Chester and the cost of creativity

Editor’s note: Chester Bennington, the lead vocalist of era-defining rockers Linkin Park, would have turned 50 on March 20. His searching words of despair have moved millions of fans, both in India and across the world. In our lead essay this week, Devarsi Ghosh examines, with love and admiration, Bennington’s craft and his need to be heard. In the process, he reckons with the nature of creativity itself, and the ways in which art—and the desire to express—can consume you. 

Written by: Devarsi Ghosh 

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Chester Bennington Lives

“I bleed it out digging deeper just to throw it away,” Chester Bennington screamed in ‘Bleed It Out’, the fourth track from Linkin Park’s third album Minutes to Midnight. That line about sums up not just Bennington’s art and artifice, but that of any creative person.

‘Bleed It Out’, Linkin Park

Creativity is an imaginative response to pain. This pain, or heartbreak, could be about childhood, abuse, trauma, romance, ambition. Through the process of building up a frenzy systematically before releasing art out to the world, all pains become one. There is no single cause-effect flowchart to understanding creativity, but perhaps, this essay can help.

Chester, who would have turned 50 on March 20, had an extremely fruitful career before he died from hanging himself at his home in California, in 2017. The prolific songwriter left behind no note.

Heartbreak is an emotional and epistemic shock that brute-forces you to acknowledge mortality, and that’s how I returned to my childhood favourite, Linkin Park. Growing up in Kolkata, Linkin Park was among the bands that broke big right at the cusp of the millennium and made its way to us via a burgeoning network of private FM channels, internet-streaming, and peer-to-peer file sharing networks like Torrents, from where we would download entire discographies: including the EPs and B-sides and the remixes. Linkin Park had tons of them. 

‘P5hng Me A*wy’, Linkin Park (Reanimation)

The electronic-hard-rock-hip-hop mashup arrived at the exact right moment in my young adulthood when the world was just opening up to me. LP worked as a gateway to the world. I know friends who got into harder rock through Linkin Park. Some moved into hip-hop. I discovered electronic music through Linkin Park.

Looking back, I was always more curious about the blank spaces between each beat, the silences between words, and the echoes of reverberating electric guitars, more than the words, beats and riffs themselves. I was trying to understand the hidden network behind everything around me, as one does while growing up.

So what hid behind Chester’s angst-bitten lyrics about loneliness, isolation, betrayal, heartbreak, rage, and a relentless eagerness to shout at the world that you was, are, and will be? Many an LP song has Chester writing about wanting to be heard accurately.

In One Step Closer, Bennington growls, “Shut up, when I am talking to you!”. In Faint, he goes, 

You're gonna listen to me, like it or not

Right now, hear me out now

….(I can't feel the way I did before)

Don't turn your back on me, I won't be ignored

I am a journalist by profession, a spec screenwriter by vocation, and an amateur poet by some madness that seized me following an unfortunate but inevitable turn of events in October last year. Heartbreak forces you to return to your past, do the accounts, reconcile with it, and rebuild bridges, so this life doesn’t go to waste.

‘Faint’, Linkin Park

The Nature of Poetry

As I began to write poetry again, and I have in the past usually in the buildup to or a comedown from a relationship, I started to pay more attention to the world. You cannot create without seeing and listening closely. Poetry also forces you to look really inward. And as you go inward, you find your past, from where I brought Chester back to life.

I slowly began to understand that creativity is not just skill and technique. Having studied in an ace J-school followed by working in one of India’s most prestigious English-language newsrooms, I became a hound for skill and technique. I carried that over to screenwriting, where I approached the craft mathematically, like a puzzle to be solved. When emotions cannot save you close to the day of delivery, you will always have skill to fall back on.

But to be truly creative, you need to be honest with yourself—you need to really confront yourself. Chester did it like his life depended on it.

A thin, spiry man, shifting between spiked hair, mohawk, and a buzzcut, it was his spectacled, constantly emotive face that spoke volumes. A real contrast to the long-haired, ultramacho idea of the rockstar. And his voice could simultaneously break your heart and be completely demonic; exhibit A and B below, respectively.

‘Let Down’, Dead by Sunrise—Chester Bennington’s sidegroup

‘Given Up’, Linkin Park

How could you not love Chester in one of his earliest appearances, in the excellently conceived music video for Papercut in 2000? It only takes a papercut on your skin for all the hurt in the world to enter and metastasise. The video shows the band jamming in a suburban drawing room, but behind the walls, something dark and fierce rages.

‘Papercut’, Linkin Park

That hidden room is the wellspring of creativity. Chester’s first marriage ended in a divorce in 2005, right at the peak of Linkin Park’s early run. He constantly dealt with depression, substance abuse, and illnesses—and relapsed. These are, in my experience, an add-on to a life handled rashly, usually in the pursuit of creative satisfaction.

Two of my most favourite Linkin Park songs, ‘With You’, and ‘Pushing Me Away’, are terrific songs about damaged relationships. The former has hope lingering: “The sound of your voice, painted on my memories / Even if you're not with me, I'm with you.”

The latter is brutal from the onset: “I've lied to you, the same way that I always do / This is the last smile that I'll fake for the sake of being with you” before he asks himself in the chorus, a question you and I understand really well: “Why I never walked away?”

To walk away requires a purpose, and walking away needs a thorough explanation. Let’s take two of my favourite singer-songwriters, Nick Cave and PJ Harvey.

‘Henry Lee’, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds feat. PJ Harvey

They dated for a short period in the mid-’90s, during which they collaborated on a few songs, chief among them being Henry Lee. Legend goes: Polly Jean broke up with Nick over the phone. Nick in a conversation with a fan on his website The Red Hand Files, wrote that drugs, and his lack of understanding of monogamy, could have contributed to the breakup. “I think at the end of the day it came down to the fact that we were both fiercely creative people, each too self-absorbed to ever be able to inhabit the same space in any truly meaningful way,” Nick wrote, “We were like two lost matching suitcases, on a carousel going nowhere.”

But here’s the point of the story. Nick wrote that as he was “never one to waste a good crisis”, he put all his heart and soul into completing his band Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ next album, The Boatman’s Call (1997). Up until then, with a reputation of being “the most violent live band in the world”, the Bad Seeds hadn’t done anything like The Boatman’s Call; stripped-down, piano-driven ballads. Nick had a free hand with the album, so he could explain to the world, and, Polly Jean, of course, what went wrong.

‘Into My Arms’, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds

What about Polly Jean? The more private of the two, she never spoke publicly about the relationship, but PJ Harvey fans can recognise callbacks to Nick in many songs that followed that period.

For example, the final track of her 2004 album Uh Huh Her, which was her attempt at a totally sparse and empty-sounding album, free of overproduction. It’s called ‘The Darker Days of Me and Him’. Polly Jean sings,

I long for a land where

No man was ever known

With no neurosis

No psychosis

No psychoanalysis

And no sadness

I'll pick up the pieces,

I'll carry on somehow

Tape the broken parts together

And limp this love around

Limp this love around

Even while promoting the album, Polly Jean performed her tribute to Nick from their halcyon days, Meet Ze Monsta (1995), at a televised BBC performance, dressed up like her ex: all black, feat. a raunchy red lipstick. 

‘Meet Ze Monsta’ (live), PJ Harvey

Cautionary tales

Recently, I was at the home of a graphic novelist friend, who has been hard at work on what I keep saying is her magnum opus. She cited examples of great Bengali filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak, and the Bengali poet Michael Madhusudan Dutta, saying one cannot live life so intensely that you destroy yourself.

Ghatak died from alcoholism, possibly induced by his extremely confrontational nature that did not allow him to make the kind of films he hoped to make. Dutta, most famous for his epic poem ‘Meghnad Badh Kavya’, that sympathises with Ravana’s son Meghnad, died in penury after living a volatile life. Days before his death, Dutta, who initially attempted to be an English-language poet, recited a few lines from Macbeth to his friend, Gour Das Bysack.

...out, out, brief candle!

Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more; it is a tale Told by an idiot,

full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.

These next lines are for you, dear Chester, my friend in childhood, and now, middle-age. You could have held on, trusted your friends. You were loved. Do you know Linkin Park stopped making music after you passed away? But now, your friends have a fabulous new singer, Emily Armstrong, who is carrying your torch, determined to never let it burn out. A couple of years back, Emily made her debut with Linkin Park’s eighth album, From Zero. She sings,

This is what you asked for, heavy is the crown

Fire in the sunrise, ashes raining down

Try to hold it in, but it keeps bleeding out.

 

Yes, the crown is heavy. But you need to keep holding on to it because you chose it for yourself. You helped me and many like me in a time when we weren’t too sure of ourselves. We still aren’t. We need you more than ever. But, that’s alright, you’re in the safest place possible: my heart.

‘Heavy is the Crown’, Linkin Park

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Devarsi Ghosh is the Consultant Editor at Advisory.