Lincoln Park Top Songs
The American rock band Linkin Park is one of the most famous rock bands around the globe. This band of six has many best rated songs and albums to their credit, particularly in the genre of alternative rock and light metal. Also Read:Top 6 Rock Bands Of All Time. 11 Linkin Park Songs That Take On A Whole New Meaning After Chester Bennington's Suicide.
Chester Bennington, the ferocious lead singer for the platinum-selling hard rock band Linkin Park, was found dead in his home near Los Angeles on Thursday. He was 41.
Brian Elias, the chief of operations for the Los Angeles County coroner’s office, confirmed the death, in Palos Verdes Estates, and said it was being investigated as a possible suicide after law enforcement authorities responded to a call shortly after 9 a.m.
[ Read an appraisal of Chester Bennington’s music and career ]
Mr. Bennington, who was known for his piercing scream and free-flowing anguish, released seven albums with Linkin Park. The most recent, “One More Light,” arrived in May and debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard album chart. The band was scheduled to start a tour with a concert on July 27 in Mansfield, Mass.
Mike Shinoda, one of Linkin Park’s founders, spoke on behalf of the group in a tweet. “Shocked and heartbroken,” he wrote, adding that the band would issue a statement.
Mr. Bennington also performed in a side project, Dead by Sunrise, and joined Stone Temple Pilots as its lead singer after the band split with the vocalist Scott Weiland in 2013.
In May, he responded to the suicide by hanging of his friend the singer Chris Cornell in a note he shared on social media. “I can’t imagine a world without you in it,” he wrote. “I pray you find peace in the next life.” (Mr. Bennington also performed Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” at Mr. Cornell’s funeral. Mr. Cornell would have turned 53 on Thursday.)
A week later, he posted a series of positive tweets, including one about being artistically inspired: “Feeling very creative this last week. I’ve written 6 songs and I’m happy with all of them. Just getting started.” He added the emoji for the devil-horns hand gesture.
But Mr. Bennington had been open about his struggles with drug and alcohol addiction, which had fueled many of his biggest hits with Linkin Park.
“I have been able to tap into all the negative things that can happen to me throughout my life by numbing myself to the pain, so to speak, and kind of being able to vent it through my music,” he said in a 2009 interview with the website Noisecreep. “I don’t have a problem with people knowing that I had a drinking problem. That’s who I am, and I’m kind of lucky in a lot of ways ′cause I get to do something about it.”
On “Crawling” — one of the band’s defining singles from its debut album, “Hybrid Theory,” which went on to sell more than 11 million copies in the United States — Mr. Bennington sings: “There’s something inside me that pulls beneath the surface / Consuming, confusing / This lack of self-control I fear is never ending.”
The song, he said later, was “about feeling like I had no control over myself in terms of drugs and alcohol.”
“That feeling,” he added, “being able to write about it, sing about it, that song, those words sold millions of records, I won a Grammy, I made a lot of money.”
Still, as the group’s career progressed, Mr. Bennington was adamant that he would remain transparent in his music about his personal ups and downs. The recording studio, he told Rock Sound, “is not a safe place for me to be unless I’m doing what I need to do — taking care of myself, being real, being open, getting it out, taking all the steps to make myself whole.”
“If it wasn’t for music I’d be dead,” he added. “One hundred percent.”
Chester Charles Bennington was born on March 20, 1976, in Phoenix, the youngest of four children. His mother was a nurse and his father a local police detective prone to pulling double shifts. Mr. Bennington described his childhood as unhappy, citing his parents’ divorce when he was 11 and frequent molestation by an older friend, beginning when Mr. Bennington was “about 7 or 8” and continuing until he was 13.
“It destroyed my self-confidence,” he said of the abuse in an interview with Kerrang! magazine in 2008. “Like most people, I was too afraid to say anything. I didn’t want people to think I was gay or that I was lying. It was a horrible experience.”
Mr. Bennington found solace in writing angst-filled poetry, in drawing and eventually in music; he cited Stone Temple Pilots and Depeche Mode as two of his earliest influences. As a teenager, he started his first band, Grey Daze, and gained something of a local following in the wake of the grunge explosion.
At 23, Mr. Bennington was married and working in an unfulfilling job when a music industry acquaintance sent him a demo by the band Xero, featuring Mr. Shinoda, a California rapper and songwriter interested in mixing hip-hop and rock sounds.
“I never pretended I could carry the vocals on my own,” Mr. Shinoda told Kerrang! “I had these great melodies in my head, and I couldn’t get them across. I wanted to find someone who could do them justice.”
After he auditioned an array of vocalists, he gave the job to Mr. Bennington, who had already recorded himself singing over the band’s early work. Together they became Linkin Park.
“Hybrid Theory” was released by Warner Bros. Records on Oct. 24, 2000, at the peak of the teen-pop mania fueled by Britney Spears and ’N Sync. Despite its rougher edges, the album’s raw emotion and radio-ready hooks found a mass audience — and a fair amount of critical derision — as part of the growing nu-metal boom led by acts like Korn and Limp Bizkit.
Mr. Bennington’s worldview could be bleak and his lyrics self-lacerating, but his honesty and the steeliness of his vocals on tender subjects bred fierce loyalty in the band’s listeners.
Top 10 Linkin Park Songs
Though the band was popular among the headbangers of Ozzfest and the annual “Family Values” tour, it never shied from its pop sensibilities, as Mr. Bennington shifted easily between belting and growling. “In the End,” with his soaring chorus, reached No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 2001.
Linkin Park pushed even further into the rap and pop realms on its 2003 follow-up, “Meteora,” which sold four million copies. The band even collaborated with Jay-Z on the platinum mash-up album “Collision Course” the next year. The band’s latest album, “One More Light,” features Pusha T and the grime rapper Stormzy and uses songwriters who have written for Justin Bieber and Selena Gomez.
Mr. Bennington said that his sobriety had faltered throughout his rise to fame, pointing to his divorce in 2005 as a catalyst for his drinking. In a radio interview last year, he recalled going to counseling with other band members in 2006.
“I knew that I had a drinking problem, a drug problem, and that parts of my personal life were crazy,” he said, “but I didn’t realize how much that was affecting the people around me until I got a good dose of ‘Here’s-what-you’re-really-like.’ ”
Mr. Bennington married Talinda Bentley, a schoolteacher and former model, in 2006. In a Wired article the next year, he revealed that he and his wife had been victims of an aggressive cyberstalker who had gained access to everything from their Social Security numbers to their social plans. The experience was deeply unsettling, leading Mr. Bennington, who was famously open and available to his fans, to withdraw.
“It sparks the sort of anger you don’t normally experience,” he told Wired. (Devon Townsend, the woman who had tormented Mr. Bennington and his family, was sentenced to two years in prison in 2008.)
In addition to his wife, he is survived by six children.
Despite his years of turmoil, Mr. Bennington was optimistic in interviews during the lead-up to the new Linkin Park album this year.
“Where I’m at right now in 2017 is as far on the opposite side of the scale to where I was at this time in 2015,” he told Rock Sound. “I literally hated life and I was like, ‘I don’t want to have feelings.’ And now I’m like, ‘Bring it on!’ ”
No band has sold more records this millennium than Linkin Park. Initially dismissed by metal’s self-appointed defenders of the faith as merely a ‘boy band with guitars’, the Los Angeles sextet have matured into one of modern rock’s most influential bands, transcending their nu-metal roots to create a body of forward-facing work that continues to inform the generation of bands that followed in their wake. “We always treat every album like it’s our first, because we don’t want to survive off nostalgia,” said Chester Bennington earlier this year: here’s the songs that have given the band that platform to build upon…
10. Guilty All The Same
“We’re not 18-year-old kids making a loud record, we’re 37-year-old adults making a loud record,” Mike Shinoda declared before Linkin Park released The Hunting Party in 2014, and the album’s first single is a testament both to the band’s self-assurance and a renewed sense of feistiness. It’s a full 90 seconds before the vocals begin – the sextet building tension and drama with portentous piano chords and martial beats – and the opening lyric ‘Tell us all again what you think we should be’ is both a defiant anti-authoritarian challenge and a neat, sarcastic kiss-off to those who think they know Linkin Park better than the band themselves. The chorus, naturally, is a monster, and when old school hip-hop hero Rakim steps in to spit his bars the track catches fire anew.
9. Shadow of the Day
Having sold almost 50 million copies of their first two albums worldwide, Linkin Park were in an understandably bullish mood when they commenced work on Minutes To Midnight, determined to step away from the tried and trusted musical formulas that had served them so well on Hybrid Theory and Meteora. Unrecognisable as ‘nu-metal’, the slow-burning Shadow of The Day is most reminiscent of mid-period U2, not least with the echoes of With Or Without You in its chorus, and stands as one of the tracks which ensured LP’s longevity and set the band up for their second decade.
8. Breaking The Habit
Originally conceived as an instrumental track by Mike Shinoda, Breaking The Habit is a key track in Linkin Park’s evolution, dispensing with both Shinoda’s rapped vocals and the distorted guitar riffs which had previously been integral to the band’s sound: it’s a measure of Shinoda’s lack of ego that he entrusted the song to his co-vocalist to sing even though the lyrics were his alone. Chester Bennington once identified Breaking The Habit as his favourite Linkin Park song, admitting that when he first read the lyrics he felt that Shinoda was “singing my life.”
7. New Divide
One of Linkin Park’s few non-album singles, New Divide was written for the soundtrack to the second Transformers movie, 2009’s Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. “We knew the movie was going to be epic, so we wanted to make an epic-sounding song,” said Chester Bennington at the time, but he was being generous, for LP’s theme is easily the best thing about the movie, Megan Fox’s denim shorts notwithstanding. It’s a textbook, precision-tooled Linkin Park track, to the point of parody, but that chorus is undeniable.
6. Given Up
Woah! He said ‘Fuck!’ That was most people’s first reaction upon hearing the heaviest track on the Minutes To Midnight album, with the LA band abandoned their long-standing ‘no swearing’ policy to let Chester B have a good old rant in the chorus. Cleverly introduced by hand claps, pretty much guaranteeing the song’s status as a future live favourite, Given Up is a pure rager, with Bennington turning in a truly fantastic vocal performance, not least on the epic throat-shredding scream he emits mid-song.
5. Faint
Once again, Bennington kills it here, both in the track’s massive chorus, and in its apoplectic paint-stripping ‘You’re going to listen to me, like it or not’ middle eight. The second single from the band’s second album, Faint adheres pretty tightly to the ‘trademark’ Linkin Park sound (synth stabs-hulking riff-rap verse-skyscraper chorus) but was given a solid makeover on Collision Course, the band’s massively successful mash-up EP with Jay-Z, the recording of which saw the Jigga Man compliment fan-boy Mike Shinoda by stating “That shit is fast as shit! I might have to bring out the young Jay-Z!”
4. Papercut
Linkin Park Top Songs Download Zip
“Even to this day I feel like Papercut is probably the best representation of this band,” Chester Bennington admitted to this writer earlier this year, and it’s easy to understand what the singer means. This is the sound most people have in their heads when they hear the words ‘Linkin Park’, yet for all that Hybrid Theory has now become part of the rock’s cultural wallpaper, the album’s third single still sounds fresh and bold, largely thanks to the magnetic interplay between co-vocalists Bennington and Shinoda.
All Linkin Park Songs Youtube
3. In The End
That Hybrid Theory is the best-selling debut album of the 21st century, having shifted a phenomenal 28 million copies globally, is perhaps down to this one song more than any other. Again, with no disrespect to the band’s creative director Shinoda, this is another stunning showcase for his buddy Chester, who absolutely slays the chorus and rips his heart out of chest on the song’s middle eight. Kept from topping the US Billboard chart by a frankly rubbish J. Lo/Ja Rule collaboration, In The End has sold over 2.5 million copies on its own in the States alone: tidy.
2. Numb
For all the high-tech production lavished on Linkin Park’s studio recordings, many of their finest songs would still hold up beautifully rendered in an ‘unplugged’ format. A case in point: last year someone posted Chester Bennington’s isolated acapella vocals from Numb online , and it sounded even more powerful stripped off all its meticulously layered instrumentation. In the earliest years of this century, there were plenty who questioned Linkin Park’s staying power, and insisted the LA band would disappear after the ‘fluke’ success of Hybrid Theory: Numb dispelled all that talk in just a blush over three minutes.
1. One Step Closer
There’s an old truism that states that you never get a second chance to make a first impression, and what an introduction this was. Nu-metal was already firmly established as rock’s dominant trend when the first single from Hybrid Theory was released, but instantly Linkin Park here cockily announced that they were out to take over the world. With a chorus born of Bennington’s white knuckle frustration with producer Don Gilmore, there’ll always be a strong whiff of adolescent angst to LP’s definitive anthem, but you might level the same accusation at any number of classic songs, and regardless of how evolved and sophisticated Linkin Park’s songwriting might become, they – and indeed any other rock band currently drawing breath – will do well to ever equal the sheer visceral whomp of this debut.