Steven Hyden once wrote something he called the “Winner’s History of Rock,” arguing that rock history tends to be written by (and for) the losers; critics lionize the outsiders, the marginalized, the rebels and outcasts, and they neglect rock’s “winners,” the commercial juggernauts beloved by the masses. One of the “winners” he profiled, alongside such luminaries as KISS and Bon Jovi, was Linkin Park, which didn’t feel right to me – if any band is the “winner” of that era, it’s Nickelback. Not Linkin Park, who screamed of angst and pain, whose scene evaporated quickly, whose tortured lead singer ended up another rock tragedy. Surely, that’s an outsider band, like Nirvana, like Black Sabbath, like The Cure, bands who did sell tons of records but were clearly a different breed than Pump-era Aerosmith or Load-era Metallica.
I could try and make that case if I wanted to, but it would wither in the face of Hyden’s profile, which depicts Linkin Park as a group of polished studio craftsmen making slick corporate rock with an almost Mike Love-ian focus on moving units. They didn’t even party on tour, Hyden notes with palpable disdain; they were pure professionals, there on stage to do a job. And indeed, a close listen to Linkin Park in any of their eras reveals a very well-oiled machine; for all their drama and fury, their trademark slick mix of rap, rock and electronica mostly reminds me of cross-genre streaming giants like Imagine Dragons or Post Malone. (And though their 2010s weren’t exactly successful, Linkin Park's move into a new decade required far less adjustment to their sound than it did, say, Nickelback’s.)
All of this makes their 2007 song “Bleed It Out” a giant anomaly in their catalog, and especially among their singles. Linkin Park had already announced a shocking move for their third album Minutes to Midnight: It would have almost no rapping. The rap-metal era was dead, and Linkin Park had no intentions of being left behind with Limp Bizkit or Papa Roach. The first single, “What I’ve Done,” was still recognizably Linkin Park but Mike Shinoda was more or less absent from it (and as further proof of their “winner” status, it appeared prominently in “Transformers,” for better or worse the summer blockbuster of 2007).
But “Bleed It Out,” the second single, was something different. It shouldn’t have been that different; if anything, the fact that it still had Shinoda rapping meant that it was the most stereotypically Linkin Park song on the album. But the very first sound isn’t the band, it’s the most startling sound ever heard on a Linkin Park record: party crowd chatter. The year before this song came out, the James Bond series rebooted with Casino Royale; in the first action scene, there’s a minor shot of debris hitting the ground as James Bond crashes through a construction site. That one throwaway shot was a dramatic announcement of a new world for Bond, one where actions had consequences; the background chatter served the same function for Linkin Park. That noise promised a different Linkin Park, one not created by ProTools; this was Linkin Park live, Linkin Park as a real honest-to-god organic band, with energy, with spontaneity, with reality, the garage punk version of Linkin Park rather than the studio creation.
This is essentially a con, a trick – as artificial as the electronica stutters on their first records. Bands and artists have been adding canned party noise to sound spontaneous since at least the 1960s and probably earlier. It calls attention to itself, like a lens flare in a CGI cut scene; it’s a band that has reached past perfection and aspires to imperfection. The music video, incidentally, is terrible in the way it undercuts those aspirations. It almost gets it right by having the band rocking out in an unbroken one-shot, but then it ruins it by also having a fight breaking out in reverse while the band plays forwards. It’s a showy display of technical mastery completely at odds with what the song is trying to accomplish.
None of this means the song doesn’t work; it very works. The idea of Linkin Park attempting to stage spontaneity is as interesting as them achieving it for real. And while the song’s engineering is as pristine as a Boston album, the notes themselves are simple. The bass line is beyond simple, the drums a hit-them-then-hit-them-again rhythm, the riffs easy to imagine playing yourself. It’s easy to tell why this song was the one they tried to make sound organic; I am shocked to discover it’s not their shortest song, it feels as punchy as Blur’s “Song 2.” Shinoda’s rap at times seems more fit for his side band Fort Minor (of “Remember the Name” fame) than the eternally angst-ridden Linkin Park. Hand-grenade pins in every line; make it a dirt dance floor again; cock it back and then watch it go. There’s still the requisite self-loathing and pain; Chester screams about scars and self-harm and Mike raps about hanging nooses and about how no one cares, but that’s not the feeling I get from this song. “Bleed It Out” is, above all, Linkin Park’s truest headbanger anthem; “One Step Closer” and “In the End” will reliably get a party lit to this day, but no Linkin Park song has ever been as honest-to-god fun to listen to as “Bleed It Out.”
The fact that I chafed at Linkin Park’s “winner” label means I’ve forgotten how much disdain I held Linkin Park with as a teenager. In 2001, labeling them a sellout corporate creation would have been the obvious call. Their broad and obvious lyrics about “crawling in my skin” and being “one step closer to the edge” were, to me, thuddingly lame generalities clearly designed for a dumb mainstream audience; why, they didn’t even curse. I grudgingly accepted “In the End” as a good song and by the second album I had given in completely – it was too fun to scream DON’T TURN YOUR BACK ON ME, I WON’T BE IGNORED, a good indicator of why they were still around in ’07 after their peers fell by the wayside. Hyden wrote his Winner’s History of Rock before Chester Bennington’s suicide, which would maybe have altered his opinion on whether they were “winners” or not; it would certainly forever change the tenor of those singles to me, into something darker and more genuine than I took them for at the time. “Bleed It Out,” though, I don’t know where that makes them fall on the winner/loser binary. Does making a spontaneous party song make them more real, or is it the closest they ever got to being Motley Crue?
