Link Park’s ‘Hybrid Theory’ Turns 20.
October 25, 2000. Linkin Park releases their debut album Hybrid Theory and, in doing so, closes the books on both rap-rock and nü-metal.
Now, that’s not to say rap-rock and nü-metal ceased to exist after October of 2000, it’s just to say both genres saw the peak of their natural evolutions with the release of Hybrid Theory: they achieved their final form. And that form was a blend of the two genres that also incorporated both the hard and soft edges of the pop aspects of rock music. It was as if Linkin Park had cracked some sort of code, creating a style of rock that would play nicely along every other style in the big rock sandbox.
The numbers bear this out: Hybrid Theory went twelve-times platinum and the singles owned tons of real estate on both alternative and mainstream rock radio. “In The End” even crossed over to Top 40. Keep in mind, this was all at the outset of the digital music era: Napster had launched a year earlier, and Apple would debut their iPod a year later. Big sales numbers like the numbers for Hybrid Theory were about to become a thing of the past for rock bands. So Linkin Park’s timing was near-perfect.
What I keep coming back to is this: the album is twenty years old. It doesn’t sound twenty years old. And 2000 doesn’t feel like 20 years ago. The videos, however? Those look 20 years old. Y2K certainly had a certain style, no?