To me and millions of other people who grew up listening to alternative rock in the early 2000s, Chester Bennington was a generation-defining voice of rock music. This month marks the eighth anniversary of his passing, and I still remember exactly where I was when I heard the news. I had never been truly affected by a celebrity’s death before, but when I saw the original TMZ report while lying on my living room couch, it felt like the whole planet tilted on its axis. I was sick to my stomach and knew, at some point, word would get to someone in my family in the other room and they’d come to check on me, and I dreaded having to acknowledge it out loud. I locked myself in my room like I was barricading myself up in anticipation of an incoming attack. The battle I was preparing for was a seven-word exchange from the other side of my door:
“Kenneth, Linkin Park’s singer died,” my mother said through the door.
“I know,” I responded.
My mother knew well enough to leave me alone after that, but 17 years of my life were flashing before my eyes, so I wouldn’t have been fit for a conversation anyway. I remembered borrowing my childhood friend’s burned copy of Meteora for weeks and listening to it on loop so many times that even now, 20 years later, I still anticipate the “skip” in the third line of “Numb” that came every time I listened to the scratched disc. I lamented that I’d only seen Linkin Park live once, during the 2012 Honda Civic Tour, and would never get to hear Bennington’s wailing through the speakers again. And oddly enough, one of the most pronounced memories I had was of all the (sometimes) poorly made AMVs I’d watched on YouTube, which had made use of the band’s songs.
For many kids growing up during the early 2000s, Linkin Park’s radio success with songs like “Numb” and “In The End” meant they were among our first exposures to heavier music. Before I knew who Linkin Park was, I would often only hear these songs in the dead of night on the pop radio station my family listened to. When I got my first personal radio that I kept in my bedroom, I kept it on late into the night in hopes that one of their songs would play. Hearing “In The End” at eight years old, a few times a week at most, was a musical awakening. I had never heard a voice like Chester’s, or considered lyrics like the band’s. I had been raised on a diet of mostly boy bands and country up to that point, and Linkin Park was coming into my life at a pretty formative moment.
Meanwhile, by the time I was midway through elementary school, I was watching more anime like Dragon Ball and playing more angsty, emotionally driven games like Final Fantasy, Kingdom Hearts, and the 2000s-era Sonic games. Superheroes had also entered my field of view, but the X-Men films and Evolution animated series were my touchstones at that point. My media diet had been largely controlled by my parents, but the more time I spent with friends in elementary school, the more I was exposed to the kind of art that altered my younger self’s brain chemistry. I wasn’t quite an emo kid yet, but the seeds were being sown, and Linkin Park was a musical anchor for these changes. Right about this time, I was also getting access to the internet, and my earliest exposures to fandom and internet culture were set to rapper Mike Shinoda’s flow.
Before the days of Spotify and long before I had enough money to buy CDs or an iPod, one of my primary ways of listening to music I didn’t own yet was through YouTube. If a band hadn’t released a music video for a song, there was certainly a pre-teen with iMovie and a dream who had set hastily-clipped-together snippets of their favorite anime or movie to it. Linkin Park has sold millions of records and sold out stadiums, but one of their most enduring roles in pop culture is as the early 2000s AMV band. Almost anyone who was a fan of anime like Dragon Ball Z probably has core memories of fan videos set to Linkin Park’s music.
The association is still so strong that if you scroll down to the comment sections of some of these videos, you’ll find that fans flocked to them shortly after Dragon Ball creator Akira Toriyama passed in 2024. Some of these edits have more views than the band’s actual music videos, like this Spider-Man video set to “What I’ve Done,” which has accumulated over 179 million views over the past 16 years, eclipsing quite a few of the band’s official works. Plenty of other outfits from this era, like Evanescence and Breaking Benjamin, share the distinction of being AMV bands, and while it’s partially because their mainstream success had made them each something of a household name, it’s also because each of these bands’ music is built upon intense emotion that blends seamlessly with the bursts of stylized action, angst, and agony so common in the works AMVs tend to celebrate.
When you’re young, you feel every emotion with a raw intensity you (hopefully) grow out of as you get older. Listening to Linkin Park now, I find that a lot of the band’s early nu metal efforts speak to that unbridled rage and hopelessness you might feel when you’re young but can’t neatly fold up and articulate in something more poetic. Bennington repeatedly screams “shut up when I’m talking to you” in “One Step Closer,” and yeah, a different band (and even Linkin Park itself on later records) would probably find a more eloquent way of expressing frustration with someone who has repeatedly berated you to the point of making you lose your cool. That’s not to say I view Linkin Park’s old records as “childish” or “immature,” but it does provide a context for why so many of those decade-old music videos of anime and video games we were playing in the early 2000s are set to Linkin Park’s music. They are as much a cultural artifact as the band’s music, emblematic of where the band and their fans were 25 years ago. Linkin Park’s legacy was written in the glow of CRTs playing Toonami and riffed on in early versions of Final Cut Pro.
These days, AMVs have taken a different form in TikTok edits, and newer bands like Sleep Token, Bring Me the Horizon, and Cafuné have become staples on the app. But Linkin Park’s influence persists, with “What I’ve Done” having become a meme referencing its inclusion in the Transformers film. Even after Linkin Park’s heyday has come and gone, we still associate their music with a specific era of self-serious fan edits that still manage to hit. Apps like TikTok have made editing tools so widespread that these references become much more universally understood and recreated, to the point where decades later, younger audiences are extending that cultural footprint.
I saw Linkin Park for the third time at Barclays Center yesterday. It was my second time seeing them with new frontwoman Emily Armstrong, so I’ve now officially seen the band more times without Bennington than with him. While it was clear that the crowd skewed toward millennials, there were a lot of kids there, young enough that I wondered how cognizant they were of the band before Bennington died in 2017. Whenever they started listening, they were still singing along to songs older than they were. So perhaps even though they’re coming in hearing Armstrong perform everything from the back catalog, the kids are being raised on the old texts, and all that early 2000s angst isn’t being lost to the ether.
Armstrong has been under a lot of scrutiny since she joined Linkin Park in 2024, both for some very valid reasons having to do with her past support of Danny Masterson and her ties to the Church of Scientology, and as a result of some fans seeing her take on the vocalist role as a betrayal of Bennington’s legacy. You can’t open up a video of her performing the old songs without someone making a comparison to Bennington’s vocals or spamming “karaoke night” as if she’s just covering someone else’s music. One of Bennington’s last songs, “One More Light,” is about mourning someone who’s gone, and there’s a line that references having “one more chair than you need” at the dinner table when the person who typically sat there isn’t around any longer. When you grieve someone from the outside, like an actor or member of your favorite band, it becomes easy to project your scruples onto the world as it continues to spin. Sometimes, when an artist you deeply admire dies, they can become symbols of your own myopic relationship to them before they’re people, and that means we once again start writing fan fiction in our head about whatever comes after. To some, Linkin Park persisting after Bennington’s death has felt like letting someone else sit in that empty chair.
I understand the knee-jerk emotional reaction, and it certainly feels like the band anticipated the pushback they might receive. Linkin Park’s latest record, From Zero, is the first since Armstrong joined the band, and while it’s middle-of-the-road for them, in my opinion, it feels like a grand tour of each one of the band’s previous eras, but with a new singer. It pivots back and forth between the group’s explosive nu metal roots to its more experimental electronic work, almost as if they were trying to prove to everyone that, despite all the turmoil, Linkin Park can still be everything they once were. That includes a band that captures all the emotions our favorite show, movie, or game makes us feel. The empty chair is still there, and no one else is sitting in it. There are just a few new chairs at the table now, and nevertheless, millions of fans are gathering around it once more.
