wow...what a speech. okay, chester holding lp back? wtf? no no no no! chester is the emotion that makes lp's songs great. without chester lp is missing vital things that lp needs! his lyrics may be simple, but they are simple and beautiful. they give life to the music around them! now mike, he is without a doubt a great songwriter. mike is very important to linkin park because of the amazing things you can find in his work! his art in songwriting and other arts is simply amazing! basically what i'm saying is their is nothing that they NEED to change. they don't need to be a mike-linkin park and they don't need to be a chester- linkin park. they need to be themselves all together, they need to be LINKIN PARK Only!
Uhm, as much as I love you agreeing with yourself, LP4Hope, can you please try not to double post? Thanks.
No. Chester is more prominent on Minutes to Midnight than he was on the previous two albums. MTM is most definitely a rock album. Plus, he screams on two tracks anyways.
Actually If Somewhere I belong had different lyrics I wouldn't cringe every time I listen to it. A lot of the times lyrics can ruin a song or a different set of lyrics could just make a song better, perfect examples: In the end demo > In the end Esaul > A place for my head Forgotten Reanimation > Forgotten Demo > Forgotten
x2 all this criticism is good , Lp has and will evole. Foreword/>Don't Stay Crawling In the end With you My Dcmbr 1stp kloser Krwling Shadow of the Day No more sorrow Little things give you away Session Numb
Even 'back then', I felt Linkin Park was much, much more than just Chester's scream. So what's the list for?
my thoughts exactly. and basically that always was what i loved about chester as a singer. that he's not screaming because he can't sing. he's able to do both sing beautifully and scream like a madman. the reason i started to love LP back then... i don't really know what to say about his skills to write lyrics... but even if he's not good at that, LP is a band consisting of 6 members. they're working together. so i don't see a problem in mike being better in writing lyrics and chester being better at singing. if chester could do all this on his own he would be chester with 5 other guys supporting him in making music. that DBS wasn't really a hit just proves for me, that they're all best when they're working together as LP. also a fact i really love about LP. that they're a band with 6 members and not an egocentric singer with 5 other guys playing the instruments.
I dont want the Shinoda-Linkin Park. He is a great songwriter, no doubt about that, but i don't think he is that good when you want to talk about innovation. Did some of you realize that he always comes up with the same keyboard-riff? (where'd you go, not alone, what i've done, pushing me away live.. only to name a few). I think that lyrics written by Mike are always great though. He is much more poetic than Chester in a way. Chester has a more direct approach when it comes to lyrics, which isnt bad at all to me. But if you take the greatest Linkin Park-Song ever, The little things give you away, you can see that Mike Shinoda really needs the rest of the band. Rob Burdon came up with this amazing drum-pattern, while Brad Delson wrote the epic solo. In addition, Chesters vocals are pretty awesome on that song. His singing is way different from how he used to sing in the past. He proves that he's got an incredible range and puts feeling into the words, which makes the song authentic. I'm pretty shure that Mike wrote the lyrics though. Personally I like most of the Fort Minor-Stuff and I think that Mike is great when it comes to making beats. But I have never heard a stunning keyboard-riff made by him. Maybe A thousand Suns will prove me wrong. I think he could do better though.
LP is who LP is, and this next album will capture the hearts and minds of people who might have disliked them before.
Ok, you are right that they can improve a song. But lyrics do NOT ruin a song in my strong opinion. Now, If LP decided to sing about getting drunk at a party and about their hangover...that would cross a line for me obviously. Sometimes, you have to listen to the emotion of the song. If you get yourself in the right mood, SIB can really be riveting. Chester's lyrics are straight to the point and there's nothing wrong with that. Listen to the intro of Faint and get back to be on that. I wasn't trying to sound like I only listen to pop music or something. I HATE pop. EVERY Linkin Park song is amazing instrumentally with "catchiness". That's what I look for in music. EXACTLY
I call 'direct' a polite way to describe triviality, not as trivial as pop music though. And how can you say The Little Things Give You Away was the best LP song ever? One of their better ones I would say but talking about songs beeing 'best ever' is quite difficult anyway. There are great LP songs where Chester plays a minor part, I prefer them unsurprisingly but maybe its just preference of style. Intro of Faint?? Besides beeing very short its not that impressive even though I admit its pretty excentric. Excentricity has nothing to do with coherent complexity though. But discussing this topic upon a short snipped of sound is not really possible. You dont seem serious about critically thinking about LP if you claim 'EVERY' LP was amazing with catchiness I dont bother myself asking if a bad LP song suddenly would become great just by switching lyrics, of course not, but bad lyrics stand in the way of a song beeing great in gerneral.
I love this entire band and every member is incredibly talented, but realistically Linkin Park would probably cease to exist if Chester was not in the band. His vocals are probably the strongest part of the band, not the weakest. If his lyrics suck, then just have Mike write/edit most of them. Chester has defined and continues to define the LP sound more than any other member of the band, there's no arguing that and it's not a knock at any of the other members whatsoever, it's just reality.
If you think those piano melodies are the same, you are sadly mistaken. And you know that Mike originally sang on this song in the demo, right? Also imagine that song without the keys or the acoustic guitar, since you know, that's what Mike plays on that song. Or that Mike originally sang the melody of Leave Out All The Rest. And singlehandedly created Breaking The Habit. So wait, you're saying he hasn't made a stunning keyboard riff and you like the FM stuff? Let me direct you to Right Now, or 100 Degrees. Or the fact that aside from the strings, all instruments on The Rising Tied were played by Mike. I think your problem is you're judging Mike Shinoda as the 'keyboard player' of the group. You're not taking into account all the production he has done (he IS co-producer along with Rick Rubin, after all) or the extended roles he has in the studio and the live setting. He raps. He sings. He plays guitar. He plays keyboard. He does string arrangements. There's a reason they used to call him The Glue.
A lot of you seem to be assuming that if Chester sings it then he wrote it. That isn't true. Him and Mike work together on a lot of the lyrics and often Chester will end up singing something Mike wrote, e.g. BTH. Infact I believe Mike wrote the majority of the lyrics on MTM because Chester had writers block (which makes some peoples complaints about Mike hardly being present on MTM even more ridiculous). IP and TLTGYA were Chester, not sure what else. Like I said above, Chester wrote the lyrics to TLTGYA, and the song itself was born out of the drum pattern Rob wrote that you can hear in the breakdown. I do consider it to be the best song they've written to date. I have to disagree about lyrics, they absolutely can ruin a song. A truely great song has to have the whole package; great music, structure, lyrics, exectution. It really wouldn't matter what mood I'm in, as it is SIB is cringeworthy and that's because of the lyrics. If it had good lyrics then I'd find it listenable. I have the same problem with WID actually. Cheesey. But once again, Mike and Chester work closely together on lyrics so Mike is just as much to blame for bad lyrics as Chester. Either because he wrote them himself or because he allowed them through because couldn't come up with anything better himself. I think it's the band a whole really. If I had to guess which one of them instigated it, I'd say Mike, but they're all pushing it. Pretty much every song from the beginning of the band up to Meteora was started by Mike and Brad. That's where the core of their "old" sound came from. The writing process for MTM was much more inclusive of the other members. But yeah, I think Mike is the driving force of the band, always has been. EDIT: IMO, LPs weak spot is not any one member, but their penchant for using formulaic structures and vague "universal" lyrics. Thankfully they began addressing that on MTM
The singer is what makes or breaks a band. When you listen to a song by a band you haven't heard before, you usually judge it based on how the vocalist sounds. And Chester is a fucking master at the craft.
Well, Chester himself said Mike was driving the change yesterday on BBC1 just after the premiere of The Catalyst. But alright, instigating change and driving force or driving change doesnt make a big difference. I agree on a lot of your thoughts, you seem to know LP very well. If you see it as a curve of weaknesses of LP I see Chester beeing responsible for the biggest area under curve, mathematically spoken. So I can still agree on what you characterize as the LP weak spot. They addressed the universal lyrics problem on MTM and they broke up the formulaic structures a bit but concerning the latter it was still 'just' a little rearranging. The Catalyst sounds as if real change is coming now to them but I'm still not convinced it becomes better, not only different. What came into my mind when I listend to to interview with Chester on BBC is something something else abstracking LP. They often seem very selfsatisfied with their finished work. Neither Chester nor Mike get tired telling the public what amazing, unique and touching stuff they are producing. For instance on BBC Chester said he believed where ever you come from in the world everyone can somehow be touched emotionally by the new single. Does he really think the World has waited for LP and their mindoverwhelming new single to be unveiled? It has been so before Meteora, before MTM and also before ATS. While still recording they also like to update the public what great stuff they were doing right now. Im always interested how LP developes and like to read about what direction they take and what they want to try out but cant they please shut up self-praising? It's that lack of self-criticism that may keep them from working on their music, not beeing easily satisfied, trying as long and hard until they find something that really sounds special down to every fraction of a second and alltogether. Maybe ATS is different... Well thats just st**id.
The craft of singing, that is. And did you just censor yourself? Furthermore, did you just censor the word stupid?