YMMV / Linkin Park

Opinions on the band range from "original, creative, and awesome enough to be their own genre" to "insufferably emo."

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• And You Thought It Would Fail:
  • Many fans' reactions to Reanimation, due to the fact that it was a huge risk to have a remix album after only the first studio album. However, to this day it is popular with the fanbase.
  • "Nobody's Listening" is a Take That! to people who thought this of the band in general.
• Anvilicious: While some may argue a few songs fits the trope, the closest contender is "Heavy", which isn't the slightest bit subtle with describing what it's like to have depression. Considering that the person who wrote it killed himself not long after it was released, it's important that it be heard.
• Audience-Alienating Era: For a certain part of the fanbase, it started the moment Minutes to Midnight hit the shelves and the band officially decided to move away from the very distinct style they made a name for themselves with. Whether or not they ever got out of it depends entirely on who you ask.
• Audience-Alienating Premise: While every Linkin Park album not named Hybrid Theory or Meteora has generally received eye-rolls and groans from finicky fans, the reaction to One More Light being a straight up contemporary pop album with virtually no rock instrumentation or rapping, the farthest-removed from anything they'd ever done prior, was volatile. Both fans and detractors called it the only Linkin Park album that sounded as if it was by anyone other than Linkin Park. After Chester Bennington's death, it also feels uncomfortably like you're listening to a long, drawn-out suicide note.
• Broken Base:
  • It would be easier to list the stylistic phases that the band went through that didn't divide fans. Are only their first two albums worthwhile? Is everything after worthwhile? Were they always good? Was their weaker stuff really that bad, or was it just not as good as their better stuff? And the mother of them all: should they have stuck with Nu Metal or not?
  • More controversially, there's some debate about whether One More Light is better with the knowledge that it was more personal than the "generic pop" label it was slapped with upon release, or if it's still not good and is only getting more positive feedback because people don't want to speak ill of Chester now that he's dead.
• Catharsis Factor: A big appeal to the band's music. What better way to deal with repressed anger than with loud guitars, angsty lyrics and metal screaming?
• Common Knowledge: One popular misconception is that "Breaking the Habit" was written by Chester Bennington about his struggles with addiction. In reality, it was written by Mike Shinoda about a friend's substance abuse problems before he even met Bennington.
• Dead Horse Genre: Why the band decided to move on from Nu Metal after their first two albums, for better or worse. Ironically, Minutes To Midnight was criticized for capitalizing on alternative rock and emo just as those genres were losing steam (and for not being nu metal).
• Discredited Meme: Chester Bennington's suicide brought a giant sledgehammer to the criticisms of his music being "whiny", as it proved once and for all that the perceived wangst was not a put-on or an exaggeration. Now, if you look back on their songs, you'll find endless comments of fans mourning his death and getting angry at the once-common jokes that are now considered very unacceptable.
• Epic Riff: "One Step Closer", "Faint", and the distinctive piano notes of "In the End".
• Fandom Rivalry:
  • Many Deftones fans are resentful towards Linkin Park for allegedly copying the band's sound. Deftones are indeed a major influence on the band, although many Linkin Park fans enjoy Deftones, and the two bands have gone on tour together many times.
    • Also, there's the fact that two members of Deftones contributed to Reanimation, with Stephen Carpenter playing guitar on "By_Myslf" and Chino Moreno's Team Sleep remixing "My December", which was deemed too dark for the album and has never been released. There's also the fact that Chino contributed to one of the songs on Mike's solo album Post Traumatic.
  • There's also one between LP and Limp Bizkit fans, arguments over which band is better are common, though LP have admitted to being fans of LB.
• Friendly Fandoms: With fellow angsty 2000s band Sum 41, especially after fans of both bands noted how well Deryck Whibley performed some LP songs with the remaining members of the band after Chester's death, leading to a Vocal Minority who believe he would be the perfect new singer for them.
• Funny Moments: Their appearance in Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping's soundtrack. Chester basically brings his A-game, Metal Scream and all...and he's singing about the stuff in someone's Jeep.
• Gateway Series:
  • Let's just say more than a few metalheads were introduced to hard rock/metal through this band. Whether or not they admit it is another story. And if you're young enough and have not heard any of the Beastie Boys, Linkin Park could have also been a gateway to the "eccentric" Alternative Rock scene with bands like U2 and The Cure, due to their experimenting with electronic and Hip-Hop elements.
  • An AfroPunk article released shortly after Chester Bennington's death mentioned how the band was especially integral in getting black kids into hard rock. Not only was their music heavily influenced by hip-hop (their mashup album with Jay-Z was a huge help), but it offered kids of color the opportunity to express the kind of cathartic anger they otherwise never got to.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: To say that the band has a massive fan following in Asia would be an understatement. Many kids of The '90s and the early 2000s would unanimously agree that Linkin Park was the first American band they ever listened to.
• Growing the Beard: A Thousand Suns was supposed to be this. Whether or not it succeeded depends on who you ask.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Enough to warrant its own page.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • "One Step Closer" and "Numb", two of Linkin Park's most well-known songs, share the same names with two lesser-known U2 songs. Now, what was one of the complaints about "Shadow of the Day"? The fact that U2's "One Step Closer" came out four years after LP's song doesn't make this any less funny.
    • Not to mention, during the tribute concert to Chester Bennington, the band with Yellowcard's Ryan Key segues from "Shadow of the Day" to "With or Without You."
  • Mike's side project is most known for "Remember the Name", though most people couldn't tell who performs it if they heard it. Also hilarious is that Fort Minor's actual big hit was "Where'd You Go?", which has gone out of people's memories whereas "Remember the Name" is the song that is "remembered" today.
    • Doubly hilarious considering that in "Step Up", from their 1999 Hybrid Theory EP, Mike Shinoda dissed Top 40 hip-hop when calling out all the "phony rappers" on the market. Come The Rising Tied, his solo hip-hop project, and his single "Where'd You Go" topped the very charts he was dissing years back.
  • After Idina Menzel's "Let It Go" in Frozen (2013) made a much bigger impression on pop culture than "Iridescent", the repetition of the lyrics "Do you feel cold and lost in desperation?" and "Let it go" are hilarious to listen to. Doubly funny, considering that "Iridescent" was also used as a theme song for a movie.
    • According to Mike, the band actually tried to drop a reference to Frozen in the outro of "Keys to the Kingdom", saying "The cold never bothered me anyway" at the end, but nixed the idea after Disney's legal team got involved. They changed it to a kid saying "I'm not allowed to say certain things! AAAAUGH!"
  • Not to mention that there had been two cases when the band performed their live ballad medley (consisting of "Leave Out All the Rest", "Shadow of the Day" and "Iridescent"), Mike would swap the normal outro of "Iridescent" with bits of "Let It Go".
  • One from the band's tribute concert: Avenged Sevenfold's frontman M. Shadows singing "Burn It Down"
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: Many of the responses from fans towards Meteora, as well as Reanimation due the mere nature of a remix album (especially one so early in the band's career).
• Just Here for Godzilla: Had the One More Light arena tour gone as planned, it's safe to assume that most of the concertgoers would have been there for their old material (noticing a pattern here?).
• Memetic Mutation:
  • The choruses of both "Crawling" and "In the End" basically became the theme songs for mocking the band and/or the wangsty Emo Teens associated with them, as well as other LP appearances such as Chester's cameo in Saw 3D, where he's in a trap that involves him ripping off his skin, and ultimately fails the trap and is killed — so in the end, it didn't even matter. However, as mentioned above, Chester's death seems to have taken these jokes with it.
    • The fan-edit "Crawling in My Crawl," in which all the key words in the lyrics are replaced with "crawl," is either a mockery of this meme or the greatest example of it.
    • The funny thing is when somebody tried putting the lines from "In the End" on a Facebook comment, Facebook refused to let it be posted because of "suicidal themes". Of course, considering what happened to Chester, they most likely were.
  • We have a rapist in Linkin Park.^ExplanationThis particular line came from the same infamous news interview from Antoine Dodson that spawned the "Bed Intruder" song. Obviously, the fact that Lincoln also sounds like "Linkin" did not go unnoticed.
  • Where is the old LP?^ExplanationBegan circulation among the divided fanbase upon release of Minutes to Midnight.
  • "Try the ketchup, motherfucker!"^ExplanationA mishearing of a line from the chorus of "When They Come for Me" ("Try to catch up, motherfucker!") that the Internet ran with. There was even a fan shirt of the misheard line, with Mike wearing a tuxedo. Funnily enough, the shirt definitely got Mike's attention.
  • Is this Carousel?^ExplanationIn 2020, in celebration of the 20th anniversary of Hybrid Theory, three of the members (Mike Shinoda, Joe Hahn and Dave "Phoenix" Farrell) got back together during a video call to react to one of their old concerts from 2001. When they came across "And One," a song from their lesser known Hybrid Theory EP (released a year before the album) that they hadn't played since 2002, they struggled to remember its name. Phoenix initially thought that it was "Carousel", the opening track of the EP, and his confused guess was later perpetuated as a meme.
  • "I ordered a frappuccino. Where's my fuckin' frappuccino?"^ExplanationA bit of Studio Chatter from Chester at the beginning of Collision Course.
  • "I will not dance even if the beat's funky."^ExplanationA line from "When They Come for Me" that got some mileage online, by itself◊ or in combination with the preceding line ("I'm not a robot, I'm not a monkey").
  • X but if it came out in 2007^ExplanationA Twitter meme based on the ending of the first Transformers film (a 2007 release), which plays "What I've Done" underneath an Optimus Prime speech and times it so that the chorus hits just as the film cuts to black and rolls credits. It likely began with this viral tweet, which praised the use of LP as "one of the greatest creative decisions in cinematic history", after which tweets began cropping up of other films and TV show endings being re-edited to include "What I've Done" in a similar fashion and presented with the title "[Film/TV show] but if it came out in 2007". Films and shows that have gotten the 2007 treatment includes Black Panther (see here), Avengers: Infinity War (see here), The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (see here), Batman Begins (see here), Zack Snyder's Justice League (see here), and The Boys (see here). It eventually spread so much that the Twitter account of Paramount, the distributors of the live-action film series, got in on the fun and gave Transformers itself the 2007 treatment by just posting the original ending.
  • In The Virtual End^ExplanationA Half-Life 2-themed version of "In The End" which became a popular meme in 2022.
  • "X To The Tune Of Linkin Park"^ExplanationA popular meme on the Brazilian internet that started with a viral edit of the Rock Lee vs. Gaara fight from Naruto with "In The End" as the sondtrack. Several other videos were made in this style, from other popular battles in fiction to funny videos of people and/or animals fighting and even white blood cells fighting off bacteria!
• Misaimed Fandom:
  • Chester wrote "Crawling" about his struggles with abuse as a child, and "Papercut" about his struggling with meth addiction. Both quickly became anthems for suburban teenagers bitching about First-World Problems. This was a major catalyst for the band wanting to move away from the nu-metal genre.
  • Similar to the above, "One Step Closer" is seen as an angst anthem when it's really just about the band getting mad at their producer for making them do endless retakes of "Runaway."
  • "Bleed It Out" sounds like it's a song about Self-Harm, but it's just as meta as "One Step Closer"—it's about Writer's Block, hence the first lyric being "Yeah, here we go for the hundredth time".
  • "Valentine's Day" is often labeled as an emo teen break-up. It's actually about a funeral.
    And the ground below grew colder
    As they put you down inside…
• Misattributed Song:
  • Can't find info on a certain song? Make sure it's not by Fort Minor, Grey Daze, Dead by Sunrise, or Tribal Ink (or Kansas of all things).
  • "I Just Want Your Company" is not by Linkin Park but by (həd) p.e..
  • Also, that's not Shinoda rapping on Evanescence's "Bring Me to Life". That's Paul McCoy of 12 Stones.
• Narm:
  • "I bleed it out, digging deeper just to throw it away…" Uh, is Chester talking about self-mutilation or tampons? (Neither, it turns out — he's talking about Writer's Block.)
  • The interactive video for "Lost in the Echo" pulled basically randomly from photos of your Facebook friends, meaning it either worked really well or it didn't. Mike Shinoda himself confessed that the version he got had someone crying over a ham sandwich.
  • The music video for "Lost" uses AI animation, something that has become a very controversial topic in the 2020s, making it feel unfitting for such a song.
• Narm Charm: Chester's Metal Scream. So over the top, and that's exactly what makes it so awesome!
• Nightmare Fuel: Now has its own page.
• Once Original, Now Common: The band's signature combination of Nu Metal, Alternative Rock, Hip-Hop, various Electronic Music subgenres and Pop sensibility was fairly original for its time; nowadays, thanks to all the imitators, they're often accused of having copied their signature sound from some other band. They caught onto this pretty quickly and wanted to do a stylistic overhaul right after Hybrid Theory, but Executive Meddling kept them from doing so until Minutes to Midnight.
• Older Than They Think:
  • The 2010s-era electropop sound that One More Light was famously blasted for was not the first time the band recorded music like that. Their first attempt at that style was, of all things, a collaboration with The Lonely Island two years earlier called "Things In My Jeep," off of the soundtrack to Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping.
  • While One More Light was their most significant deviation, the band was experimenting with different styles and genres all the way back to Meteora, and even some unreleased music from the Hybrid Theory era (such as "She Couldn't") deviated quite a lot from their nu-metal niche.
• Periphery Demographic:
  • As mentioned above, the band has had a dedicated African American audience from the beginning, mostly due to their hip-hop influence. Lupe Fiasco himself has said that Hybrid Theory is one of his favorite albums of all time.
  • Thanks to the band's use of anime imagery in their early work (especially the iconic Humongous Mecha on the cover of Reanimation), they're very popular with anime fans. There are an ungodly amount of Dragon Ball Z AMVs set to Linkin Park songs.
  • Transformers fans, too, thanks to their music being featured in the first three live-action films.
  • Thanks to their frequent collaborations and experimentation with hip-hop, they had a large following with hip-hop fans too. After Chester's death, many folks in the community paid tribute to him and how the band was a close friend of the genre.
• Posthumous Popularity Potential: While the band was active, they attracted a ton of mockery due to their lyrics often being seen as pure Wangst. After Chester's death, many music publications began re-evaluating the band's music more positively. Stereogum praised them as the last big rock band to make a huge debut, concluding that the constant Genre Shifting is what helped them maintain their relevance before the major changes in the music industry made it next to impossible for a rock band to ever reach those kinds of heights. Others put a more positive spin on their unflattering "emo" label by saying that the unambiguous angst of their music was hugely cathartic for people with depression, with droves of millennials coming out on social media to back this claim up.
• Questionable Casting:
  • Anybody else think it's a little strange to hear Chester on the same song as G-Unit's Young Buck?
  • This is how many people felt about Stormzy's verse on "Good Goodbye", with the main criticism being that it was too cringe-inducing and self-indulgent.
• Signature Song:
  • "In The End","Numb", and "Crawling" are some of their most iconic songs, in part thanks to Memetic Mutation. "One Step Closer", "Breaking the Habit", and "Somewhere I Belong" are also contenders. After changing styles, "What I've Done", "New Divide", "Iredescent" (all three mostly thanks to Transformers Film Series) and "Burn It Down" fit this.
  • Tragically, "One More Light", which fans (and even critics) connected to Chester after his death.
• Suspiciously Similar Song:
  • "Session" is this to the hidden track featured at the end of "Part of Me" on the Hybrid Theory EP, to the point that fans often assumed that it was a reworking. Mike has stated that he never made the correlation between the songs at the time, and their similarity is unintentional.
  • "Shadow of the Day" sounds quite similar to "With or Without You", and various remixes combining the songs can be found online. In the October 2017 tribute to Chester Bennington at the Hollywood Bowl, the band segues from this song to "With or Without You" while performing with guest singer Ryan Key.
  • Likewise, the intro to "What I've Done" and the Halloween theme.
  • "Heavy" sounds almost exactly like "Closer", complete with having a female guest singer getting a verse and singing in a duet.
  • The main chorus of "Heavy" also sounds similar to the Paul Walker tribute song "See You Again". To this end, several remixes combining the songs can be found online.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: While far from the only ones, Linkin Park are easily one of the most notorious examples of a band whose decision to depart from their Signature Style was met with nothing but contempt, if only because theirs was so distinct. Critical reception from Minutes To Midnight on has been generally middling or negative, often referring to their newer styles as "bland." More notoriously, the reception from fans of their Nu Metal material has ranged from indifferent and frustrated to entitled and volatile, some even outright demanding that they record more songs that sound like their older ones, or getting offended that they weren't "warned" about these changes. The band has made it quite clear that they hate this reputation and that they don't want to be forced into not evolving as artists.
• Tough Act to Follow:
  • Indirectly, their collaboration album with Jay-Z, Collision Course, served as this for the MTV Mashup series, seeing as the album itself (particularly "Numb/Encore") garnered critical acclaim and recognition from the Grammys.
  • Their first two albums are hugely popular. How popular? The sales of these two albums are more than the rest of their albums combined. In fact, LP became the best selling artists of the 21st century based on their first two albums alone. However, they never hit those commercial peaks again.
• Uncertain Audience: "One More Light" album struggled to find an audience. The new metal and electropop fans had largely abandoned the band, and due to band's reputation of being nu-metal band among wider crowd, the pop-oriented listeners were not very keen to listening the album.
• Vindicated by History: Each New Sound Album tends to get this once the hoopla over the different musical style dies down (or, in worse cases, isn't thought to suck as much as the new album).
  • Meteora was seen by some as a cheap rehash of Hybrid Theory when it came out, but is now considered an improvement on the groundwork it laid, especially since it's their only other album to feature their Signature Style. Those who like their later stuff also appreciate that it showed the early signs of the more experimental music they'd eventually do.
  • A Thousand Suns, once considered by some as one of their worst albums, is now acknowledged as the most ambitious project in their discography with some of their best songs. Many now even consider it their best album, citing the band's handling of the album's concept, the seamless transitions that make a complete front-to-back experience, them showing a willingness to experiment with song structure that wasn't present in the previous albums, and the increased lyrical and sonic depth of the songs.
  • The Hunting Party brought back some of the band's older fans, but still drew the ire of some detractors who didn't think that they had quite recaptured their old sound. Fans of their newer works also passed it over as the band's attempt to appease their picky fanbase. The album is still divisive nowadays, but has a lot to offer critical fans. Supporters of the album praise the band, Brad and Rob in particular, for seriously improving their skill on their instruments to record the album, and view it not necessarily as an attempt to reproduce their nu-metal sound, but as a tribute to 2000s rock as a whole. Songs like "Mark the Graves" and "A Line in the Sand" are often favorites among this crowd due to them being Linkin Park's first ventures into progressive rock.
  • While still seen as their weakest album, One More Light has seen a bit more acceptance in the wake of Chester's suicide, especially since, once you get past the pop sound, it's lyrically his most personal album. At the very least, people generally seem to be a bit more willing to accept that his negative attitude towards the album's reception was less of him being a prima donna and more of a sign that he was not in a good place, and are willing to acknowledge that the album does have genuinely good songs on it, namely the haunting title track.
  • The band as a whole saw a re-evaluation in the late 2010s and early 2020s. Since their very start, Linkin Park's reputation for angsty lyrics and performing the oft-mocked genre of nu-metal led to them being labeled as "whiny" music for angry white boys, a title they could never disassociate themselves from no matter how hard they tried. After Bennington's death, these same critics began to re-evaluate their music with the knowledge that the supposed wangst was really a depressed man purging his demons, giving them a better appreciation for their angry music and their later experimentation.
• Wangst: "Crawling" is a pretty good example to some, even though it's about genuine pain. Ditto with "Numb". Though as previously mentioned, Chester's suicide has made people see that there's more to these songs.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: The band has always had a following amongst tweens and young teens despite not being aimed at them. Their first two albums were favorable amongst parents because, though the songs were gloomy and dark, there wasn't much violence, sexuality, or cursing. Their album "Minutes to Midnight" caused controversy upon release because it featured profanity unlike the previous albums.
• Win Back the Crowd: The Hunting Party was the band's lone attempt to appease fans who desperately wanted to hear them play rock music again. While generally well-received, it was praised more in theory than in execution and didn't leave much of an impression. And then One More Light happened…

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