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Chester Bennington, lead vocalist of nu metal, hip-hop fusion band Linkin Park, has died by suicide, according to a report by TMZ. Linkin Park is scheduled to play Starplex Pavilion in Dallas on Aug. 25.
TMZ’s report, which has since spread to other outlets, including People magazine and the Associated Press, says that Bennington, 41, hanged himself at a home in Los Angeles and was discovered early this morning.
The article draws a link between Bennington’s death and that of his friend, Soundgarden frontman Chris Cornell. Cornell died in May, also by hanging, and today was his birthday. But industry guidelines note that there are almost always multiple causes, such as psychiatric illness, for suicide.
“Your voice was joy and pain, anger and forgiveness, love and heartache all wrapped up into one. I suppose that’s what we all are.” – Chester Bennington
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“Your voice was joy and pain, anger and forgiveness, love and heartache all wrapped up into one,” Bennington wrote in a letter posted to Twitter the day Cornell’s body was discovered. “I suppose that’s what we all are.”
Linkin Park formed in ’96 and sold 70 million albums in the course of its career. “Crawling,” from the band’s debut, Hybrid Theory, won a Grammy in 2002 for best hard rock performance. The band received a second Grammy in 2006 for best rap/sung collaboration for its work with Jay-Z on “Numb/Encore.”
Linkin Park began its One More Light world tour in May and has completed two of four legs, which took them to South America and Europe. Linkin Park was on a brief break at the time of Bennington’s death and was preparing to begin the North American leg of the tour on Thursday, July 27, in Mansfield, Massachusetts.
“Whether it was the almost punkish ‘Given Up’ or a sad-sack power ballad like ‘No More Sorrow,’ the guys in Linkin Park (especially singer Chester Bennington) made every note and lyric seem like an urgent call to arms,” Observer contributor Darryl Smyers wrote in his review of Linkin Park’s March 2011 show at American Airlines Center.
Linkin Park’s last visit to Dallas was to Starplex – then called Gexa – in September 2014. As of now, tickets to the Aug. 25 stop of Linkin Park’s One More Light World Tour are still on sale on Live Nation’s website.
If someone you know exhibits warning signs for suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8233.
