2 on the Hot 100 in 2002 - as the fourth single off Hybrid Theory, incredibly.ДЄnd they were able to take a fundamentally top 40-unfriendly genre one spot from Hot 100 immortality for a simple reason: 'In the End' was one of the best pop songs of the 21st century. You know that Limp Bizkit never even had a Hot 100 top 40 hit? That Korn only had one, and if you can name it in fewer than eight guesses you probably work for Billboard? Well, Linkin Park took 'In the End' all the way to No. Subtlety would never be his strong suit, but his voice was more malleable than he was often given credit for: Had he come up a decade earlier, he could've growled with James Hetfield and Dave Mustaine had he come up a half-decade later, he could've out-emoted Chris Carrabba and Patrick Stump standing on his head. He was the band's not-so-secret weapon, capable of unleashing holy hell at a measure's notice, making their songs captivating even when they otherwise sounded like they were just spinning their Xbox controllers.Д«ut it wasn't always about brute force with Bennington: His yawp had a piercing clarity to it, too, which helped facilitate Linkin Park's eventual evolution away from the nu-metal moment that birthed them into more straightforward stadium rock, and in recent days, to something more resembling alt-pop.

But that's not to say that he was inessential, or indeed that he was anything less than epochal: His shredded-throat shrieking was the whiny, guttural, unignorable voice of a musical generation, as inextricable to the sound of '00s rock as, well, Chris Cornell's voice was to the '90s. As I wrote when discussing Hybrid Theory in a ranked list of Diamond-selling albums - and yeah, don't forget just how huge that album was, arguably bigger than any other rock album this century - 'For all the skeptics who view Linkin Park as a bunch of whiny, repetitive, dull, uncreative mooks: No, youвЂ™re thinking of every other popular band from that time.'Д¬hester Bennignton, who was found dead Thursday (July 20) at age 41 of an apparent suicide, didn't dominate Linkin Park the way most frontmen of his time did - at their best, the band's nervous system was directed in equal parts by Bennington's paint-scraping primal scream, Mike Shinoda's keep-calm-and-carry-on rhyming and Joe Hahn's lucid-nightmare samples and soundscapes. Dismissing them along with the thudding misogyny that marked nu-metal deep into the '00s is no fairer than writing off Nirvana with the middling bands of '90s post-grunge. Their best music was electric, boundary-pushing and undeniably vital. Sure, they had the misfortune of their commercial and artistic apex coming at a peak for mainstream rock music at its most blunt and least imaginative, and the double misfortune of being directly influential on a lot of the bands responsible for making it so.Д«ut that was never Linkin Park themselves. The band was too big, too influential, too talented, too smart, too innovative. It would have happened - absolutely would've, eventually.

It's not the saddest part of today, but it's still absolutely heartbreaking that Chester Bennington didn't live to see rock's history writers come around on Linkin Park.

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