Now playing; Hybrid Theory, Reanimation, Meteora

A memory of a time.

I actually had Reanimation before I had Hybrid Theory. A friend burned me a CD copy of Reanimation before a loving mother (thanks mom) let me take a proper copy of Hybrid Theory home from Target. I thought “Enth E End” was the big hit single everyone was listening to! For maybe a month of my childhood I lived in an alternate reality in which the biggest song in the country was this dusty hardcore hip-hop track. Then again, I was also living in a reality where Linkin Park were the only band in the world, let alone the country. This was that band for a generation of kids that were as afraid to admit they liked the Backstreet Boys as they were scared of Korn’s lyrics or Slipknot’s masks. Or they weren’t allowed to listen to those bands in the first place. Linkin Park may have been loud but they sure weren’t scary, no need to advise the parents not a swear in sight, and that moved units to pre-teens needing something they could take home to mom and dad. So they did and now, 20 years later, their moms and dads are as likely to know every work to “In the End” as they are. Linkin Park are an institution, a name brand, built on some very very good music. So let’s reset expectations and review their opening trio of records now;

Hybrid Theory [Warner Bros, 2000]

From The Velvet Underground to The Ramones to Guns ‘n’ Roses to Korn, Deftones, and Slipknot; rock history is full of debuts that seemed to instantly reconfigure what a rock band could do. They hit with incredible execution but even more potential, setting off shockwaves of imitators ready to reconfigure the sound into their own new universes. Hybrid Theory is not one of those albums. Linkin Park’s debut may have changed rock music forever but it did not immediately activate a tidal wave of innovation because there was nothing left to innovate. Hybrid Theory is an ending, not a beginning; the entire last 20 years of popular music - new wave synths; industrial sfx; hip-hop beats and rhymes; nu-metal heft; grunge emoting; emo sensitivity; pop songwriting - packaged up and dropped right at the top of the 21st century like a big fat period punctuation mark. It rocked enough for Ozzfest, popped enough for the Hot 100, and sold enough that you could conceivably go to any used record store on earth and find a copy (30 million and counting). Plenty of bands claim Hybrid Theory as formative influence but none of them aspire to top it. It’s a masterpiece of songwriting, snapping together a lifelong music junkie’s record collection into something exactly of its time and outside it entirely. Linkin Park’s principal songwriter Mike Shinoda would have broke through in any era, his songwriting prowess was bulletproof and instincts to weld the seams left behind by Limp Bizkit and Slipknot created the true pop breakthrough nu-metal has not yet achieved and did it with an album that contains nothing resembling a single dud. It always seems impossible until it’s done, then you can’t believe nobody got to it first. A

Reanimation [Warner Bros, 2002]

If Hybrid Theory brought all of Mike Shinoda’s influences together in the tidiest package imaginable, Reanimation blows them all apart into 20 tracks that explore new wave, hip-hop, electronica, pop and nu-metal separately instead of together. It’s a testament to the strength of Shinoda's songwriting and Linkin Park’s execution that it mostly survives translation intact. Jay Gordon’s Xbox-rock makeover of “Points of Authority,” Kutmasta Kurt reconfiguring “In the End” for alleyway cyphers, Mickey P. making the boyband allegations difficult to deny as he gives b-side “My December” the pop-ballad banger treatment Justin Timberlake would have killed for or Amp transforming “Place for My Head” into a proto-dubstep meld. More than anything though this is Shinoda reaching back to his homies in the underground hip-hop scenes that made him to put them all on a platinum album. It’s solid, remix albums are rarely this considered, but as an act of musical charity it’s better. The kids that had their minds expanded by Hybrid Theory, which was still moving tens of thousands of copies a week by this point, suddenly found threads to follow into the genres that created it through Reanimation. Pharoahe Monch, The Roots, and Alchemist suddenly had a contingent of rock kids buying their records, Guitar Center had never sold so many turntables or MPC samplers before. B

Meteora [Warner Bros, 2003]

It wasn’t just other rock bands that couldn’t figure out how to top Hybrid Theory, Linkin Park couldn’t do it either. So Meteora, instead of attempting Linkin Park’s big evolution, finds new formations in the formulas, expanding rather than transforming. Thank christ, no rock band before or since put the pieces together like Linkin Park and we should be thankful they gave us one more album of hyper-consistent nu-metal to enjoy before the anti-nu metal propaganda machine got to them. So they get heavier (“Don’t Stay”), poppier (“Numb”), more hip-hop (“Nobody’s Listening”), and more instrumental (“Session.”) I don’t think I’ll ever come around on the power ballads or the sour grapes griping of “Nobody’s Listening” but Meteora is still an effective, accomplished follow up to an impossible peak. It’s also where the story of Linkin Park, nu-metal band, comes to an abrupt end. Where would they have gone if allowed to expand upon something like “Breaking the Habit”— which deftly fuses the band’s tight melodies and turntable wooshes to something that charts a way forward for the band they ultimately couldn’t take as the pressures to betray the soon-to-be passe nu metal scene for designer sunglasses and Rick Rubin took hold. Linkin Park’s run as nu-metal’s definitive band was short but rock music is still living in the impact crater they left behind. B+