2024-09-22 23:16:38
Seven years after the death of their singer Chester Bennington, Linkin Park are celebrating their resurrection. In Hamburg, the legendary nu-metal band around Mike Shinoda played through their career. She sings: Emily Armstrong. For the encore, he even appeared in a special outfit.
Millennials are doing what their parents did. Boomers are already standing in front of concert halls and begging for tickets with cardboard signs. The Hamburg Arena, which currently bears the name of Barclays, the British bank, can accommodate 15,000 visitors. 300,000 are said to have called for a ticket on the portals. Favorite for members of LPU: Linkin Park Underground is a kind of group for registered fans of the band from California. Well, on the evening of the return in Germany, some of those who left empty-handed sadly raised their boxes saying: “They are looking for tickets! At the right prices!” Do Millennials no longer trust their gadgets?
A good 30 kilometers to the south, in the rosarium of the Ohlsdorf cemetery, they have already maintained a memorial for Chester Bennington with pictures, flowers and painted stones. In addition to his RIP posts on Instagram. The singer committed suicide on July 20, 2017, a few weeks after the suicide of his friend Chris Cornell of Soundgarden. At the funeral, Bennington said goodbye with Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”. Cornell’s birthday, July 20, is the anniversary of Bennington’s death.
“Martyr of the Millennials” is what his WELT obituary has been saying for seven years now, which is also a farewell to Linkin Park, his group, which, if you look at their balance sheets, is the biggest of singles and young people. 21st century. In grief, it became as big as it was in the early days, when Bennington sang songs like “Breaking the Habit,” “Numb” and “Crawling.”
There have been rumblings about Linkin Park on social media for a while now. Remixes of their classics, house records thought to be lost and rediscovered, songs that have never been heard before are accompanied by rumors, hopes shared on Instagram and ideas of a comeback. The group, for their part, posted: “Be part of something.” And then, on September 6th, 2024 at midnight: Linkin Park is back, with a singer, with a new one. Music, as well as videowith an album, with a length of one hour game stream, including a filmed interview, with multiple segments YouTube-Texture and with international travel. This evening, seven years after their last work and tragedy, they returned to Europe after returning home, in a large company in Hamburg.
While the Millennials, the 30-year-olds of Generation Y, are still crowding the Wiederkehr venue outside in order to be there in person even without tickets, 15,000 people are having a hard time with their smartphones in their hands how the stage of the middle. the hall became the center of the event Mosh pits with their guns-as the city is fogged up, the video cubes begin to flicker and a laser thread falls from the ceiling of the hall. How the singers got up to their instruments, how the blonde singer appeared and sang “Somewhere I Belong”.
“I just want to be part of something”
Emily Armstrong walks in broad steps through the 21-year-old’s song from the second album “Meteora”, beat the beat, climbed on the monitor and attacked the timbre of her predecessor with some enthusiasm and occasional loans from Stevie Nicks and country. . Some people know him from a band called Dead Sara, but also from guest contributions for The Offspring, Beck and Hole. In their YouTube interview, Linkin Park reports how they meet each other again and again to maintain their creativity and harmony in the studio and how they invite guests. Armstrong has the right chemistry to revive Linkin Park with him. In the game, he first showed himself with his first work: “Dancing”, “Lies from You” and “Points of Authority” followed by “Somewhere I Belong”.
“New Division”, the theme song for the 2009 movie “Transformers”, is followed by the sixth track “Emptinness Machine”, the first new song by the new Linkin Park. It can also be old. Emily Armstrong sings about the emptiness of machines, burning altars and walking weapons. He wants to see himself bleeding and: “I just want to be part of something!” A mantra in the style of Bennington’s poetry. Sadness, fear, panic. For philosophers among pop critics, such lines cry out for recognition for the new man. However, the fact that a public woman is singing the songs that Chester Bennington wrestles with has so far only been discussed, tweeted and posted to a limited extent.
The excitement is all great about Emily Armstrong’s sympathies for Scientology and the actress serving time as a rapist. She apologized for any mistakes and sins on Instagram: “Hello, I’m Emily. I am new to most of you. Everything is fine in Hamburg.
There are Emily’s songs, Linkin Park is back, not the old ones, but they almost sound like they did when they did the classics from the first singles. “One Step Closer” and “Breaking the Trend,” “Papercut” and “My December,” “Fainted” and “Numb” and “Finally.” Emily Armstrong is not the only new member of the team. Drummer Rob Bourdon, who stopped showing up at meetings at one point, was replaced by Colin Brittain, who also worked as a producer on the new album. Guitarist Brad Delson sent another guitarist, Alex Feder, on the tour as his replacement. The DJ booth and bass are occupied by Joe Hahn and Dave “Phoenix” Farrell, the two fathers next to Mike Shinoda, who holds the band together and leads it as a rapper, second guitarist and leader.
Do they even know Linkin Park, even without Chester Bennington? Wouldn’t a new team name be more appropriate? How about “From Zero”, as they called their mini comeback tour around the world and as the album will be called in November? Such questions are still discussed among their fans in these weeks. After Ian Curtis’ suicide in 1980, the Joy Club became The New Order. On the other hand: Queen is Queen even without Freddie Mercury and with Paul Rodgers, AC / DC is always AC / DC, with Brian Johnson and even with Axl Rose. Many bands from older generations are already so thin out and full that they tour around as their own cover bands. Shinoda said in the interview: “It sounds so much like Linkin Park that we would be crazy to choose another name.” It also refers to the core of Linkin Park from 1996: Xero, their college band. So “From zero” for a new beginning.
More light!
At halftime of the concert in Hamburg, Mike Shinoda stepped up to the piano, Emily Armstrong joined in and sang “Lost in the Echo” as if on repeat. Another imitation of familiarity and harmony is Linkin Park 2.0. “Lost in the echo” comes from their fifth album, “Living Things,” 2012. Strangely enough, the live retrospective rarely goes beyond their first five albums, with the exception of “Friendly Fire,” which was posthumously released just one year this. Which could also be because of their albums after “Minutes to Midnight” from 2007, the concept album “A Thousand Suns” about the atomic curse of Robert Oppenheimer from 2010 and “Big Things” with the anthem A real, “Burn it down” for the 2012 European football championship, became increasingly weak.
“One more light”, the singer’s farewell album with a Goethe-esque death title, does not contain a single song. And with none of those predictable lines like “I dance with my demons” or “Why is everything so hard?” In “Talk to Myself,” Chester Bennington sings about himself as if he sees himself through the eyes of his wife Talinda, who wonders how she can help her husband, cure his depression and ease his suffering in life. chance.
Maybe they are showing respect that not everyone gives them. While Talinda Bennington gave her blessing to the return on Instagram by putting a fire and a heart under the photo of Mike Shinoda’s reunion with Emily Armstrong, Jaime Bennington, the eldest of the six children left by Chester Bennington, complained: on Shinoda: He “ruined life my father’s life and his legacy disappeared”, “revealed the fanbase” and made Linkin Park an “old, tone-deaf” band. Shinoda protested this when he shouted from the stage into the hall at the first concert in California on September 11th: “Each of you is a Chester Bennington today!”
No one felt the release when they stood in the hall in Hamburg and noticed on their cell phone that they were there and would have been there when the largest group of their generation remembered what they were. The two heads of Mike Shinoda / Chester Bennington show a hybrid of two styles, which is also in the title of the first album, “Hybrid Theory”. Hip hop and rock. Of course, Generation As if Countless and Aerosmith/Run-DMC, Beastie Boys and Anthrax/Public Enemy did not exist as pioneers of crossover. Linkin Park called their official album “Clash Lessons”, featuring Jay-Z.
But the spirit that lives in the songs that Bennington screams from his body with swollen jugular veins is different from the hard spirit of the eighties and nineties, even if he is at least a decade older than the millennials who listen to him. Self-doubt is part of Linkin Park’s system. In 2010, they wrote in the blurb for their first solo release, “A thousand Suns”: “We have destroyed our group and rebuilt it.”
So now Linkin Park has started again. The first trip took them from Los Angeles via New York to Hamburg and from here via London and Seoul to Bogota. They were on stage in Hamburg for over two hours. When Emily Armstrong appeared for the encores, she wore a pink jersey with the German national soccer team’s zero number and her name. Linkin Park is celebrating the live premiere of the second new song called “Heavy Is the Crown”.
“Bleed it Out” is their last encore in Germany, the beginning, as they say, until the big “From Zero” tour next year. When Millennials were younger, they would have been amused by the Boomers’ nostalgia. As every generation does until it is ready.
Michael Olu was surprising and shaped by two albums in 1986: “License to Sick” by the Beastie Boys and “Kingdom in Blood” by Slayer. As a boomer, he had a hard time with clean iron.
This word deals with suicide. Do you have suicidal thoughts, or notice them in a relative/acquaintance? Telephone advice offers help: anonymous advice is available around the clock on the free numbers 0800 / 111 0 111 and 0800 / 111 0 222. Advice via the Internet is also possible at http://www.telefonseelsorge.de. A list of national aid agencies can be found on the Website of the German Society for Suicide Prevention.
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