FEATURE:
Points of Authority
Linkin Park's Hybrid Theory at Twenty-Five
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THIS album…
PHOTO CREDIT: Mick Hutson/Getty Images
is one that I remember listening to a lot when I was in college. I was aware of Linkin Park in 2000, yet Hybrid Theory was their debut. I think there was some buzz around the band before the album came out, but it was only when Hybrid Theory came out that I connected with them. That immense debut turns twenty-five on 24th October. I want to spend time with it. I will end with a review of the album. However, before getting there, it is worth bringing in some features. It is s shame that Linkin Park’s former lead, Chester Bennington, does not get to see people react to twenty-five years of Hybrid Theory. He died in 2017. Hybrid Theory’s lyrics address Bennington’s experiences during his adolescence, including drug abuse and the constant fighting and eventual divorce of his parents. Because Linkin Park were another Nu Metal band joining the scene, there was mocking and ridicule. It was a scene that had its detractors. Limp Bizkit were already around. It was not until In the End was released, which came out on 9th October, 2001, that a lot of opinion changed. However, Hybrid Theory is an incredible album from a distinct band. One that were serous and stood apart from those around them. In 2020, Stereogum marked twenty years of Hybrid Theory:
“They had a plan.” That was the late Chester Bennington, just before his 2017 death, reflecting on the first time he met his Linkin Park bandmates. That plan is what attracted Bennington to the band. At the time, Bennington was just past 20, but he was already done with the music business. Bennington had spent five years in Grey Daze, an Arizona grunge band. Grey Daze had self-released two albums, and they had a local following, but they never went anywhere outside the Phoenix area. Bennington was looking for stability. He married young, and he got a job at a digital services firm. He wasn’t going to be a rock star. But then Jeff Blue, a music exec who knew Bennington a little bit, told him about a Los Angeles rap-rock band who needed a singer. If you were a young man looking for stability, then you could see why joining Linkin Park was a pretty good bet.
Linkin Park were, and are, professionals. They were always businessmen, never hedonists. In a nu-metal world full of party-hard jokers and outsized personalities, Linkin Park were practically monks. They didn’t engage in rock-star hijinks. They wrote lyrics so broad and relatable that they could fit just about any dark-night-of-the-soul context. Their music only barely scanned as metal, and they took more, both lyrically and aesthetically, from Depeche Mode and Echo And The Bunnymen than from Helmet or Pantera. They attacked their soul-wracking self-exorcisms with a businesslike precision. They didn’t even cuss on records. And they eclipsed all of their peers.
Linkin Park showed up in the waning days of the nu-metal boom. Korn and Limp Bizkit were still huge, but they’d already peaked. Kid Rock was already in the early stages of his Southern-rock transition. Slipknot and Static-X and Coal Chamber and most of the other big rap-metal bands had already released their biggest albums. (P.O.D. were still ascendant, but they had the Christian thing going for them, so they could afford to be late.) A week before the release of Hybrid Theory, Limp Bizkit had dropped their third album Chocolate Starfish And The Hot Dog Flavored Water — a huge hit, but one that couldn’t match the sales of 1999’s Significant Other.
Originally, Linkin Park had planned to call themselves Hybrid Theory, but the existence of the British dance group Hybrid made that a no-go. So they kept Hybrid Theory for the album title and picked a new band name. They’d considered calling themselves Lincoln Park, after the Santa Monica enclave, but they changed the spelling because the LinkinPark.com domain name was still available. As far back as 1999, Mike Shinoda was thinking about search-engine optimization — the mark of a true professional.
Listening to Hybrid Theory now, a few things are striking. There’s the clear debt that Linkin Park owe to Nine Inch Nails, whose big programmed beats and ultra-processed guitars were the clearest possible antecedent. There’s the lack of specificity in the lyrics — the way “I” and “you” and maybe “time” are the only characters on the LP. There’s the force of personality that Bennington brings — the guy clearly knew his way around a big hook and understood how to invest his screams with stadium-sized catharsis. And there’s how sad the whole fucking thing is.
Hybrid Theory is, on some level, a fundamentally teenage album, an album about feeling like the world doesn’t understand you and like you just want everyone to get out of your room right now. That teenage quality is the greatest strength and the greatest weakness of Hybrid Theory. The album is repetitive and one-note. The singles often sound huge and overwhelming, but the album tracks usually just wear me out. I don’t think it’s a great record, but then, I’d just gotten done with being a teenager when it came out. If I’d been maybe four years younger, that shit could’ve just kicked me right in the soul”.
I want to next bring in an interview from Metal Hammer published in 2001. They sat down with Chester Bennington and Mike Shinoda to discuss Linkin Park’s stellar rise. We get to discover the background of the band and how they overcame rejection asnd haters. Hybrid Theory was a mighty statement that changed Metal forever:
“The very earliest incarnations of the songs from Hybrid Theory were written at my parents’ house when I had just finished high school,” recalls rapper, keyboardist and creative mastermind Mike Shinoda. “A Place For My Head was one of those first songs, but I wasn’t thinking of writing an album – I was barely considering starting a band!”
The young Shinoda’s ‘studio’ was, at best, rudimentary. “I had a four-track recorder, a guitar that we plugged directly into a tiny little amp, and a vocal mic,” he laughs. “The whole set-up was maybe worth $300. We actually sent out a bunch of tapes of those recordings, including to a guy who we knew had signed Incubus and Korn. Amazingly, he called us back! When I told him about my set-up, he was like, ‘That doesn’t make any sense – these songs sound really good!’ And even though he was never in the position to sign us, that was really the start of it.”
With his ambitious creativity and Spartan work practises already earning praise, Shinoda began to form the nucleus of what would become Linkin Park. A merry-go-round of endless demoing ensued, but something was missing from the fledgling line-up. The answer, it turned out, would be found in the form of a flame-haired vocalist from Arizona.
“I had basically decided to retire from music,” says Chester Bennington, reflecting on his frustrating early years trying to make it in a band. “I’d got a job in real estate and thought that while I would probably still make tunes for fun, I would need to find something else to do full-time.”
That’s a fairly remarkable statement for someone who had only just turned 21 at the time, but Bennington, it turned out, was not a man to do things by halves.
“A dude who had been working with my old band gave me a call, going, ‘I’ve got these guys and they’re writing this great music but they really need a singer.’ I immediately was asking all sorts of questions, like, ‘How old are they? How long have they been doing this?’ because I didn’t want to waste my fucking time. He said, ‘Well, I’ll just send you this demo,’ which turned out to have two tracks on one side and instrumentals on the other. I listened to the instrumental side first and immediately I was like, ‘This is it, these are the ones.’ The next thing I know, I’d flown to California and was sat outside Zomba Music Publishing, opposite Whisky A Go Go on Sunset Strip.”
Such quick movement, though, meant that at this stage, Chester hadn’t even set eyes upon the men who would become his new bandmates. “When I finally met the guys, I remember that they seemed very nice, very smart, very serious and, most importantly, they had a plan, which was pretty refreshing.”
If meeting your singer through A&R teams and label suits seems a little – or maybe even a lot – businesslike to you, then you’re not alone in your thinking. When Hybrid Theory did eventually blow up in spectacular fashion, the band had to fend off the accusations of being corporate puppets from all quarters.
“We did get a reputation for being a business rather than a band,” admits Shinoda. “But that was because we were so focused on getting our stuff done. It wasn’t in the name of business – it was in the name of building up this thing we had worked so hard to create. We were prepared to do everything in our power to be successful on all levels.”
The proof of Shinoda, Bennington and co.’s unwavering, singular dedication? Consider the unshakeable faith they had to display as they tried to score the record deal that would turn Hybrid Theory into a reality. “We showcased for every fucking label there was,” sighs Shinoda, “and they all turned us down.”
Shinoda has his own view on the way his band were perceived. “I think that the difference between us and someone like Korn or Limp Bizkit is that, to me, a lot of that music was made for a frat party, a drunken brawl, slutty dudes taking their tops off and feeding off their own testosterone. What we didn’t connect with in that scene was that there wasn’t a lot of room for more introspective emotion. People would ask us, ‘Well, Jonathan Davis practically grew up in a morgue and was molested and all these horrible things. What gives you the right to be angry?’ But you don’t have to have gone through the worst things in the world to be sad. I think that’s something that ultimately really connected with our fans: that you don’t have to be an outcast and a fuck-up to take something from this music on an emotional level. If that makes us dull, then fine.”
It must be said, though, that while their debut album was breaking records for sales and at the same time converting a generation of kids to rock music, Linkin Park weren’t exactly indulging in the rock-star fantasies you might imagine. Even as they were handed the keys to the castle as the biggest band in the world, it was still a case of ‘work hard’ rather than ‘party hard’.
“I guess by most standards we were pretty reserved. We were doing so much that it didn’t leave too much time to get crazy,” jokes Shinoda. “I mean, there was this one time in Minnesota that by the end of the night we had thrown a beer keg through a hotel window and had a snowball fight in the lobby, so we weren’t totally fucking boring, but we were so focused on achieving the next goal.”
Do they wish they had been a bit crazier at the time of their peak? “We did it our way and I wouldn’t change a single thing,” reasons Bennington. “Not a thing.”
All the graft, indisputably, paid off. Hybrid Theory remains the biggest-selling debut album of the 21st century and Linkin Park’s influence can palpably be felt across a whole new wave of emerging acts. A little over 10 years down the line, how do the band reflect on the record that changed their lives irrevocably?
“I’m still enormously proud of that album,” beams Bennington. “Every now and then I will listen back to everything that we’ve done and I still enjoy that record”.
It was a myopic injustice that Hybrid Theory was compared to other Nu Metal albums. Ones that were meat-headed and macho. Instead, this is an album of sensitivity and depth. I am going to come to a feature from NME. They looked at Hybrid Theory on its twentieth anniversary. The anniversary reissue of the album was out. Packed with demos and unheard material, it was a real treat fans. You can purchase it here. Chester Bennington, Rob Bourdon, Brad Delson, Joe Hahn, Mike Shinoda and Dave ‘Phoenix’ Farrell (he was credited but did not play) created one of the albums of the decade with 2000’s Hybrid Theory. NME spoke with famous fans of Hybrid Theory. The album inspired the likes of Billie Eilish, Brockhampton, Twenty One Pilots, Bring Me the Horizon and YUNGBLUD:
“The likes of the elegiac ‘In The End’, the serrated ‘Crawlin’ and the ferocious ‘One Step Closer’ dominated music television and gave confused, emotional teenagers a voice. Meanwhile, the record earned the band a Grammy (‘Crawlin’’ took Best Hard Rock Performance) and became the best-selling album of the year. To this day, it remains one of the biggest-selling rock albums of all time, having shifted more than 27 million copies, making it, commercially, the biggest rock record of the 21st Century.
“They only seem like big songs in retrospect,” Shinoda says. “In the studio, there was a lot of anxiety to get it right.” Those worries didn’t stop when they finally released the album they’d been dreaming about for years. “The expectations of us as a band were growing so quickly. We were just kids being expected to headline big festivals with 40 minutes of music. The pressure was immense.”
They played over 300 shows to promote the album (says Hahn: “It felt like we had to prove ourselves every time we went onstage”) and pushed against the nu-metal label that was ascribed to them by the media. With the release of their hip-hop heavy remix album ‘Reanimation’ in 2002, the band continued to do things their own way. Everything from the record’s Banksy-inspired street art artwork to what the band stood for felt like a protest.
“All the music we liked was rebellious,” Hahn says. “Hip-hop felt like a neo punk rock in some way and as far as subject matter, we were definitely all about fighting against the system and lifting up a big middle finger.“
ybrid Theory’ was released in the midst of nu-metal’s assault on the mainstream. Korn were riding high after two back-to-back Number One albums (1998’s ‘Issues’ and 1999’s ‘Follow The Leader’) and it was impossible to avoid Limp Bizkit’s 2000 album ‘Chocolate Starfish And The Hot Dog Flavoured Water’. Musically, ‘Hybrid Theory’ fit into a scene that combined heavy metal with hip-hop, but there was much more to them then wallet-chains and red caps.
“We can laugh at it now but we were put on a pedestal as the trophy boys of nu-metal,” says Linkin Park’s Joe Hahn. “We didn’t love it all and because our album combined so many styles, it felt like a much bigger approach. We didn’t call it ‘Nu-Metal Theory’; it was ‘Hybrid Theory’ because we wanted to make something different.“
Nu-metal was a macho scene, but, says Jordan Fish, “Linkin Park weren’t really a macho band, were they? It was rebellious, but they still had universal songs like ‘In The End’ that your mum could enjoy on the radio. A lot of songs from that era were straight-up ‘Fuck everyone!’ bro anger, but Linkin Park were a lot more emo and introspective. They didn’t have that silly aggression that a lot of nu metal bands had; they were talking about depression.”
Linkin Park’s ‘Hybrid Theory’ accelerated genre-less listening habits, exposed a generation of kids to what else was out there and turned six music nerds into the biggest thing in rock. Their message of believing in yourself – even when no one else will – continues to resonate with a global audience, as does their insistence that it’s healthy to embrace your flaws.
As the band’s Joe Hahn puts it: “Seeing the impact that album had on people as individuals, and how that echoed through different places in the world, holds a very special place to us. It let us know that what we do has an impact on people, and that’s not something to take lightly”.
I am going to finish with a review of the 20th Anniversary Edition of Hybrid Theory. KERRANG! awarded the release five stars. Even if there are some fillers when you look at all the extra tracks, they note how Hybrid Theory still sounds so urgent and important. An album that has inspired so many other artists. Twenty-five years on from its release and you can hear it in the blood of some of modern music’s best artists:
“It’s not hyperbolic to say that Hybrid Theory is one of the most important rock albums of all time. It was that perfect gateway drug for millions of teens around the globe to discover alternative music through its monumental hooks, bouncing beats and the unstoppable, never-bettered vocal interplay between Chester Bennington and Mike Shinoda. Merging the worlds of hip-hop and electronica (previously seen as enemies) with rock and metal, this ‘hybrid’ felt fresh, energising and the perfect sound to usher in a new millennium. Building on the foundations of their peers in Deftones and Korn, Linkin Park’s debut had the accessibility turned up to 11, with shimmering production and lyrics so infectious you’d need gloves to handle them.
And, to mark two whole decades since its release, Linkin Park have opened their vault to bring us a chonking great six-record box set that follows the embryonic stages of the band – originally known as Xero – to the brain-mangling 2002 remix album Reanimation.
Listening to Hybrid Theory today is just as exhilarating as it was in 2000. From the opening pulses of Papercut, few records strike at the heart of what it means to be cutting edge, the sound of a band determined to shake things up, pulling from influences as diverse as Depeche Mode and DJ Shadow. And while it’s always great to hear the pained wails of Crawling, the simply timeless In The End, and nu-metal aggro of One Step Closer, there’s still so much below the surface. The criminally underrated With You (with Chester’s cathartic, guttural ‘With youuuuuuuuuuuuu’), the joyous ‘Hoo-hah!’ in Forgotten, the electro-wizardry of Cure For The Itch… this is more than an album of four mega-singles.
Away from the record proper, we find ourselves in the midst of its kind-of sister album, Reanimation. Released two years after Hybrid Theory, the band invited some of their DJ and rapper mates to reinvent the record, with varying degrees of success. “They were all people that we really looked up to and wanted to collaborate with,” Joe Hahn told Kerrang! in this week’s Cover Story. Sadly, it isn’t a 100 per cent hit rate: some remixes miss the magic of Linkin Park completely, hacking their way through a capella vocals and riffs until they’re a useless mess. That said, the dubby bass of Frgt/10 with Charli 2na and Pharoahe Monch’s showing on H! Vltg3 elevate the record, while Deftones’ Steph Carpenter’s interpretation of By Myself (titled By_Myslf, naturally) adds even more heaviness and a refreshing, almost-Infected Mushroom beat. None of the songs, however, are an improvement on the originals.
At six records and a whopping 80 tracks, it’s vast undertaking for one listening session. And unlike the lavish box design suggests, this isn’t all gold, but that’s not the point. It’s as much about the journey as the destination, and this is a 20 year celebration and exploration of how Linkin Park worked their way from lo-fi 1998 demos to flame-haired world-conquerers just two years later. In fact, it would have been great to include a visual element – perhaps the band’s 2014 Download set where the played the album in full? Arguably the greatest 38 minutes the festival has ever seen. And 12 songs that we’ll never get tired of listening to, ever”.
Linkin Park are still recording and playing to this day. Now led by Emily Armstrong, they released their eighth studio album, From Zero, last year. Although nobody can replace Chester Bennington, that is not what Linkin Park are trying to do. Armstrong is carrying on his legacy but also offering something new to the band. I don’t think they ever released an album as incredible as their debut. On 24th October, we celebrate twenty-five years of Hybrid Theory. I recall the album fondly. In the End is the standout cut from the album from a band who were simply brilliant…
FROM the beginning.