Remembering Meteora, Linkin Park's Masterpiece
A 20th Anniversary Retrospective
It’s March 25, 2003. School had just let out and a young Dan Scott headed to straight to the Walmart nearby. You see, on this most auspicious of days a new album had dropped, and this angsty teenager was ready for it. The music video for Somewhere I Belong playing on MTV’s TRL had gotten him hyped for Linkin Park’s sophomore album weeks before it was available so as soon as it hit store shelves he wanted to get his copy.
That may sound weird to the younger generations reading this. “Why did you have to rush to Walmart to get it?” Well you see kids, back then there was no Spotify or Apple Music. Streaming services of the time were little more than digitally streamed radio broadcasts and the occasional webcast. Digital music existed, but it was usually pirated copies of ripped CDs. iTunes was around to rip and manage your music library, but the iTunes Store wouldn’t launch for another month or so, so buying digital music wasn’t really a thing at that point. Back then, a song from an upcoming album would play on the radio and on the music TV channels (MTV, VH1, BET, etc) for a little while before it was officially released so the DJs could hype it up and drive sales.
Hybrid Theory
Let’s rewind the story a few years to the year 2000. The new Millennium was quite a time to be alive musically, socially, and technologically. The Y2K scare had come and gone, and 9/11 hadn’t happened yet so looking back it was this odd little time when there didn’t seem to be a crisis hanging over everyone. For me, I was a freshman in high school. As a very overweight/obese teenage boy being whipped around by the changes of puberty whilst in the American public school system I was trying to figure out where I fit in society as well as in my own body.
I liked all types of music and would carry around my binder of 180 CDs in my backpack along with my off-brand Discman, but of all the genres out there I was particularly drawn to punk, hard rock, and metal (especially nu metal). This was also the time that rap and hip hop were really starting to take off. Sure, they’d been around for a long time at that point, but the early 2000s were when they started to gain mainstream acceptance and praise.
As a little kid I wasn’t allowed to listen to rap music, but my older sister was a big fan of it. I remember sitting in my room which was next to hers and hearing her music and thinking the beat was pretty good and liking the flow of the rap without really understanding what they were talking about. While I was listening to Green Day and Oasis, she’d be playing guys like Biggie and Pac, and Bone Thugs-n-Harmony; and in going into middle school I remember her getting into guys like DMX and Eminem.
At the time I was still more into pop and rock, but my taste was changing. It was around this time (‘98/’99) that the music scene started popping out new artists like Kid Rock and Limp Bizkit trying to bring the rock and rap genres together to varying degrees of success. Sure, the Beastie Boys had pulled it off in their own way, but these guys were going for a much more metal/hard rock approach to the rap/rock genre. I liked a couple of their songs, but overall wasn’t a fan of either of them.
One morning at school, while my friends and I sat around playing Yu-Gi-Oh! my friend Jamison brought up this new band he’d found called Linkin Park. I’m still not sure how I’d missed hearing In the End playing on the radio or MTV, but somehow I did. He let me borrow his copy of Hybrid Theory — LP’s first album — and it blew my mind. There was finally a band that blended rap and rock, and did it well. It was different than Kid Rock and Limp Bizkit. It was hard and drove my emotions with lyrics that evoked feelings of rage, hope, and lament. I know that probably sounds strange, but it was really good and over the next couple of years I found myself finding catharsis in songs like Crawling, Papercut, One Step Closer, and Points of Authority.
Upping the Game
So back to 2003. I remember opening the CD and sliding the disc into my car’s CD player. At first, I wasn’t sure if I was going to like it. I had liked Hybrid Theory so much that I basically just wanted more of that and while Meteora was still Linkin Park being Linkin Park, it had a distinctly different feel to it than Hybrid Theory. Mike still rapped, Chester still screamed, the band still rocked, but there was a much more cinematic vibe to it.
As a Toonami kid I picked up on the Japanese influences with songs like Nobody’s Listening and the music video for Breaking the Habit. The video for Somewhere I Belong even had Gundam models which was very cool and uncommon in the mainstream back then.
Instrumental tracks like Forward and Session added to the ambience of the album. Songs like Lying from You and Hit the Floor brought back that Hybrid Theory sound, while Faint brought in a new level of speed and intensity that their first album lacked. Meteora also gave us a chance to really hear Chester Bennington’s vocal range with Numb and From the Inside (probably my favorite song on the album).
Collision Course
The next year a curious thing happened. MTV sponsored an EP — which was produced by Mike Shinoda — to take the rap/rock thing and expand on it. It was a mash up album taking several hits from Linkin Park and putting them together with Jay-Z.
The album sold fairly well and was well received by the fans, though critics and journalists seemed to be less impressed. Overall it was well put together and I made a point to pick it up when it dropped. In fact, I was a little too eager to pick it up and got a speeding ticket on the way to Best Buy! It was a cool project that eventually led to Mike working with Jay on his Fort Minor side project, though lyrically it’s not really family friendly so just keep that in mind if you’re interested in checking it out.
Legacy
I’m not going to speak about the album’s impact on the music industry or anything like that. For me, though it was a powerful album. The lyrics and the emotion in Chester’s vocals — just like with Hybrid Theory — really resonated with a lot of what I was going through at that time. To this day it’s still my favorite Linkin Park album, and it’s one of my favorite albums in general!
With today being the 20th anniversary of the release I’d encourage you to give it a listen if you haven’t already. The entire album only runs about 35 minutes or so and it’s really good. They’re even releasing a 20th Anniversary Edition with a ton of extra tracks and content which I may pick up at some point. And if you decide you want to get a physical copy, consider using the affiliate links below.
To me, music is one of those things that goes through life with me. So often particular songs or albums are tied to certain dates and events, and Meteora is one of those albums. I picked it up shortly before my conversion to Christianity and continued listening to it afterward, so many of the songs which had meaning to me in one sense gained new meaning after that. It’s just a little hard to believe it’s been 20 years already!