Chester Bennington and the Cathartic Anger of Linkin Park

Chester Bennington, a vocalist for the nu-metal band Linkin Park, was found dead in his California home on Thursday morning. The apparent cause was suicide—a hanging. Bennington was forty-one years old, and is survived by his wife and six children. The precise manner and timing of Bennington’s death feels trenchant. Chris Cornell, Bennington’s friend and occasional collaborator, who ended his life in a similar manner just two months ago, would have turned fifty-three yesterday; in May, Bennington, accompanied by the guitarist Brad Delson, sang Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” at Cornell’s funeral. Suicide can feel like a kind of contagion—an idea that slips into a room and lingers, cruelly. This summer has been a dark and exhausting time for fans of hard rock.

In 2017, Linkin Park’s sound—a convulsive and visceral synthesis of rock, rap, and industrial music—feels like a curious relic of some long-ago era. It is sometimes hard to locate its vestiges in the air. The culture has a way of revising and reasserting certain narratives, even historical ones; now, when tasked with evoking the sound and aesthetic of rock music circa 2000, it is simpler to recall a cabal of fashionable, New York City-based bands (the Strokes, Interpol, LCD Soundsystem, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs) whose aesthetic and ironic posturing has endured and blossomed. Yet Linkin Park’s breakthrough LP, “Hybrid Theory,” from 2000, sold thirty million copies worldwide. (Its follow-up, “Meteora,” from 2003, sold twenty-seven million.) Those numbers are staggering: it’s treacherous to conflate commercial success with other triumphs, but to deny Linkin Park its cultural significance feels egregious. It was easily the most popular and omnipresent new rock band of its decade.

For me, Bennington’s singing has always felt athletic, determined, wildly urgent—like a long-distance runner just barely hurling his depleted body across a finish line. Sometimes, in the midst of a particularly furious run, it can seem as if we are actually hearing his vocal cords separating, fraying, going up in flames. His manifestations of rage are often so unflinching as to feel threatening. In the past, Bennington has spoken about being the victim of child sexual abuse—he told the rock magazine Kerrang! that, when he was seven, he was routinely tormented by an older friend—and much of his work seems fuelled by a deep and otherwise unarticulated anguish. I’m not certain how else a person might come to sing like that. His lyrics were frequently doused with fatalism, yet he never seemed like a nihilist; Bennington was merely vexed by the futility of his love. “I tried so hard and got so far, but in the end it doesn’t even matter,” he sings on the chorus of “In the End,”an early single.

There’s video online of Bennington and Cornell performing “Hunger Strike,” a track Cornell first recorded with Temple of the Dog, together. “Who’s drunk enough to be in a singing-out-loud mood?” Cornell asks the crowd, pacing back and forth. This, to me, still feels like an acute summation of a particular kind of seething masculinity: How do we vanquish or neutralize the anger that sets us apart? What will it take tonight? Bennington jogs out to do Eddie Vedder’s verses. The crowd hollers when he pushes into his upper register at the end of the chorus—“Hung-ryyyy!” Bennington himself seems to prefer this bit—the part where he gets to bend and wince, to embody and release whatever pain he’s internalized. Relief, when it comes, is a spasm.