DATE | WEEKS |
August 7, 2004 | 4 |
It's not fair that I only get one post to write about the Meteora album cycle. It was a significant album for me during the last two years of high school. All these years later, it's probably my favorite Linkin Park album. The singles were all massive hits on alternative radio, and some of them crossed over to pop radio. There was no way for me to escape them, not that I wanted to.
And yet only one single from the album made it all the way to the top of my chart, and it was the last single at that. I guess that's just the breaks. Music charts, even personal ones, can sometimes be crapshoots.
Still, an album as deep and stacked as Meteora was going to assert itself on my chart one way or another. "Breaking the Habit", the only song from Meteora to reach #1, is a great song, but it's not the best one from the album, or the one that lingers in my mind 20 years later. In some ways, it was a different song for the band, and maybe that gave it the edge. But the song also resonated with me in ways I wasn't able to fully comprehend, and that I'm still reckoning with to this day.
Linkin Park's debut album Hybrid Theory was, by any measure, an enormous success. It sold over 12 million copies in the US alone and gave them a huge crossover hit with "In the End". They were nominated for Best New Artist at the 2002 Grammy Awards, losing out to Alicia Keys, someone who will also show up in this column down the road. None of their nu metal peers could lay claim to all those accolades.
Before embarking on a sophomore album, Linkin Park took a step back and came out with the remix album Reanimation in 2002, remixing the Hybrid Theory tracks and a few B-sides that didn’t make the cut. This led them to want to experiment more on the production side of their next album, along with their producer Don Gilmore.
For many bands, the pressure to produce a comparable follow-up would be devastating. Guitarist Brad Delson told MTV News at the time, “We really learned the meaning of pressure. But it wasn’t pressure from outside people. It was artistic pressure from ourselves.” Chester Bennington would add years later, “We knew what we wanted, and we knew how to execute to a certain degree. However, we were also just going for it.”
Meteora was released on March 25, 2003, with the first single “Somewhere I Belong” shipped to radio a month before. The song is typical of the experimental nature of the album. Bennington wrote the song on guitar, then Mike Shinoda and Joseph Hahn molded the hell out of it with effects and backmasking.
I remember being slightly disappointed by the song when it was out. The aggression of Bennington’s choruses is tempered by Mike Shinoda rap-singing in almost a ballad style. To me, the song felt like a soft launch, something to test the waters with audiences. I still liked it well enough for it to reach #5 on my chart. It quickly ascended to the top of the Modern Rock chart and got to #32 on the Hot 100.
“Faint” felt more in keeping with what Linkin Park were about. The song is pulsing and grabs you by the throat. The Mark Romanek-directed video, with the band performing from behind, silhouetted by blinding floodlights, captured the raucous energy of the song. It got to #2 on my chart, blocked for two weeks by Radiohead’s “There There”. It too topped the Modern Rock chart, as well as peaking at #48 on the Hot 100.
The crown jewel of the album was the third single. “Numb” is the final track on Meteora and is absolutely gorgeous. It’s the most restrained track on the album, but it’s disingenuous to call it a power ballad. The moodiness of Bennington and Shinoda’s vocals and lyrics fits in with the rest of the album. It feels like a fitting comedown from the adrenaline the rest of the album releases.
I probably don’t need to tell you it was another massive hit for Linkin Park. It was yet another #1 on the Modern Rock chart, this time for 12 weeks. It just missed becoming the band’s second top 10 hit on the Hot 100, stalling at #11. The video is amongst the most viewed music videos in Youtube's history, with well over two billion views.
By all rights, it should’ve been their second #1 on my top 40, but it had the unfortunate timing of getting released around the same time as Outkast’s juggernaut hit “Hey Ya!” Instead, it spent four non-consecutive weeks stuck behind “Hey Ya!” at #2.
Following up a song like “Numb” is not an easy feat, and maybe that’s why I didn’t really get behind “Lying from You” as the fourth single. Curiously, “Lying from You” was only released to rock radio stations in the United States and Canada; the rest of the world got “From the Inside” as the fourth single. And rather than make another big budget music video to support it, the band used footage from their Live in Texas concert film.
“Lying from You” only got as high as #22 on my top 40, and when it fell off my chart on June 12, that wound up being the only week in 2004 when there wasn’t a Linkin Park song on my top 40. All that still didn’t stop the song from becoming their fourth straight #1 on the Modern Rock chart and getting to a respectable #58 on the Hot 100.
Which brings us finally to “Breaking the Habit”. Shinoda began writing the song years before joining Linkin Park. During the sessions for Meteora, Shinoda was working on an instrumental interlude that he eventually decided to turn into a proper song under the title “Drawing”. After finishing the demo for “Drawing”, Shinoda was able to complete the lyrics for the song he had spent years trying to come up with.
Shinoda was inspired by fans who connected with Linkin Park’s music to deal with the problems in their own lives, whether that was trauma, addiction, or mental health issues. Because Bennington sings the entirety of the song, many fans assumed it was him who wrote the song. Instead, it seems like Shinoda was partly inspired by his bandmate’s issues with drug and alcohol abuse.
When Bennington first read the lyrics to “Breaking the Habit”, he was so moved he started crying and had to leave the room. Bennington later said it was one of the hardest songs for him to record due to how much he connected with the lyrics. When the band went on tour to support Meteora, “Breaking the Habit” wasn’t included in the setlist at first, presumably due to Bennington’s emotions toward the song.
“Breaking the Habit” deals with someone carrying a lot of trauma and not knowing how to handle it. “Memories consume, like opening the wound. I’m picking me apart again.” The specter of substance abuse lingers throughout the lyrics: “You all assume I’m safe here in my room, unless I try to start again”. Later, Bennington sings, “Clutching my cure, I tightly lock the door. I try to catch my breath again. I hurt much more than anytime before. I had no options left again.”
As big a fan of Linkin Park as I was at the time, I wasn’t really aware of the issues Bennington had dealt with to that point. I just knew I connected with the band’s music in a way few other artists could match. The idea of trying to “break the habit” sounds like it should be a direct reference to drug use to anyone listening. But I’ve never used hard drugs in my life, and wasn’t drinking alcohol when I was 18. Considering a lot of the shit I dealt with in my adolescent and teenage years, that feels like a fucking miracle. Not everyone who goes through that stuff gets off as easy.
For me, the habit I was trying to break may have just been my own introversion. I never seemed to be able to hold onto friends and always seemed to find myself on my own. It’s easy for someone the age I was to assume it’s their own fault, that everyone has just cause to reject or abandon them.
The years after I graduated high school were very hard for me. Around the time “Breaking the Habit” hit #1 on my chart, my father and I moved in with my eventual stepmother. It was a rough transition, especially since it meant once again moving somewhere where I didn’t really know anybody. I was grateful I had music to give me comfort. That’s always been my drug of choice, and it’s a habit I still have no intention of breaking.
Let’s talk about the music video for a minute. Directed by band member Joseph Hahn, it’s drawn in anime-style animation. The animation was led by Kazuto Nakazawa, who had recently collaborated with Quentin Tarantino on the anime segment in Kill Bill: Volume 1 that detailed O-Ren Ishii’s backstory. That film was an instant classic for me when I first saw it, and even though I’ve never been a big anime or manga fan, the style Nakazawa used in both clips is utterly arresting.
It's hard to say that there’s a plot to the video for “Breaking the Habit”. Different characters come in and out. At one point, a woman is throwing tomatoes at her boyfriend, and it’s later revealed she caught him in bed with another woman. Toward the end, a man who has fallen from a building to his death is revealed to be Bennington; he rises upward and joins the rest of the band on the roof to perform the song. I don’t think I took away any subtext from the video whenever I saw it on TV. I just connected with the loose drawing style and frenetic pace of the animation.
You’ve probably guessed by now that this was yet another #1 song on the Modern Rock chart for Linkin Park. Since the chart’s inception in 1988, no other artist has gotten five #1 singles from one album. For context, over on the Hot 100, only two albums, Michael Jackson’s Bad and Katy Perry’s Teenage Dream, have accomplished that feat. “Breaking the Habit” also managed to cross over to pop radio, and it reached #20 on the Hot 100.
Ultimately, while Meteora couldn’t reach the same heights that Hybrid Theory did, it came pretty damn close. It debuted at #1 on the Billboard album chart with 810,000 copies sold, and has gone on to sell over 8 million copies in the United States.
While the Meteora album cycle was winding down, MTV had come up with an idea for a show in which a hip-hop artist and rock band would perform mashups of their songs. The network wanted Jay-Z, who had recently released the amazing Black Album, and who will eventually appear in this column, to headline the first episode.
It turned out that Mike Shinoda had already been in correspondence with Jay-Z about collaborating on mashups of their songs, but rather than combine the original tracks, the two wanted to go into the studio to creating new recordings.
The result was the six-track EP Collision Course. Linkin Park and Jay-Z performed the entire EP at the Roxy Theatre in Los Angeles in July 2004; although MTV’s show never got off the ground, the concert still aired on the network later that year. One song from the record, “Numb/Encore” was released as a single. It combined the music and some lyrics from "Numb" with Jay-Z's verses from The Black Album track "Encore". The song bricked on both the alternative and hip-hop charts, but it still found an audience on pop radio, peaking at #20 on the Hot 100. On my chart, it climbed up to #11. (Kanye West provided background vocals on “Numb/Encore” and he too will eventually appear in this column.)
Linkin Park were arguably the biggest rock band in the world by the mid-2000s, Even though rock’s influence on the culture was diminishing during the decade, Linkin Park still moved the needle. When it came time for them to release their next album, fans weren’t going to break their habits of listening to what came out. Neither was I. We will see Linkin Park back in this column.
EXTRAS
Here’s the video for Christian metalcore band Wolves at the Gate’s cover of “Breaking the Habit” that they released last year.
THE BEST OF THE REST
Coheed and Cambria's infectious emo-core classic, "A Favor House Atlantic", peaked at #4 behind "Breaking the Habit".
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