Beginning in 2000, Linkin Park brought the collision of hard rock and hip-hop to its commercial and aesthetic peak, with its lead singer, Chester Bennington, delivering intense, almost physically palpable emotion alongside the grounded rapping of Mike Shinoda.

But how Mr. Bennington — who was found dead Thursday morning in his California home — truly set himself apart was with his flexibility, taking on different vocal personas, depending on the demands of the song. That made him an anomaly for his era: a 2000s progressive who rooted his singing in the tenets of 1980s and 1990s rock, and someone who knew how to extract feeling both from careful whispers and gnarled yelps.

[ Read Chester Bennington’s obituary ]

He had many guises. On “Numb,” from Linkin Park’s second album, he started out plaintive and became gutturally desperate at the hook: “All I want to do/is be more like me/and be less like you.” On “Walking Dead,” a collaboration with the D.J.-producer Z-Trip, he was languorous and mildly sleazy. On “New Divide,” a midcareer hit from, of all places, the soundtrack to the film “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen,” he was dreamlike and practically sweet. On “Crawling,” from Linkin Park’s debut, he brought gale-force anguish, vivid and baptismal.

Mr. Bennington’s ability to pair serrate rawness with sleek melody separated him from the other singers of his era, and also from the ones he grew up on. He was an emo sympathizer in a time when heavy metal was still setting the agenda for mainstream hard rock, and a hip-hop enthusiast who found ways to make hip-hop-informed music that benefited from his very un-hip-hop skill set.