(A Music Review on Linkin Park’s "Meteora")
May Love L. Oniola
It used to be that when I am in one of those moods, the kind that borders between helpless melancholy and suicidal depression, I’d turn to my radio and listen to any of those radio stations playing sappy love songs that empathize with my blue mood. Some say that music sooths the soul – well, I say, that really depends on what kind of music that you listen to, because for my part, whenever I listen to these love songs, instead of soothing me, I feel more agitated, “bluer than blue.” There finally came the time when I got tired of feeling worse after listening to love songs. I decided that I needed the kind of music that’ll still express what I was feeling but will also help me get over that feeling. This craving for another kind of music led me to my discovery of Linkin Park.
Well, actually, Linkin Park songs had been playing inside our house for some time, courtesy of my brother. Linkin Park already had three albums before I learned to appreciate their music. At first, whenever my brother listened to them I’d tell him to pipe down the “noise” because that was all that I heard then – noise: electric guitars whose guitarists seemed to have the worst kind of Parkinson’s disease; the growling-screaming voices that seemed to be an integral part of rock “music;” and those other background noise that I could not quite identify.
But then I read the lyrics of their songs. And I was surprised how accurately the songs were able to say every dark emotion I had inside me – something that no love song has ever been able to say yet! That was when I began to take an interest in the Linkin Park songs, especially with Meteora, their follow-up to their debut album Hybrid Theory.
Meteora got my attention from the other two albums (Hybrid Theory and Reanimation, a collection of remix versions of some of Hybrid Theory) because of the album’s packaging. On the cover of the cassette tape (we didn’t have a CD player yet when my brother bought the tapes and besides, CDs cost too much!) was a guy wearing gas masks, spraying paint on the floor; the picture had a combination of sepia and black colors, which then offered me a picture of an almost subdued but very troubled (read: angry) person. When I read the album’s lyrics, my speculation was proven true: it was an album full of held back anger and despondency of a person towards someone who held power over him or her.
Like the song “Numb.” It begins with the beat that brings to mind the falling of a drop of water on a surface – very peaceful. Then the drum’s sharp beats and the guitar’s wild strums come in to meld quite effortlessly with the beat of the falling water. Chester Bennington begins the song with an almost crooning-pleading voice: “I’m tired of being what you want me to be/ Feeling so faithless/ Lost under the surface/ I don’t know what you’re expecting of me/ Put under the pressure/ Of walking in your shoes/ Every step that I take is another mistake to you.” And in between breaks, Mike Shinoda quietly pipes in with his hip-hop beat: “Caught in the undertow/ Just caught in the undertow,” as though he is the person’s subconscious mind, repeating this line over and over again at the back of his head. Then Chester suddenly breaks into a frenzied growling (like a dog roused from a much needed sleep) for the chorus: “I’ve become so numb/ I can’t feel you there/ Become so tired/ So much more aware/ I’m becoming this/ All I want to do/ Is be more like me/ And be less like you.” With the hoarse screaming voice of Chester, one sees the person pointing an accusing finger to that other person that he hates so much.
Throughout the entire song, Chester and Mike successfully blend in their voices (the rasping, growling and the calm) that create the atmosphere of barely-held-back anger and misery in the song. Whenever I hear this song (indeed, the whole album), I always find myself nodding my head, with my eyes closed, to the beat of the guitar. I let the “angry” voices, the thumping of the bass flow all over me until I feel like I am the one singing the song – pouring out my everything into the song, until the very last beats of the song: the quite falling of water, until nothing more falls.
I think that the charm that this album has on its audience – at least to this audience – is that for each of the cuts in the album, a catharsis happens. The artist and the audience purge all of their dark emotions together, they scream until their voices become hoarse, they bang their heads until they fall down on the floor, and they revel in the feeling of being able to let everything come out in the open, which is really the intention of the album. As Chester Bennington said, the things written in this album happened to them and to the people around them.
No one would like to hear them on the radio because they’re dark. But they are important to them. And it was up to the Linkin Park to say things that nobody dared to say – it’s like being the bearer of the bad news: nobody in the world wants to do the dirty work, but somebody has got to do something – somebody has got to do what needs to be done.
