A place in my head: About Chester Bennington

Chester Bennington, singer of the band Linkin Park—most 90s kids' playlist poison at some point—was from a time when album reviews, social media criticism, and even facts in our trivia did not matter. At least for us gawky fans huddled excitedly at the back of the classroom, foggy nuggets of news, and a whole lot myths about our favourite artistes worked just fine. We created them. We circulated them. We subscribed to them. You see, I am a part of a generation that for the large part, grew up offline.

This was when our Mp3s came from godknowswhere, perhaps borrowed from that cool senior boy who would send me the latest Linkin Park (LP) song via bluetooth, confidently declaring LP was finally coming to India. I remember cornering him in the school toilet to beg for a pass so I could see Chester perform live before he succumbed to the 'throat cancer' that was supposedly plaguing him. (It was just a rumour. Another of our myths).

Life was a music video then. And my 'fandom' comprised largely of stories I made up myself about the songs, the often misheard, misquoted lyrics (no metrolyrics.com to correct me, thankfully) and how they would immediately apply to my teenage angst. I would often see myself as Chester when his screams emerged out of a distant horizon like an apache helicopter, mostly after Mike Shinoda set the stage with his swagger. It was something guttural. Primal. It still feels the same. (Or may be I am again making up stories in my head again). Probably his screams never reached anybody at all. Even with sympathetic sermons about (his) 'depression' being a silent killer crowding social media, truth is, none of us will ever know what really caused Chester to end it this way. But I could take a lame guess at what hurt him.

Like many others transitioning from alt/rap rock to more 'sophisticated' genres, there came a time when it was important for me to denounce Linkin Park to save my cool quotient. "You still listen to LP? Man! Try bay area thrash—listen to Swedish doom, listen to new wave of British Heavy metal!" And so I did. Sure, the old favourites still lurked at the back of my head, but it is important that I come to terms with this —I had stopped taking interest in the band trajectory years ago. Evidently, so had the others. So when Linkin Park's seventh studio album, the apparently pop-leaning (so I'd heard) One More Light (May 2017) came out, the opinions of 'die-hard fans' were already decided. Their minds made up. The last album I'd heard was Living Things (2012). But word was, Chester was a sellout now. He was on the Billboard! He had lost his roots, his street cred. What next? A single with Selena Gomez? He probably deserves to have a jug thrown at him now. F*ck him. (Online music magazine Consequence of Sound reported that a disgruntled concert goer threw a jug at Bennington as he performed his new songs at French heavy metal festival Hellfest in June).

Of all the trivia I'd pieced together over the years, I never knew he had six kids. Because human beings produce kids, not superheroes who spell out your darkest fears without ever having known you. I don't even remember ever checking him up on Wikipedia (barring the night of his death) after I got online with the rest of my generation. Now, I guess, it "doesn't even matter" if I blare Papercut on my speakers.

Don't think me to be a slave to sentimentality. Or do. Point is, I know, by all objective standards, my hero worship was silly. That phase had to end—for a new one to emerge. In this phase, I, along with so many others, felt comfortable dismissing once-loved bands and artistes grasping to reconfigure their sound so they could stay relevant to an ever-evolving and diverse audience.

I don't know about the others. But I feel a collective guilt, for casually rejecting the man who once taught me it's okay to not know "why I instigate/ and say what I don't mean".

I cannot imagine how he felt when 'fans' "flipped him the finger" while he was trying to perform, just because he wasn't singing what they thought to epitomise the band's true sound. Perhaps, it felt like a glitch at the end of that bootlegged copy of From the Inside which someone had handed me a decade ago. One that somehow still survives in an unattended section of my smartphone.

Sans artiste tags or judgement.