Linkin Park is not a very good band. It took me 10+ years to finally realize this.

Hybrid Theory and Meteora were awesome. They were leaders in the nu-metal sub-genre. They have struggled to put together a great record and improve as a band. We fans have always given them the benefit of the doubt but there comes a point where we need to confess that the band just isn't very good anymore--and it's not entirely because the sound isn't nu-metal.

After the golden age of LP with HT and Meteora, we got to see what their capable of creating as a band outside of that sub-genre and it's been largely inconsistent. They pride themselves on their ability to fit into any genre, but it doesn't work and that's why none of their albums are critically acclaimed and their reputation is going down with each album. A great band can make you love every song on an album. Linkin Park makes you think WTF is this song doing on this album i.e. You can't have a track like Good Goodbye if you're going to do a folky track like Sharp Edges to close the album---it destroys the cohesiveness and ebb & flow of the album.

I just don't think this band is capable of putting together a GREAT album outside of the nu-metal genre. After watching the Linkin Park reacts to Teens React to Linkin Park video. It's very strange and alarming to me how out of touch Mike is with what made Linkin Park so great from the onset and broke them into the mainstream. He's ashamed of the One Step Closer video, he thinks making any song that sounds like Hybrid Theory or Meteora would be cringe. On that point, Chester shared the same sentiments in the "nu-metal" version of Heavy video where he said it would "fucking suck". They've completed abandoned all energy and moment from Hybrid Theory and Meteora and started fresh instead of evolving. In my opinion, it's that energy that allowed them to create Breaking the Habit which to this date is better than anything they've put out after Meteora. However, that song was an evolution of nu-metal LInkin Park. That's real growth. Everything after that has been an identity crisis.

My expectation for the band has always been evolution. There was this energy to Linkin Park that has nothing to do with screaming, guitars, and rapping. There was this sense that they were going to "bring it" but it's gone and fizzled out. It's like a great athlete whose past his prime and is a shade of his former self. It's all gone.

I suppose i've grown out of this band in my late 20s. There's just so many great bands out there who are consistent ( not consistently making the same songs, but consistent with putting out great albums) to listen to LP all of the time---which used to be a thing.

It was a good run. See ya.

 

Bye. ✌

 

For your information, not every LP fan loves HT/Meteora. I hate them (harsh but this is my opinion). and I'm a fan since 2004. and no, putting a fun rap song with a folky song in the same album is LINKIN PARK. and not an album full of the same "powerchords/angsty lyrics/screams" songs.

 

Speaking of energy and creativity, a user-submitted review of the album makes an interesting point about this'

if they're sellout, know-nothing lazy-asses, they have been since after Reanimation.

 

Wow. Corniest thread of 2017. Congrats

 

Read the first line and skipped the rest. Based on the following posts, it appears as though I made the right decision.

 

ATS.

/thread

 

If they were selling out, I highly doubt they would include deeply personal and loving lyrics about their families and friends.

"Hey kids, here's this bullshit song I wrote about you guys to make money! I didn't mean a word of it!!!1!"

I just feel that the band is incredibly honest about the process of this album. Why question their integrity? So many people are right now.

 

I feel sorry for those folks, their lives must be very very sad :'(

 

you probably don't realize it, but the implication of this statement is essentially "if I personally don't love it, it isn't good. because if it was, I'd love it." which is simultaneously egotistical and circular reasoning.

I don't necessarily disagree with the title of your thread, but the reasons you're giving I could not disagree with more. Nostalgia usually involves a lot of lying to yourself.

 

See you on the other side.

Actually I am. LPA are the loyalists. See album sales and general feedback, reviews, and impressions on general Rock forums.

Passive aggressiveness is corny too.

No, that makes you ignorant.

 

Hybrid Theory and Meteora were some of the very first albums that I ever listened to from beginning to end as a kid and thoroughly enjoyed. I thought they were amazing, and I can still pick them up today and listen to them and push some of the cringey-ness that they have aside, because I know these albums meant a lot to me growing up. Do I think these are the best albums of all time? Hell no, but they were my favorites, if that makes sense.

I then got into other kinds of music throughout my teen years, and I was 17 when Minutes To Midnight happened. I was a little bit more mature then and I really appreciated the album, it became my favorite Linkin Park album, and still is to this day. The best part about it for me was that it also opened me up to a large amount of different kinds of music, that further helped shape my musical tastes. It's something that has stuck with me to this day, and I can still listen to Minutes To Midnight as well and love it.

Now, years later, I barely listen to Linkin Park. I don't listen to any of the albums that the band released after Minutes To Midnight. I've heard them, but I didn't care for them, and that's ok, I can say that without sounding like a douche, like a lot of fans.

I don't consider Linkin Park this great epic band nowadays. I loved their early music, like I said, their first three albums, but I know they aren't the best albums of all time. Maybe they are to me, but in the scope of things, they aren't. That would be ridiculous to suggest. I don't think that Linkin Park sucks, or isn't good, though. They're a talented group of people who make music they want to make. Not a lot of bands can do what they did, or are still doing.

 

They are just people, like you and me, doing what they want to do and doing what they like.

The only difference is we are all watching them do this from the outside and making comment on it, reflecting on it from the view point of our own values and beliefs, thinking the band is this or that, that they don't get it, or that they do, or this and that.... we are just over thinking it.

If you don't like it, don't listen to it. If you like it do. The world will continue without you or your opinion looking from the outside, it will be whatever it is, despite your viewpoint of it.

There are a lot of people on this giant floating rock that think Justin Bieber is the best artist on the planet. Go figure.

You are saying it took you over ten years to realise that they aren't a good band? You either wanted to listen to there music or you didn't in this time, maybe you view it differently, tastes change, maybe you don't like some of the stuff now, it doesn't matter. Over thinking it, over analysing it, just kills it. Go find something you like and don't worry about if LP is a great band or not.

You say Mike is out of touch of what made Linkin Park great, but what does that mean? Great in your opinion, in your beliefs and that Mike is somehow out of touch from this, this is typical outsider mentally, it may appear that way from the outside to someone that thought HT/Meteora made LP great, but maybe this album is what Mike thinks is great right now, who cares if you think that is out of touch? What does that even mean? If being out of touch means different from what everyone else wants, then of course they are, they always said they do what they like and that's what they did when HT came out and that's what they do now. In that sense, sometimes what you do here will kill it and people will think it's awesome and sometimes they won't, thats the danger you have if you take this true direction, but honestly, again this is only something that people looking in from the outside debate.

Personally i'd rather live my life being me, doing what I like and truth is, if you all were here on a website debating my life, you would add all this extra stuff in that you see looking from the outside, which just isn't relevant to me or my life, it's more your story than mine, i'd rather just listen to the music that I enjoy and if i have something bad to say about it, go listen to something that doesn't give me that negative feeling inside. There is too much life out there to worry about anything else.

 

Hybrid Theory was revolutionary. With the exception of Breaking the Habit and Nobody's Listening (and if High Voltage had actually been on Hybrid Theory, you could remove Nobody's Listening from that list as well), Meteora sounded exactly like Hybrid Theory except with marginally more interesting musical elements and a drastic downgrade in lyrical quality. By definition, Meteora is derivative. It also sounded just like about two dozen other nu metal albums that came out that year.

Clearly you need to go back and read some of the reviews of Minutes to Midnight, The Hunting Party, and especially A Thousand Suns. Those albums largely were received VERY positively by the industry.

"You can't have a track like Breaking the Habit if you're going to do a nu metal power ballad like Numb to close the album---it destroys the cohesiveness and ebb & flow of the album."

Okay have you SEEN the One Step Closer video lately? It was directed by a fucking porn director. There are ninjas in hoods and face paint who can levitate for no particular reason. Mike and Chester are wearing their hair all spiked up in stupid colors and the band is rhythmically doing that "restrained really low-to-the-ground headbang" thing because that's what nu metal bands were expected to do at the time. The entire image of the band around that era was so manufactured and fake, how could it NOT be cringeworthy?

Also, listen to Wastelands. It's literally a Hybrid Theory/Meteora song with a synth solo instead of a lyrical bridge.

So let me get this straight...Breaking the Habit, a string-laden, softer-dynamic song with a lot of sampled synths and beats is an evolution. Shadow of the Day, a string-laden. softer-dynamic song with a lot of sampled synths and beats isn't. Regardless of opinion on which song is actually better, I'm failing to see a difference in terms of logical progression here, except that one song is on an album that can be classified as nu metal, and the other isn't. Hmm...couldn't POSSIBLY be some underlying bias on your part, could there?

Let me guess, your idea of "consistently great bands" consists of Papa Roach, Disturbed, Seether, and every other radio-butt-rock band stuck in 2005 that routinely plays to crowds of 30-something, mid-life crisis-having rock "fans" who haven't actually bought an album in 10 years at C-list festivals like Rock Fest and Northern Invasion. Or maybe you're a fan of "not sure if metal parody or serious band" stuff like Five Finger Death Punch, Volbeat, and everything Avenged Sevenfold has done since Jimmy died. Maybe a mix of both

 

Haha I love this. Thank fuck Dave and Brad stopped doing that around 2003 or 2004? I laugh everytime I see it.

 

You know that's the thing, it really wasn't. I think this is what throws a lot of people of people now who can't fathom why Linkin Park "just suck so bad now! why can't they go back to how they were?!".

Hybrid Theory dropped at a time where a looooot of bands where peppering techno in with their rap-rock. LP just happened to do it a bit better, at strike at juuust the right time where they were all dying out, so not everything on the radio sounded like that. That, I think for a lot of people, would give some comfort on how this epic, phenomenal, highly creative and bizarrely innovative rock band seemingly turned to complete and utter shit overnight; because they're not remembering the way it actually happened correctly.