When Linkin Park first hit the heavily contrived airwaves I was sixteen years old. I remember thinking, why are these Fresno meth dealers on the radio? This was a strange time in pop music. Limp Bizkit was big. Korn. Puddle of Mudd. Nickelback.
The entire movement could be best described as You’re Friend’s Shitty Cousins, who apparently have a fucking band now.
You know the ones. The ones who tag toilet stalls and bring Ripple to the cookout. People who white trash consider white trash.
Basically these Orange County ratchet asses took two things that were cool, hip hop and rock, and mashed them together in their absentee parents’ living rooms.
Fresh squeezed orange juice is delicious. So is artisan made prosciutto.
Yet, combined, it is a somewhat rancid dish.
That’s not to say Linkin Park is the fresh squeezed orange juice of rock and roll, or the prosciutto of hip hop.
What they did was take a bastardized version of each and combine them, so they basically squeezed Sunny D over head cheese.
Remarkably, they are still a band and that explains why almost half of the people who voted voted for Trump, because there are a lot of dumb assholes in America who like bad things.
The lead singer of Linkin Park is named Chester Bennington.
As of my last moveon.org spam, the draconian left still allows you to make fun of white people’s names, and any black guy whose name starts with a D’, as long as you donate enough money.
You cannot make fun of Asian guys names.
Such as this one Vietnamese guy who Facebook wouldn’t allow to create an account because his name is Phuc Dat Bich and they thought he was making a lame joke.
Turns out it’s his actual name.
Who’s the racist now Zuckerberg?!!?!!?
There is absolutely nothing funny about the fact that a guy’s name is Phuc Dat Bich.
Unless you’re a liar.
It’s actually really fucking funny.
So anyway you can make fun of Chester Bennington.
What an asshole.
After the unfortunate passing of Chris Cornell I’ve been watching a lot of his past performances on YouTube. While this certainly won’t go on his tombstone, he once toured with Linkin Park and would sometimes join them onstage.
We all have our regrets.
This is how I came to view live Linkin Park performances on Youtube.
The way their concert format goes is, some guy who looks like he should be working at a gas station spouts off some shitty social justice rap and then Chester Bennington begins soiling himself over distorted guitar riffs in front of thirteen year old chicks in Forever 21 genes with holes in the knees as Kurt Cobain’s ghost plots terrorist attacks on the venue but is too high to succeed.
It’s pretty fucking bad.
The first performance I caught was this one, where Cornell joins Bennington in a harmony but totally phones it in so as not to outshine him, because he was clearly a nice guy like that.
Also, Bennington is on the threshold of being in good enough shape to go shirtless.
It didn’t surprise me much that Bennington sounded like shit on his own song, yet on the side of my Youtube page, where it recommends related videos, I saw that Linkin Park had done several covers.
Out of morbid curiosity and self loathing I then watched all of them.
These are the songs Linkin Park has covered onstage which were on that YouTube page I looked at. Please refrain from emailing me, I’m sure they fucked up a bunch of other songs:
Rolling in the Deep by Adele, Wish by Nine Inch Nails, Hunger Strike by Temple of the Dog, Sweet Child ‘O Mine by Guns ‘N Roses, and Smells Like Teen Spirit by Nirvana.
The thing about these songs is that they are all really difficult to sing, and the other thing is that Chester Bennington is not by any stretch a good singer.
It made me wonder why a shitty singer would choose to attempt Rolling in the Deep when they could just as easily bust out a Beyonce song that your niece could pull off when forced to do it by your drunk sister in law you’ve always hated.
Bennington basically picked Expert Level on Street Fighter against a 17 year old Korean kid, or walked into a thai restaurant, in Thai Town, and demanded the curry with five stars.
He argued politics with that dude at the bar with the dry hair.
In short he put himself in way over his head.
It got me thinking, has this guy never heard himself sing?
Does he just over-challenge himself?
Is he a masochist?
Or is he just a complete narcissist who believes himself to be far more talented than he actually is.
At this point I noticed that Chris Cornell had actually joined Chester Bennington is a harmonized duet version of Hunger Strike, and I watched the video:
If you’re not familiar, Hunger Strike is a song by Temple of the Dog, a transitionary early 90’s band composed of the founding members of Sound Garden and Pearl Jam.
In the song, Eddie Vedder provides a baritone accompaniment to Cornell’s trademark shrieking high notes.
When Chester Bennington did his rendition of the song with Chris Cornell, it would only make logical sense that Cornell would do his same roll in the song, and Bennington would essentially fill in the Eddie Vedder part.
That is not what happened.
When the chorus arrived, Bennington started screaming in his trademark anal rape key and Cornell, by any definition a far superior singer, perhaps the best high note rock singer of all time, dropped in with the lower key harmony – the easier part.
Because he was cool.
This leads me to believe Chester Bennington is a psychotic megalomaniac whose band only still exists because there’s a certain American disconnect between what is objectively good (Cornell) and what is objectively not very good (Chester E. Bennington.)
Their band is still touring.
Four More Years!