Chester Bennington: The Voice Of A Generation

Nu metal had begun churning up the scene in the late '90s, but it was Chester Bennington who really brought it into the mainstream with Linkin Park, displaying the desire for musical innovation that would come to characterise his career.

Born in Arizona in 1976, Chester moved to Los Angeles at age 23 to join a fledging band called Xero, who would later become Linkin Park. After experiencing abuse and addiction in childhood, he brought his experiences to bear on 2000’s aptly named Hybrid Theory, which married rock and rap metal with dark, universal lyrics about depression and frustration. 

His screamed vocals, twinned with Mike Shinoda’s rapping, struck a chord with a generation. The album shot up the charts, making the slight, spiky-haired Chester an unlikely figurehead.

Meteora followed three years later, following a similar, hook-laden formula, while 2004’s Collision Course EP saw them lock horns with Jay-Z for a genre-smashing, Grammy-winning collaboration.

Despite Linkin Park’s success, Chester still struggled with addiction, and in 2006 he came to a crossroads where he decided to seek therapy, finally addressing the issues he’d buried for years.

Third album Minutes To Midnight signalled a sea change, as the band teamed up with legendary producer Rick Rubin and stepped away from their aggressive, nu metal roots. The result was more a more restrained Chester and a stripped-back sound that kept their melodic choruses but courted an older, broader audience, and divided those who had fallen in love with their heavier music. The band would continue to evolve their sound with every release.

“When we talk about lyrical content, we can’t just go back to being that angry kid,” Chester would tell Metal Hammer in 2016. “We need to talk about something that makes sense to who we are today.”

Chester was never short of ideas, and branched out with side-project Dead By Sunrise in 2005, playing a mini set during Linkin Park’s headline set at Sonisphere in 2009. Later that year, the band released Out Of Ashes, a set of polished, radio-friendly rock songs that belied his distinctive, pain-filled lyrics. Some of songs took on the edge of his heroes, Stone Temple Pilots.

For all Chester’s successes, a career high was joining that band in 2013, following the departure of troubled singer Scott Weiland. Stepping onto stages with them was a dream come true. He brought his own distinctive voice to the material, respecting the songs but making them his own, and together they wrote high-energy EP High Rise. “I know what kind of human being this guy is,” bassist Robert DeLeo told Rolling Stone at the time. “It’s not about him sounding just like someone. I’m talking about the quality of the human being.”

Despite his strong presence onstage, Chester was a private person and revealed little of himself to the outside world, preferring to speak through his work. “I appreciate that people know me for my music and that’s why they like what I do. They don’t know what I do outside of music and that’s intentional,” he told Metal Hammer in 2014. “I like going to the grocery store, I like going out in public and hanging out being another dad at the baseball game, and that’s something we cherish – the attention you want to get is the attention you do get."

Read more at TeamRock.com

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Photo Credit: Getty


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