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A celebrity death throws us off our axis, especially when it involves suicide. In the case of Chester Bennington, it is further compounded by the shame some fans feel for liking something considered "embarrassing".
After seeing the Linkin Park lead singer's suicide make headlines, I saw friends and acquaintances rushing to justify why the death was so painful to them and why Linkin Park's music was meaningful. It was heart-wrenching, partly because I believe that we shouldn't have to justify anything to receive support and affirmation.
Maybe you share memories just like these: of hearing In the End by Linkin Park on the radio around the turn of the century and becoming immediately fascinated. Later, you might have watched the Matrix-esque video with morbid curiosity as it played on Rage one Sunday morning. And then, when their second album Meteora was released, downloading a bunch of their songs, installing them on your brother's MP3 player to listen to on the walk home from school, immersed in your own head.
If that strikes a chord, then congratulations — this memory was shared by most millennials. Linkin Park's music became a testing ground for all our newly formed neurosis and disappointments. That's why the news of Bennington's suicide feels so hard to grapple with, so curiously irreconcilable.
Trailblazers in their genre
Long before My Chemical Romance's Gerard Way, Fall Out Boy's Pete Wentz and Paramore's Hayley Williams became the poster children for misspent sadness, Linkin Park vied for that title. They somehow managed to appeal equally to young hip-hop, metal and electronica fans, a feat that none of their contemporaries accomplished in the same way. Instead of pop-punk, their "pre-emo" was funnelled through a mixture of nu-metal and rap instead, a style which remains largely disdained.
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But Linkin Park were the vehicle for self-discovery for young people who finally understood what it meant to be freely, egregiously "emotional".
They helped us to realise that what we were experiencing wasn't occurring in a bubble.
Maybe looking back, we might see those youthful responses as laughable or exaggerated. But that hardly means those feelings weren't real.
"Lowbrow" art has its place just like every other kind of art. Instead of viewing Linkin Park in that hierarchy, perhaps it would help to instead see them as serving different purposes and matching different emotional needs at varied times in our life, all of which are valuable and deserve recognition.
I'm grateful to have been touched by some very fleeting, seemingly banal moments in musical history, and to not have to quantify that under false metrics.
Linkin Park were under appreciated from the mainstream in recent years and most people wouldn't have been caught dead admitting that they still listened to them.
But the band's music — and Bennington's lyricism, which had became more sophisticated over time — remains a cornerstone in the personal development of so many young people.
We don't understand grief
How can we sincerely express our grief when mourning is already such a shamefully loaded process, one that we have hardly adapted to in western culture?
The suicides of musicians such as Chris Cornell and Chester Bennington — or Kurt Cobain, Elliot Smith or Ian Curtis for earlier generations — remind us that depression and in the case of Chester, PTSD, do not discriminate. "Speaking out" about these illnesses needs to happen, but our avenues of care for mentally ill people are inadequate in so many places around the world.
Some of these deaths have been recognised by wider culture as more serious or "important", but the contributions of all these people have their place. These were real people with friends and families, too — it's vital to remember that.
It still shocks me to see people writing off other people's grief in the wake of a celebrity death, stuck in their own musical elitism.
But some of the same people suddenly drop their standards to grieve the death of male musicians who have been abusive. Maybe that's a different conversation.
I hope we will learn how to process grief more expertly as the years go on, and as we feel more connected to different lives via social media.
We should learn to practice empathy, to understand each other's personal involvement in the grave matter of suicide and to be reflexive. It's time to react with warmth and understanding to the other people's pain, instead of distance and derision.
Jonno Revanche is a freelance writer.
Topics: suicide, rock, united-states
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