
But watching the videos on MTV was…this wasn’t something a
teenager mad at his dad would make. All that imagery, the isolation, the
vulnerability – all of that’s stuff only someone who’s been shaken, beaten and broken can come up with. Even as a kid I
understood that this was all in his core,
something he felt to the point that it defined him.
The thing is – when you make songs that are always real, people won’t always like
them. That’s just how these things go. If you puke out everything you are on
the disc tracks, sometimes the stuff that gets dredged out doesn’t look so
good. But it’s sincere and when it
blooms, it blooms and grabs people in
ways that the most meticulously crafted fake song could never do.
I rediscovered Linkin Park at a very bad time in my life. I had yet to be diagnosed with
depression, and…well, that’s a story for another post. Then through
happenstance, I listened to Burning In
The Skies and decided to give the band a second shot. That wasn’t a
decision I regret making.
Ostensibly a parable about nuclear power and the possibility
of Armageddon, Thousand Suns is as
much the journey of one man as it is the journey of the whole human race. There
are some weak tracks here and there, but as a whole the album is powerful and knows when to be subtle and
when to be all-out.
I remember listening to When
They Come For Me and feeling it. This went beyond simply immediate reactions
to victimization, this was when you’d been used to exhaustion by others and just
had enough of it all. This is what
cynicism sounds like – when you’ve been hurt so badly that the only way you
could live through it was to grow fangs of your own.
And the next track made me cry when I heard it. Dubbed
simply Robot Boy, it took the singer
of When They Come For Me and gave him
a good, long look in the mirror. His defenses have made him strong, but they’ve
taken something away from him, too – was all that cold, unflinching
invulnerability worth the loneliness it brought as its price?
That’s something everyone has to answer on their own.
Chester gave us his answer, and while
the world is the poorer for it, I see no point in judging him for what he did.
And while I don’t have my own answer, I’m grateful to him for asking me the
question in the first place.
Thousand Suns was
more than Linkin Park’s first legitimately great – not good, great – album. It was about a man who’d
been torn apart, and his attempt at stitching himself back together.
