Our outlook is, 'There's always tomorrow and everything can be better.' | | | | Plaid theory: Linkin Park's Chester Bennington in Anahem, Calif., Nov. 10, 2001.
(Christina Radish/Redferns/Getty Images) | | | | |  | “Our outlook is, 'There's always tomorrow and everything can be better.'”
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| | rantnrave:// "A rap-rock outfit with a jones for DEPECHE MODE? Is this a glitch in the matrix?" That's how ROLLING STONE greeted LINKIN PARK's debut album 17 years ago. What RS missed, what anyone could have missed, is that Linkin Park was entirely *about* glitches in the matrix. Screaming metallic vocals as legit pop hooks. Soaring anthems made of angst and anguish. (I can't begin to tell you how many times I saw the word "angst" in headlines on Thursday.) Songs about numbness that left you feeling everything. JAY-Z mashups executed with religious sincerity. Telling its own fans to f*** off if they weren't feeling what the band was feeling in 2017. By which time the band was beginning to sound like an actual glitch in this actual MATRIX. And through it all there was the forever loud, forever catchy and forever anguished voice of CHESTER BENNINGTON, telling us he was "waiting for the end to come," that he'd "become so numb I can't feel you there" and then, Thursday morning, in a video the band released on his close friend CHRIS CORNELL's birthday, something about "mistakes" that "might cost you everything." Bennington's closeness to Cornell has been well chronicled, and on the day Cornell committed suicide two months ago, he poured out his emotions in a heartbreaking note on TWITTER. He, too fought addiction, openly and seemingly honestly. Talked about it, sang about it, reached deep into millions and millions of hearts with it. I've written too many times in the past couple of years that it's impossible for most of us to know why someone would take their own life, no matter how much we think we know about that life. It's impossible to explain unexplainable angst, unexplainable anguish, unexplainable pain. Except, of course, Chester Bennington did explain it, over and over again, through one of the great 21st century rock careers. That's what we know. That's all we can know. Besides the fact that he took his life on Chris Cornell's birthday, a sunny LOS ANGELES day, and it's way too dark out here. MusicSET: "Chester Bennington's Screaming Life"... P.S. I don't care what everybody says, he was a fully credible temporary replacement for SCOTT WEILAND in STONE TEMPLE PILOTS... It's FRIDAY and that means new music from TYLER THE CREATOR, LANA DE REY, NINE INCH NAILS, DAPHNI's FABRICLIVE mix, ROMEO SANTOS, STANTON MOORE, DIZZEE RASCAL, NICOLE ATKINS, NAV & METRO BOOMIN, MEEK MILL, CHILDHOOD, SARA EVANS, LE'ANDRIA JOHNSON, IN THIS MOMENT, STEVE AOKI, FOSTER THE PEOPLE, BILLY OCEAN, AVEY TARE, CORNELIUS, DED, DECLAN MCKENNA, DAMIAN MARLEY and CHRIS ROBINSON BROTHERHOOD... The FYF FEST in LA, featuring BJÖRK, MISSY ELLIOTT, FRANK OCEAN, NINE INCH NAILS and more, is streaming on Twitter all weekend starting at 6 pm PT today. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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 | REDEF |
| The late Linkin Park frontman was a shrieking metal singer with a golden pop touch. A voice of angst and anguish who brought comfort and connection to his fans. His contradictions helped make him one of the defining voices of 2000s rock. | | |
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 | America Magazine |
| Is it possible to seek total global pop domination and to remain somehow soulful, sane and socially righteous? | | |
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 | Music Business Worldwide |
| We just bought 10,000 Spotify plays on the internet. It was easy. | | |
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 | Huck Magazine |
| From Bowie to Gaga, Daft Punk to Snoop, Mick Rock has shot them all and lived to tell the tale - just about. | | |
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 | The Root |
| With the release of "4:44," Jay-Z seems to have single-handedly grown rap up. Despite the fact that hip-hop is damn near 40 years old, Jigga's newest release has many arguing that hip-hop has finally reached its nonironic-dad-hat phase. | | |
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 | Complex |
| No other category of music could better understand the freedom found in a persona like rap music, and Lana Del Rey's music is all about pose and persona. | | |
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 | Revisionist History |
| Malcolm Gladwell goes to Nashville to talk with Bobby Braddock, who has written more sad songs than almost anyone else. What is it about music that makes us cry? And what sets country music apart? | | |
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 | BuzzFeed |
| After BuzzFeed News reported that parents told police Kelly has been holding several women against their will, we reached out to some of his former collaborators. | | |
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 | Stereogum |
| For the last few years American pop has been sounding increasingly African. As early as 2014, when The Fader broke down "pop music's Nigerian future," the continent's influence has been evident here. Back then, EDM was reaching a point of maximum aggression (think "Turn Down For What") and rap, pop, and R&B were deep in their DJ Mustard phase, marked by minimal, straightforward pops and snaps. | | |
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 | NPR Music |
| The KLF - Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty - were, and remain, unparalleled masters of both music and manipulation. The Austrians they inspired, however, are... a different story. | | |
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| Huck Magazine |
| Liberation Day is a documentary accompanying the surreal week leading up to the performance of Slovenian art-rock band Laibach in Pyongyang. | | |
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 | The Ringer |
| The man behind the bombastic scores of Christopher Nolan’s biggest movies changed how Hollywood sounded; now, it sounds like only him. | | |
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| The Ringer |
| Silicon Valley’s favorite iconoclast is getting his own, appropriately high-tech musical | | |
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 | British Ideas Corporation |
| Staff writer Alan Gregson catalogues his favourite selection of long tracks, a list guaranteed to test even the most durable of stylus needles. | | |
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 | The New Yorker |
| To attend a Phish show is to be subsumed by a community and to carry that experience forth, indefinitely. | | |
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 | Village Voice |
| SoundCloud, has yet to be usurped as a creator’s platform and crucial incubator for all manner of pop, particularly EDM and hip-hop — except, perhaps, by its own doing. | | |
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 | Passion of the Weiss |
| Harold Bingo takes a look at the phenomenon that is Cardi B. | | |
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 | Variety |
| The band played their longest show in over a decade, clocking in at two hours and 26 minutes. “It felt like a cosmic night,” says Naranjah’s Eran Arielli. | | |
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 | Los Angeles Times |
| Ahead of this weekend's FYF Fest -- which will feature performances by Missy Elliott and A Tribe Called Quest -- Mikael Wood considers the viability of hip-hop as a forum for middle-aged concerns. | | |
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 | Beats 1 Radio |
| The band talks about their album ‘Joshua Tree’ on it’s 30th anniversary. | | |
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| | | | | Chris Cornell and Chester Bennington |
| | Not the greatest performance of this song, but a beautiful, bittersweet and heartbreaking moment. #2017 #RIP |
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| © Copyright 2017, The REDEF Group |
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