In The End

I have a small iPod. 16GB, I think, which means it's actually about 12GB once all the wonders of technology have taken their toll. I totally don't have room to fit my entire music library, so I tend to keep a core selection of the good stuff on hand, and use the remaining 2-3GB to rotate through other material.

I have three playlists in iTunes that I regularly use to keep the music a-flowin'. The first is called "Ugly Children", which sorts all the tracks on my iPod by how many times they've been skipped. The next, "New", is for all of the... New music I listen to. Usually it's two albums and some other scraps that I listen to for a couple weeks while I decide if they deserve to be kept or not. My final playlist, lovingly named "Temp", is where I cycle through the neglected tracks in my whole library that I haven't heard in the longest amount of time. It lets me dig up good hits I might've passed over, and delete others that don't quite do it for me any more.

So using this concoction of logic and whimsy, I try to keep things rotating through my earbuds. As I 'fall out of love' with an artist or genre, it gets filtered out via Ugly Children, and makes a reappearance in Temp a year or two later, where I decide if I want to put the music back into my active collection, totally delete it from my library, or just send it back into the void to be revisited in a few more years. That last one is pretty much the equivalent of a "meh".

Lately Temp has been bringing me the the very first tracks that started my library, after I got a 4GB iPod Mini by working for my uncle's business over spring break while in highschool. Tracks that had an obscene amount of plays, but none of them recently as I had long since fallen out of love with them. Some Beatles and miscellaneous classic rock that I inherited from my parents, some swing/jazz from my saxophone playin' days, a dump of Ray Charles that my uncle gave me, and... Some terrible, cringe-worthy emo stuff. You know, some Evanescence and Linkin Park.

Like all troubled and emotional young men in highschool, I was 'troubled' and 'emotional' in highschool. I had my ass kicked all over town by a nasty depression which amplified the standard-issue teenage angst. I forget how I got into it... Maybe listening to the radio in the family Caravan while driving myself to doctor's appointments, or in the computer lab while hustling up my best game of lunchtime StarCraft.

Regardless, I think that Meteora by Linkin Park may have been my first album purchase, like, ever. I bought it, ripped it, and listened to it again and again and again. Then I bought Hybrid Theory, and did the same. And then because I was so desperate for more and they hadn't released any other original material, I bought Reanimation, their album of remixes. I was just so angsty and life was so tragic and Linkin Park was the only people in the world ever that could possibly articulate how I was feeling. I even bought a shirt.

Looking back, it's all so predictable and borderline embarrassing. The music itself hasn't aged well stylistically, the rapping is kinda weak, and the lyrics are so, so heavy-handed. But here's the thing; It was the very definition of cathartic. For that kid, in that situation with all the isolation and fear and frustration, it was exactly what he needed to cope with the weight of living.

Today Chester Bennington, the lead singer of Linkin Park, hung himself.

Say what you want about the rest of their early music, but that dude had some proper pipes. And you could tell he'd really given 'er on those recordings.

But even moreso, I feel kinda cheated. These dudes were the guides through my troubled years, and I figured that if anyone had figured out how to cope with some kinda darkness, it was them. Maybe this is just one more case of gazing long into an abyss and having it gaze back into you. Or maybe this is just another case of not having a clue about anything, and life being more complicated than it appears.

What am I supposed to say here? I guess... Thank you. For your art.

I haven't listened to Linkin Park for a long time, and I suspect that won't change any time soon. I'll see it in another couple years, when it makes another appearance in Temp, and be reminded of those dark days and dark feelings. And be reminded of how, for a time, this was exactly what I needed. And now maybe I'll also appreciate that everyone isn't so lucky.
-Cril

It's easier to run
Replacing this pain with something numb
It's so much easier to go
Than face all this pain here all alone

Link Park - Easier to Run