Chester Bennington’s untimely death last Thursday left me more shocked than I could have ever imagined possible. Unlike David Bowie or Prince, no one outside of Chester’s immediate family is likely to rank him as one of the musical greats, but I don’t think I’m the only one that feels like I share a strange familiarity with him.

I was briefly a fan of Linkin Park. Their career defining album, Hybrid Theory, dropped when I was 12 years old and was in the early stages of developing my own tastes and personality. It came into my life before I discovered my true love, punk rock, satiating my embryonic musical sensibilities that were clearly moving in a certain direction. Like most people I abandoned the band when I came to my senses just in time for their disappointing follow-up LP, Meteora. But for anyone old enough to remember those few years at the dawn of the new millennium, it’s impossible to not feel some sort of kinship with Chaz and his band. Because regardless of whether you liked them or not, they towered over the pop cultural landscape like Goliaths. That debut album didn’t only define their careers but that entire mini-era and it will be remembered as one of the key musical works of that particular moment in history. Bennington’s departure feels like losing a very distant cousin.

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Obviously for his bandmates the sensation must be immeasurably worse and could probably be compared to the amputation of a major limb. For Linkin Park as a band and musical act, the pain is compounded exponentially: more than an amputation it’s a decapitation. Chester Bennington WAS Linkin Park. He was more than its lead vocalist: he was its heart, soul, face and most of its vital organs. Mike Shinoda aside, the rest of the band were utterly anonymous – distant moons orbiting the small Shinoda-shaped planet that sustained itself on the warm rays emitted by Chester Bennington at the center of the Linkin Park solar system. It’s difficult to imagine how the band can possibly go on without him.

If we were to be brutally honest, Linkin Park were completely lost and rudderless even with Chester in the band. Ever since the spectacular success of Hybrid Theory, the band have been desperately scrambling around like junkies trying to hit the same heights of musical stardom with little to show for it. What we need to remember about Linkin Park is that they were never very good, they were simply perfectly suited for that particular flicker in time when they first appeared. Nu-metal, an aberration of popular culture, was having its moment and they created its most accessible work.

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Melodic without being too poppy, angsty without being too abrasive (like, say, Korn), Hybrid Theory was a collection of one-hit wonders. It was instinctively synchronised with the popular tastes of the moment, but in hindsight that appears to be more of a product of luck than design. By the time Meteora came out, the zeitgeist had moved on and a consensus had been reached that nu-metal was nothing more than a really terrible joke that a lot of people had mistakenly laughed along with rather than at. It was also the dying breath of a popular culture that had been defined by guitar bands since the arrival of The Beatles. Rock was in decline and hip-hop was in the ascendency, ready to impose its very own hegemony onto the pop charts.

What followed for Linkin Park was a period of musical vagrancy as they reshaped their sound according to whatever was popular at the time. The most explicit examples of this are that bizarre collaboration with JAY-Z and their fourth album, A Thousand Suns, where they strayed into electronica just as America was discovering dance music in the form of EDM. It all felt forced and overwrought and indicative of a band bereft of a clear creative vision. It would seem that Hybrid Theory was a serendipitous accident rather than a stroke of coordinated brilliance.

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Deep down I think that the band are aware of this: each following album gives the impression that they were overthinking things. You can almost hear them frantically trying to crack their own secret formula that unexpectedly brought them such success. It’s difficult to shake the feeling that they were far more concerned with stardom and adoration than their craft, like an ideologically devoid politician who will say and do anything to get themselves reelected.

It’s quite telling that, years later, once nu metal had become a complete laughing stock, Shinoda tried to shake off the label by claiming that the band had never really identified with it. Cynics will probably dismiss this as a dishonest rebranding exercise, but I’m sure there’s a degree of truth to it: Linkin Park don’t seem like a band that truly identifies with anything aside from pop chart success. Nu metal served its purpose, but once the zeitgeist had moved on they made efforts to do so too. Unfortunately for them, they’ve been desperately off the pace since the early years of the Bush administration.

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I’ve argued before that the reason why so many musicians end up being one-hit wonders is because all artists have a certain amount of creative fuel, that, like youth, is gone forever once exhausted. All bands have their creative peak, but like 36 year-olds who shirk the dull reality of adulthood, desperately deluding themselves that they’re barely out of their teens, few will admit that that peak is over and will continue to put out substandard work that sullies their own legacy. Linkin Park have been doing this for a while and I think that it might be time to call it quits.

Chester’s demise is an explicit curtain call for an era that ended nearly 15 years ago. Toiling on would not only further desecrate the memory of Hybrid Theory, it would simply be distasteful considering these recent tragic events. I think the best way to honour him would be to retire the Linkin Park name. The rest of the band could continue on under a new moniker with a new singer in the same way that Rage Against the Machine became Audioslave after parting ways with Zack de la Rocha. That’s the best way to preserve what’s left of Chester’s legacy.

For more of our music op-eds, read why DJs will never truly be the new rockstars right here.