"At the time of you asked somebody what they were listening to they’d say, ‘Rock. I listen to hip hop. I listen to jazz’. It wasn’t until five years later they’d say, ‘Everything.'"
Mike Shinoda is considering the legacy of Linkin Park’s debut album, Hybrid Theory. “It did some of that work,” says the band’s rapper and songwriter proudly of that squillions-selling juggernaut. “It was part of the progression towards breaking down boundaries between styles of music.”
These days, genre-hopping is standard practice for the average band. But when Linkin Park dropped the album on 24 October 2000, their sound was genuinely fresh and innovative, blending neck-snapping metal, sharp rap, electronics and bouncing pop choruses into an unabashed commercial proposition that captured both the zeitgeist and the future.
