If there’s one thing I know about bipolar, it’s that we with the disorder are intensely in touch with our emotions. That, in turn, means we also tend to be devourers of music, art, literature, and poetry.
So even though I wouldn’t have called myself a fan of Linkin Park or the band’s music, I was an admirer of frontman Chester Bennington’s lyrics and so was distraught to learn about his suicide yesterday.
Bennington’s troubles started early. The product of divorced parents, the singer was molested by an older male friend when he was seven for a period of six years.
Though unclear whether or not Bennington was bipolar, he openly talked about depression. In Bennington’s writings, you can ascertain that he was severely depressed, and struggling with alcohol and drugs. “I wanna heal. I wanna feel. What I thought was never real. I want to let go of the pain I’ve held so long,” he sings on “Somewhere I Belong.”
Bennington even sang about suicide. “Everything you say to me takes me one step closer to the edge, and I’m about to break,” he roars on “One Step Closer” from the band’s monumental debut, 2000’s Hybrid Theory.
Linkin Park were the kings of nu-metal, fusing gritty, distorted guitar sounds with hip-hop and taking it to massive mainstream audiences. With their soaring guitar riffs and decidedly moody lyrics, Linkin Park carried the torch for the troubled millennial, as well as the depressed, the different, and the left behind.
The band’s seventh record, One More Light, was released back in May. But it was their debut that shattered the rock ‘n’ roll paradigm and sold upwards of 11 million copies to date. The album featured the hit singles “Crawling,” “In the End,” and the aforementioned “One Step Closer.”
Moments of despair abound in the band’s catalog, from “Given Up” (“I’ve given up. I’m sick of feeling. Is there nothing you can say? Take this all away. I’m suffocating. Tell me what the f*** is wrong with me,”) to “Nobody’s Listening,” in which Bennington belts “I got a heart full of pain, headful of stress, handful of anger, held in my chest.”
Earlier this year, Bennington opened up to Rock Sound about his depression, particularly as it pertains to 2015: “I literally hated life and I was like, ‘I don’t want to have feelings. I want to be a sociopath. I don’t want to do anything… I want to feel nothing…. If it wasn’t for music I’d be dead. One hundred percent.’”
Bennington admitted to Noisecreep that the band’s first hit single, “Crawling,” is about feeling out of control with drugs and alcohol.
“It’s not cool to be an alcoholic,” he told the metal blog. “It’s not cool to go drink and be a dumbass. It’s cool to be a part of recovery. This is just who I am, this is what I write about, what I do, and most of my work has been a reflection of what I’ve been going through in one way or another.”
Bennington had a deep friendship with fellow rocker Chris Cornell of Soundgarden and Audioslave, who took his own life back in May. Bennington performed Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” at Cornell’s funeral in the spring. The day Bennington was found dead would have been Cornell’s fifty-third birthday.
Watch Linkin Park’s video for “Crawling” below. I always thought the chorus was really cool.
