Even after Bennington was installed, Hybrid Theory’s demos show just how far they had to travel before arriving at anything resembling synergy. The group had been active for three years before the departure in 1999 of original singer Mark Wakefield (who went on to both manage Taproot and design the cover for System of a Down’s Toxicity). Today, it’s hard to look past the buddy act of Bennington and Mike Shinoda as the skeleton key that unlocked Linkin Park’s appeal for a wider spectrum of listeners. Rather than re-re-evaluate the era in which they found fame, the 20th anniversary reissue of Hybrid Theory-featuring over 50 unreleased tracks, B-sides, remixes, live performances and rarities-encourages a closer examination of why this band went supernova. In making themselves small, they became colossal. They sang about being filled with tension, feeling betrayed by the light, wishing for a way to disappear. They knew the nu- was loaded: Their blend of rapping, screaming, and circuit-bending rendered them suspect to the double-denim dinosaurs of rock crit, so they built a street team on chatrooms and trained in on untapped admissions of despondency and failure. Nu-metal would seem the obvious category, but even though Linkin Park were saddled with the tag at the time, it was an awkward fit. Yet on lists of the best metal, hard rock, emo or straight-up rock, Hybrid Theory is often conspicuously absent, as if no axe-worshipping subtribe is willing to adopt it as their own. You’d assume being the only diamond-tinted rock album this side of the millennium might afford a smidgen of clout. With global sales of 32 million-including 12 million in the U.S., a million of which has come in the past three years- Hybrid Theory is the highest-selling debut in any genre since 1988’s Appetite for Destruction. All of this weighs heavily on 2000’s Hybrid Theory, already the most popular heavy music of the 21st century.
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