Linkin Park
Pts.of.Athrty

In the spring of 2004, my 14-year-old self was proclaiming, from the height of not knowing an absolute damn thing about music and the world and the typical cutting arrogance of age, that "LINKIN PARK IS THE GREATEST BAND IN THE WORLD". At the time, I didn't even have the means to imagine the extent of my ignorance on the subject; yet, with the wisdom of twenty years later, you could say that perhaps, unintentionally, I wasn't that far from the truth.

Before you lynch me, let me clarify: when I say "the greatest band in the world", I certainly don't mean from an artistic point of view (which will always remain a subjective and debatable matter regardless), but rather in terms of popularity, capturing the spirit of the times, being perceived by teenagers as exciting and on the crest of the wave. Nirvana in 1992, Led Zeppelin in '71, Oasis in '96, The Beatles in '65: bands capable of setting points in time that transcended the purely musical dimension and entered the popular imagination.

Surely my comparisons are baseless: Linkin Park never had (and never will have) neither the grit, the groundwork, nor the artistic stature of said bands, but on the other hand, 2004 in music is not 1971, and as much as I try, I can't think of another contemporary band that could rival them in terms of fame. In the spring of 2004, nu-metal, pop-punk, and post-grunge had already lost favor with the public; the next big thing was thus The Strokes' garage revival, but they had already been surpassed by their young epigones (Killers, Franz Ferdinand, etc.), who in turn were still too unripe to aspire to any throne. Excluding from the rest of the mainstream rock panorama the forty-year-olds still charming but largely exhausted (Metallica, U2, RHCP...), the stuff too niche to break through and too old to still be relevant, and also excluding the hated Green Day, whose resurrection would have been unpredictable before another six months, there are just two or three contenders for the title left: Blink-182, Foo Fighters, Linkin Park. However, the first ones had already embarked on a downward slope that would lead them from the glories of a five-year period before to a stormy split, and despite sales and popularity remaining high, their decline was already visible; the second ones had not yet garnered the disproportionate unanimous approval that would bless them a decade later (remember when any crap Dave Grohl did had fans shouting SAINT NOW? Unfortunately, I do), and despite a few effective singles, they hadn't managed to nail a single album that consecrated them in the collective imagination.

Linkin Park, on the other hand, started with a bang right from the start: the first album revealed them as a formidable single-spawning machine, the second confirmed them endowed with a verbiage that seems inexhaustible. Critics scathingly dismiss them, those in the know treat them like a boyband, yet every release they make smashes the charts, kids go wild, MTV adopts them like a mother hen and spams their (it must be said, highly effective) music videos all day long. A monstrous success, impossible to explain (only) with pretty faces and pop chorus melodies.

The fact is that Linkin Park is perfect to give voice to post-9/11 America, to soundtrack the zeitgeist of that confused, wounded, frustrated America, yearning for revenge and redemption: millions of Americans (and, by reflection, westerners) found themselves in Bennington's intimate lyrics, in his vulnerable voice and the ferocity of his shredded screams. An emotional identification process explainable only with Bennington's absolute sincerity in confessing himself, in front of the whole world, as weak and inadequate: even before his tragic end you just had to listen to the way he sang his lyrics to dispel any doubts about the truthfulness of his distress. The public noticed and rewarded them: there aren't many bands with only one album under their belt who can afford to release a remix album with high-profile producers.

"PTS.OF.ATHRTY", the first and only single taken from Reanimation, is a remix of "Points Of Authority" from the first album by Jay Gordon of Orgy. Gordon grafts onto the original a cyberpunk exoskeleton that enhances its pre-existing sci-fi suggestions but at the same time makes it lose some sonic impact. In other words, a nice little song good just for the soundtrack of Quake IV. It's the videoclip that makes the difference. I stumbled upon it by downloading it from Limewire (one of the many Napster offspring that in the 2000s infected millions of computers with virtual AIDS), and got hooked like a heroin addict: in the following year, I watched it an average of twenty times a day. The video, entirely in computer graphics, is the work of the band's DJ Joe Hahn: it depicts an epic battle between armies of aliens and robots, the latter commanded by the heads of the six Linkin Park members from within a palace stuffed with technobabble. It's the apotheosis of everything that was fashionable in sci-fi at the dawn of the millennium: inside you find Unreal Tournament, Warhammer 40,000, Matrix and Animatrix, Evangelion, Armored Core, Starcraft, the Star Wars prequels and about two thousand other names between anime and video games. A magnificent, majestic retrofuturistic cake for the eyes, glazed with that aseptic and shiny Y2K aesthetic which in 2002 was still (for a little while) perfect to describe the world. The sense of wonder as conceived by a teenager of the time.

To me, that video was pure science fiction. Not only, of course, for what was seen on screen, but for its very existence: such a devastating video clip, all in cutting-edge 3D, so well-curated, to promote a song that didn't even come from one of the two "real" albums?? How fucking powerful are Linkin Park to afford such a showoff like this????, my friends and I asked ourselves in amazement.

Ultimately, the sense lies entirely in this question from naive teenagers. The power, in the world of pop music, has resided since its inception where teenagers think it is; where they want it to be. In the mid-2000s, no group was sitting on top of the world like Linkin Park.