Linkin Park

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LINKIN PARK

Formed: 1996, Los Angeles, California

Members: Chester Bennington, vocals (born 20 March 1976); Rob Bourdon, drums (born Calabasas, California, 20 January 1979); Brad Delson, guitar (born 1 December 1977); Darren "Phoenix" Farrell, bass (born Plymouth, Massachusetts, 8 February 1977); Joseph Hahn, turntables (born 15 March 1977); Mike Shinoda, bass (born 11 February 1977).

Genre: Rock

Best-selling album since 1990: Hybrid Theory (2000)

Hit songs since 1990: "Crawling," "One Step Closer"

The members of Linkin Park were as shocked as anyone when their debut album Hybrid Theory (2000) became the biggest-selling album of 2001. This was, after all, a rap-rock outfit whose nu-metal sound, a blend of turntable scratching, hard rock guitars, rapping, and singing, was allegedly on its way out. Instead, the six-man Los Angeles band that could barely get meetings with executives at record labels just a few years before became the surprise success story of the year.

Linkin Park began life in 1996 as a Los Angeles high school heavy metal band named Xero. Guitarist Brad Delson and drummer Rob Bourdon had performed in a high school band called Relative Degree, which had set the single goal of performing a show at the Los Angeles club, the Roxy, which they did, then promptly broke up.

Vocalist Mike Shinoda, another friend of Delson's, had attended a few Relative Degree practices, developing a songwriting partnership with the guitarist. The two began the messy experiment of mixing Delson's love of hard rock with Shinoda's appreciation for hip-hop. The pair recruited DJ Joseph Hahn after he and Shinoda met while studying in the same painting course at the Pasadena Arts Center.

Xero's first recordings were created in Shinoda's cramped bedroom studio. Delson also asked fellow UCLA student and roommate Darren "Phoenix" Farrell to join the group; Farrell would leave the band in 2000 to join Tasty Snax, returning in 2002. The budding band decided they needed a proper singer, which they found in transplanted Arizona native Chester Bennington, who completed the lineup in 1999. When Bennington's impassioned singing melded with Shinoda's streetwise rapping, Linkin Park's signature sound was born: a unique mix of old school hip-hop rapping and turntable scratching, classic rock guitar riffs, and a subtle underpinning of electronic dance music beats and ambience. Before they had a recording contract, the group secured a publishing deal from Zomba Recordings in 1999 after their first showcase at Los Angeles' famed bar, the Whisky-a-Go-Go. They used the money to record an album of songs to play for record labels and sell at shows.

A Slow Crawl to the Top

Though in 1999 three different labels rebuffed the group—now known as Linkin Park—Warner Bros. Records offered them a deal with the artistic control they craved and they began work on Hybrid Theory with producers the Dust Brothers (Beck) and Don Gilmore (Eve 6, Pearl Jam). The album was released in the fall of 2000, debuting at number sixteen on the Billboard charts. Once the singles "Crawling" and the cathartic "One Step Closer" ("Everything you say to me / Takes me one step closer to the edge / And I'm about to break / I need a little room to breathe") gained increased radio play, the album began a march up the charts into the Top 10, where it would reside, on and off, for nearly a year.

Tours with Family Values 2001, featuring a lineup that, like Linkin Park, favored mixing heavy metal with hip-hop, and Projekt: Revolution, featuring rappers Cypress Hill, kept the group on the road for 324 days in 2001, paying off in January 2002 with three Grammy Award nominations. The group took home one Grammy Award for Best Hard Rock Performance for "Crawling." With more than 6 million copies in sales, Hybrid Theory was named the top-selling album of 2001, a huge accomplishment for a group's debut. Hahn and Shinoda lent their voices to a hit single, "It's Going Down," for the hip-hop group the X-Ecutioners in early 2002.

The achievements were a testament to the group's hard work and artistic vision, which extends to all aspects of their imagery and style. Bennington designs clothing for the Replicant Company, Hahn directed the "Crawling" video, as well as five other clips, and Shinoda designed the cover art for the group's albums, which he also co-produced.

Eager to keep their momentum flowing, the group entered a studio in summer 2002 to record the twenty-track remix album Reanimated. An amalgamation of ambient passages and radical reworkings of their songs, the album features new tracks and guest vocals from rappers Rasco & Planet Asia, Aceyalone, Pharoahe Monch, and Black Thought, as well as Staind singer Aaron Lewis, Korn singer Jonathan Davis, and Orgy singer Jay Gordon. For songs such as the hit "Crawling"—renamed "Krwlng" for this album—the group has completely reimagined the track, adding classical violin and cello in place of crunching guitars for a majestic sound that is more chamber music than hard rock. Aaron Lewis's haunting vocals float over the string section, layered with stuttering samples, a faint drum machine beat, and rapping.

Though their mix-and-match style of music was believed to be on the wane following a period in which many rock bands had added superfluous DJs or rappers to their lineups, Linkin Park's combination of arresting visuals and tightly produced rap-rock tracks made them the breakout success story of the early 2000s. Linkin Park's third album, Meteora, was released in 2003.