Linkin Park’s product was male rage in a form the entire family could mosh to. (It’s worth noting that sales figures for the band’s 2000 debut album, Hybrid Theory, have been surpassed in the new millennium by no rock album other than The Beatles’ 1.) The guitarist Brad Delson’s cleanly rumbling chords triggered the kind of shiver you might feel while in a dinghy passing an aircraft carrier. Co–front man Mike Shinoda rapped in blocky syllables, his voice a stentorian simplification of the voice cultivated by Public Enemy’s Chuck D. A DJ who went by the name Mr. Hahn threaded in nerdy-cool electronic sounds; the drummer, Rob Bourdon, hammered with comforting steadiness; and a bassist who called himself Phoenix shellacked on an ominous tint.

The most important ingredient was Bennington’s wail and whisper, a volatile fuel to be processed by the others. To revisit the video for the 2001 Linkin Park single “Crawling” is to see his powers at full strength, and his special appeal laid bare. At the outset, a music-box ballerina spins, a woman cries into a bathroom sink, a pretty keyboard melody plays, and Bennington screams. The crying woman appears to be in an abusive relationship, and the scrawny singer, his hair in peroxide-blond spikes, seems to narrate her emotions. His chorus—“crawling in my skin / these wounds, they will not heal”—is a strained roar, truly volcanic. His verses are soft and mannered. “Against my will, I stand beside my own reflection,” Bennington sings, looking into the woman’s face. Her nose is pierced, as is his lip.

Professional critics found such works mawkish, and heavy-metal purists dissed Linkin Park in crasser terms—gay or, yes, girly. That’s because, for all its testosterone rage, the band violated the notion that to be male is to be steady, unstudied, and tough. Linkin Park’s form of nu metal—the rap-rock style in vogue around the turn of the millennium—was polished and, for the band’s first few albums, notably devoid of swearing. The musicians were genre benders, stitching patches of hard rock, hip-hop, and new wave to a veil of soft, velvety pop. They had young fans and female fans, and young female fans. And they had Bennington: capable of lullaby gentleness and perpetually fixated on his own victimhood.

This blend, rather than betraying the history of emotionally aggrieved popular music, fulfilled a tradition of complicating the ideal of strong, silent masculinity. Look back at Rolling Stone’s 1969 pan of Led Zeppelin I, which described the high-pitched wails of the lead singer, Robert Plant, as “foppish.” Punk balked at prescribed roles and reveled in sexual transgression. New wavers like Depeche Mode knit the supposedly frivolous and fey sounds of disco into their gloom. Rock misogyny remained alive and well, but these maneuvers encouraged men to communicate in ways that would previously have gotten them labeled wimps.