How Chester Helped Me

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.