THERE HAVE always been angry white boys in pop music. Johnny Cash shot a man in Reno. Elvis sang “I’d rather see you dead little girl than to be with another man” on “Baby, Let’s Play House,” and John Lennon stole the same line for the Beatles’ “Run for Your Life.” By the time the Stones changed “Let It Be” to “Let It Bleed,” all bets were off.
But it wasn’t until the nu-metal wave of Y2K that the angry white boy label really stuck. Hits with lyrics like “open up your hate and let it flow into me” brought seething and alienation to mainstream radio in a way previously unimagined by anyone not named Trent Reznor.
That was the culture in which Linkin Park thrived. Though more skilled at incorporating other genres, especially hip-hop (they partnered with Jay-Z for the remix album Collision Course), alt-metal was always the core of their sound. Beginning at the turn of the century, they turned songs like “Numb” and “Somewhere I Belong” into chart-toppers, selling some 50 million albums along the way. Like the hits of their nu-metal peers, they were insular songs about internalized rage, desensitization, addiction and mental breakdown.
So imagine the shock of the world at large when their latest album, A Thousand Suns, turned out to be a concept record about nuclear war. For a band that had made their career facing inward, this was an ambitious attempt at a bigger perspective. Though there are still personal fears underlying A Thousand Suns, this is an outward-looking record that steps out of “angry white boy” territory to examine societal ills. It’s about connecting, rather than disconnecting; one for all, instead of all for one.
Perhaps no one was as surprised as the band itself, which used the Surrealist technique of automatic writing—a stream-of-consciousness style that attempts to avoid the filter of self-analysis or critique—to tap into some feelings they’d never explored.
“Ideas would just kind of pop out, and I wouldn’t even know that I was thinking about some of this stuff,” said Linkin Park’s guitarist and rapper Mike Shinoda, in a phone interview. “It would come out of my mouth, and the song would develop.”
Eventually, he and lead singer Chester Bennington realized there was a central theme linking the songs.
“When we listened back to all that, there were ideas of destruction and self-annihilation and fear that were popping out and surprising us,” said Shinoda. “We’re very analytical when it comes to rating our songs and putting them all together, so we’re looking at songs from every angle and we’re thinking about things, and we started asking ourselves, ‘What do we all feel about these ideas being on the record all over the place and maybe taking the record in that direction?'”
A concept record about nuclear Armageddon isn’t necessarily the most commercially viable idea, however, and it’s not always easy for a popular band to suddenly change direction with more challenging material. But in this case, Linkin Park held together.
“It turned out that all six of the guys felt like there was definitely a universal fear that I think a lot of people these days do have, whether it be in the front of their mind or in the back of their mind, that humanity as a whole is and has been for a long time on the brink of destroying itself,” says Shinoda. “Whether that be slowly or quickly, a possibility exists in the world and I think we’re all scared of it to some degree. …We decided that, for the six of us, it was an honest fear and an honest emotion, and that it was proper for it to be a part of the record in the way that it ended up being.”
The resulting album is far more downbeat than their previous efforts, sometimes downright ambient, with a couple of short tracks that feature samples of Robert Oppenheimer and Martin Luther King Jr. rather than lyrics. Though the sound and lyrical style is completely different, at times it recalls a Roger Watersera Pink Floyd album in its structure and scope. Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that the band considered presenting the album as one piece live, playing it from start to finish—but they won’t be doing that when they play HP Pavilion this week.
“Definitely there was a temptation. I think that we’re not going to do it at this point, but we’re still open to the idea of doing special shows where we play A Thousand Suns front to back,” says Shinoda. “But I want to let [fans] know that we are going to be playing songs from our entire catalog. This isn’t just a Thousand Suns show; you’ll be hearing stuff from every album.”
Linkin Park
Tuesday, Feb. 22, 7:30pm
$41-72.50
