After the shocking news of Chester Bennington's

[00:00.26] After the shocking news of Chester Bennington's suicide broke on

[00:03.53] Thursday afternoon, many of the tributes from fellow artists and fans

[00:07.01] had one thing in common.At the dawn of the new millennium, Linkin Park

[00:12.03] was part of a new youth revolution, and Bennington's voice was its

[00:15.77] blaring trumpet.Both his delivery and lyrics melded earnest

[00:19.53] vulnerability with unhinged anger.For the young people who stumbled

[00:24.52] upon Bennington's fits of sadness and rage when Linkin Park first

[00:27.27] broke, he embodied their repressed pain that could not be expressed or

[00:31.26] released or even understood.Once they dug deeper beyond the anger, they

[00:36.52] found passionate expressions of desperation, hopelessness and fear.

[00:40.03] He spent his career being honest and upfront about his struggles with

[00:44.51] depression, addiction and trauma, specifically from being sexually

[00:48.77] abused as a child.Though Hybrid Theory was released in 2000, it broke

[00:54.28] in 2001 and became the biggest album of that year.

[00:57.51] The late Nineties found angst heroes in rising stars like Eminem and

[01:02.26] Limp Bizkit and veterans like Nine Inch Nails, but the national taste

[01:06.28] was being dominated by a Disney-fied bubblegum pop movement, led by boy

[01:10.52] bands and budding divas in their late teens.

[01:13.03] For Linkin Park to break through and outsell more family-friendly acts

[01:17.02] like 'N Sync and Britney Spears meant that the market needed a

[01:20.52] mainstream icon that also reflected increasingly blurred lines of genre

[01:24.52] with a rock edge.As nu-metal blazed on, they re-wrote its possibility.

[01:29.02] The genre's Limp Bizkit-fueled machismo became less potent with how

[01:34.01] nimbly Bennington's voice would play off of Mike Shinoda's subtle yet

[01:37.01] effective rapping.They embraced electronic music in a way that

[01:41.03] complemented their musicianship rather than overpowered it.

[01:44.52] All the while, it was the vulnerability between the screams, heavy

[01:48.53] riffs and icy tones that set Linkin Park a step ahead. Even as he got

[01:53.76] older and more successful, Bennington served as a primary example of

[01:58.03] how mental illness is a daily, lifelong struggle and unpacked his pain

[02:02.26] in more complex, mature ways up through his final album with Linkin

[02:06.77] Park, this year's One More Light.

[02:09.03] He offered catharsis to those who wished they could scream like him,

[02:12.94] the same type of catharsis he felt listening to bands like Stone Temple

[02:16.94] Pilots and Soundgarden as a teenager.

[02:19.18] Bennington would go on to front STP after Scott Weiland was fired in

[02:23.68] 2013, the fulfillment of a lifelong dream.

[02:27.43] In the same way Bennington's fans lost their own light that had

[02:31.94] inspired them during their youth, Bennington witnessed the tragically

[02:35.44] young deaths of Weiland and Cornell, the latter of whom had been a

[02:38.95] close friend of his for years and whose birthday would have been on the

[02:42.19] same day Bennington took his own life.