Linkin Park

Meteora

"I'm breaking this CD - Tonight!"

Review Score:

(2/10)
Linkin Park has always been simple cookie-cutter bacon butt garbage. It seems like these manufactures whipped up another batch and now we are forced to jam every friggin song down our throats when we here this crud on the radi-Ho. I can not tell you the furious, unembroildled anger that builds up inside every damn time the local radio station blasts good songs from Alice, Rob Zombie, Perfect Circle, only to round out the night with "Breaking the Habit" or "This is where I BEEEEEEELONG". Shouldn't we be moving forward? Haven't we had enough of this "poor me" music already? If you thought nu metal was getting sidetracked from good old fashion rock and difficult rythms, just turn on Kroq now; you'll hear grown adults screamin' like 12 year olds wailing to godawful music and cheesy lyrics about "growing up".
Enough of my complaining. Why I picked this CD for my equally childish rants that no one really wants to hear? Plain and simple: It makes rock and rap look bad. It takes the worst from each world and rolls it up into one trash-heaped lump. First of all, the lyrics. These guys don't have brains like Rage Against the Machine, they don't have deep and thoughtful mind-expanding lyrics like Nirvana, and for the sake of argument with the crowd that enjoys Linkin Park......they don't even have a touch of originality like Korn did. Song structure is basic: Verse 1, chorus, Verse 2, chorus, bridge, chorus. The ryhmes are shot: The rapping in this version is more like "candy wraping" or "wraparound style":
"Nothing ever stops all these thoughts and the pain attached to them
Sometimes I wonder why this is happenin'
It's like nothing I can do would distract me when
I think of how I shot myself in the back again"
This is NOT rap, each word simply ends in a ryhming word, and Mike doesn't even try to speed up the gauntlet a little. But I'll take the white rapper any day in comparison to the band's take on heavy metal: Chester. He shows us that just anyone can be a frontman, whether you sound like a screaming gay guy, or a helium filled balloon. Sure Janes Addiction's frontman had some high vocals, but it was met with enthusiasm because the music playing and lyrics were mature. This guy sounds like a coyote, in a bad need of an exorcism. And then of course, the music: Here we have dumbed-down simple "play along with us,kid" riffs. It's a real step down from difficult compositions that Tool or Rage create. And what about the crowd that listens to Linkin Park: 18 and under in most cases. Even the frontman of Linkin Park has expressed in many reviews his pride for not having any use of "explicit language" in his cd's. He wants to make dark, but holsom music for his fans, and he feels that cursing is just childish mumbo jumbo. He has a point, but this is just sales hype. This guy drops the F-word as often as their songs cycle the Radi-Ho.
This review is not really a shot against anyone, it's a shot against the genre that is being molded from fans of Linkin. It ponders the question that if we keep on making music like this, Are we most likely going to be entering an endless age of mind-numbingly non-complex music and cry baby wailing? I certainly hope not, but it looks like the jury's out. So please break the habit people, before its to late: Once those 13 year-old girls grew up, Backstreet Boys was history and the world was a better place; Linkin Park certainly won't be any different -So break your cd's tonight.

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