Internalizing everything, keeping my real passions out of the margins of my notebooks and the inside of my locker door, didn’t stop me from being seen as the kid who was going to bring a gun to school, making my life even more of a living hell than it was probably destined to be. I kept it all hidden away, treating my copy of Mechanical Animals like contraband, envious of the guts they had for standing up to the people who took the phony affidavits about Manson tearing puppies apart at concerts as gospel truth. I never had the bravado that some of my classmates did, daring to dress goth and hang Marilyn Manson posters in their lockers going to Catholic schools in Canada’s conservative heartland. Being a disaffected teen in the years between Columbine and 9/11 was a uniquely Orwellian experience, especially if you were a girl that everyone insisted was a boy meant to be asserting some kind of manhood. The bands that spoke the most to me, the ones that absorbed the bulk of the teenage angst out of me and fed back the seeds of the adult I’d eventually become were Garbage, Marilyn Manson, and Nine Inch Nails, the kind of stuff that would get you sent to the school counsellor’s office and further marginalized by your classmates. I was a sixteen year old queer kid at the time who didn’t know what that meant yet or how to express it, so I spent a lot of time confused, angry, and scared. That deep sincerity is the insurgent quality in Linkin Park that music critics are paying homage to now more than ever, and while it’s a welcome vindication of the band’s massive success, it doesn’t do justice to just how transformative that aspect of their work was when they debuted with Hybrid Theory in 2000. It’s a shame that Adele didn’t reciprocate the cover in Bennington’s lifetime, because her rendition of “My December” or “With You” would have clarified once and for all just how similar the two singers’ sensibilities and approaches to break up music have always been. That intimacy, raw emotion, and regret tinged with self righteousness is the expanse of the Venn diagram between Linkin Park and Adele. Seated at a piano without even Mike Shinoda’s accompanying rapping is about as far from Bennington’s natural habitat as it gets, but he was truly in his element singing the words written for Adele. What struck me about it was just how natural the Adele lyrics felt coming from him. It was a novelty act, kind of like Lady Gaga skeptics reacting to her first widely shared acoustic performances. When it first went viral, the narrative attached to it was the same kind of performative amusement that people react to a monkey riding a dog like a pony with: Bennington was executing a trick beyond what people thought his natural abilities or inclinations were. Music writers across the spectrum are chasing after what they think the Rosetta Stone that unlocks Linkin Park’s appeal and importance to the millennials that came of age with them is, and I’ve seen some compelling cases like The Ringer’s Rob Harvilla pointing to “Shadow of the Day ,” but for my money it was Bennington’s live cover of Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep” at the 2011 iTunes festival that started to put the pieces of the puzzle together in a coherent way. I bought all their releases up to Minutes to Midnight including the Reanimated remix album, Collision Course mash up with Jay-Z, and Live in Texas DVD/CD set, but I never felt like they were part of my DNA until Chester’s death forced me to revisit an incomplete epiphany I had about his and the band’s impact on my life in the fifteen plus years since their debut. Linkin Park never represented any of that for me, so at first I shocked myself at just how heavily the news of Chester Bennington’s suicide hit me. That all encompassing teenage enthusiasm that’s been an unshakable part of the culture since The Beach Boys at the absolute latest. When we talk about formative influences in music, it’s usually an artist or band that you patterned yourself after: dressed like they did, plastered your bedroom walls with their posters, decorated every surface -physical and digital- with their lyrics.
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