Chester Bennington dies

By Justin Curto

Sometimes, I forget that I was a Linkin Park fan. Songs like “Numb” and “Bleed It Out” went the route of The Fray rather than of Coldplay, with me giving them all up when I got to high school and discovered seemingly cooler music. That’s not to say Linkin Park wasn’t cool – when I first discovered the band’s music, it was everything that I didn’t even yet know I wanted in songs. And while part of that came from Linkin Park slipping hip-hop and electronic sounds into rock, most of it had to do with Chester Bennington’s voice.

I got into Linkin Park late. “Numb” wasn’t my song – it was “Waiting For the End,” the single off 2010’s A Thousand Suns that I serendipitously found on the iTunes charts one day. After one listen, it was intoxicating. It was one of the only songs I wanted to listen to (even after I made it my phone alarm and ringtone). Bennington’s vocals held it together: “All I wanna do is trade this life for something new, holding onto what I haven’t got,” he sang-screamed – and I was hooked.

Since then, I backtracked into Linkin Park’s music: from “In The End,” which I could rap in full, to “Bleed It Out,” which I only listened to privately because it featured some of Bennington’s most intense screams. Like many other young “millennials,” I claimed Linkin Park as my rock band.

When I heard that Bennington died this summer, in a suicide by hanging at only 41 years old, I hadn’t listened to Linkin Park in a few years. But as I got back into the band’s music, seeing and hearing tributes across the internet, memories of loving it came back. And I realized how much Linkin Park – and Bennington – had meant to me as a music fan. Chester Bennington was one of the first modern rock stars I knew. More importantly, though, he introduced me to a whole new style of music – one that channeled emotions through screams – that led me further toward pop punk and emo.

The Sunday after Bennington died, I was driving home from my summer job and listening to the weekly emo show on my favorite alternative rock radio station. The host played a special tribute to Bennington, noting that even though Linkin Park isn’t an emo band, Linkin Park music is special to a lot of emo fans because of reasons like what I experienced, with the band pushing people toward emo. “And I’d give it all away, just to have somewhere to go,” Bennington sang through the radio. While I hope he found his somewhere, I know his music showed thousands of fans somewhere to go.