Chester B: A case study in Hybrid Theory of Music

I have a strong recollection of the very first time I laid my hands on a Linkin Park audiotape (a word I haven’t used in almost a decade). I was pursuing a course in programming in Ernakulam, in 2000, and had wandered into a store called Music World, in Pallimukku on a rainy afternoon. The store used to be a popular haunt for music buffs like myself, who’d mostly wander in to sample a few songs from a counter equipped with a CD player and high quality headphones. CDs as far as I was concerned, were still a luxury. I was a student, and I was compelled to think in terms of quantity as opposed to quality. This is a far cry from today, when I have made it a point to download songs and pay for them off iTunes, specifically for the quality of lossless reproduction that the AAC format offers, and of course, retaining some level of righteousness on my moral compass.

I was drawn to a pop-artistically rendered album cover, on the shelves of the store that day. It reminded me of the public service advertisements run by the Russian government in the USSR in its pre-Perestroika and Glasnost eras. The worker, as always would rise to the top, painted in hues of burnt sienna, pummelled by the weight of the world, his spirit nevertheless resilient. What also drew me to the imagery was the typography of the band’s name. The alphabet ‘N’ in Linkin Park is written as И, a faux Cyrillic usage of the Russian alphabet. The industrial rock band Nine Inch Nails also used this typography in its anagram NIN, a fact that I would discover much later.

As Linkin Park’s hottest single of the year, In the End, was getting ample airplay on TV, it seemed imperative at that point in time to buy that tape. I loved the album through and through and it had become one of my staples, with its themes of teenage disenfranchisement, love, loss and regrets. The hip-hop infused hard-rock songs were catchy, guitar-heavy and surprisingly sanitised – at a time when Nu-metal misfits like Limp Bizkit and Korn were tearing down the roof with their potty-mouthed angst about everything under the sun.

But as people tend to grow up, I had to move on to other genres of music, having discovered the thrill of original soundtracks and weighty compositions scored specifically for films. Interestingly, at a time, when I had almost forgotten about the band, they made a phenomenal return with an album called Meteora, that arguably features its most famous song to date – Numb.

Trivia-wise, Numb, or at least a radio-edit version of the song featured a collaboration with the hip hop artiste Jay-Z (famous for being Beyonce’s spouse now). What inscribed that song into my subconscious was the fact that Numb was the song that featured in the theatrical trailer of Michael Mann’s cinematic adaptation of his hit 80s crime drama Miami Vice. With Chester’s voice goading us on, the trailer held the promise of an exciting time at the movies. The new film, an experiment in high definition digital cinema heralded a sign of things to come in Hollywood. Numb, in more ways than one cemented my memory of how that change would transpire. And I have Chester to thank for it.