Breaking the Mold

Chester Bennington doesn't like awards shows very much -- he doesn't like being told to stay in his seat, doesn't like being herded along the red carpet like tattooed livestock, doesn't like the stiff, rehearsed, rock-concert-with-rigor-mortis vibe of some of them.

But the Linkin Park singer's voice jumps up a notch when talk turns to this year's MTV Video Music Awards, where his band is up for "Group of the Year."

"Thank God they've come to Vegas. I hope they stay there," Bennington says, expressing his frustration with the site of last year's VMAs, Miami, where the band had to travel by boat to get to some places. "I love Miami, but that was the biggest pain in the ass. It was always super humid and parties were scattered all over the city. It was like, 'Let's make this even more complicated.'

"Now that it's in Vegas, even if the parties are scattered, it's still going to be fun," he continues. "You can get everywhere you want to go in like 10 minutes. It's like, 'OK, I'm drunk, I'll just hang out and gamble until I can walk to my room.' That's great."

Bennington's an affable guy who speaks in long sentences and seems to have Redbull coursing through his veins.

He comes across as being pretty easy to get along with, and the same could be said of his band: When Linkin Park debuted in 2000 at the height of the acid-tongued nü metal era, they distinguished themselves from their potty-mouthed peers with a heightened emphasis on radio-friendly melodies and lack of swearing on their first disc, the multiplatinum smash "Hybrid Theory."

The band wasn't about offending anybody, and in a genre that prided itself on a hot-and-bothered, in-your-face bluster, with Kid Rock touring with a giant inflatable middle finger at one point and Korn penning raunchy sex tunes, Linkin Park was the more approachable, less brazen alternative that didn't make moms cringe too much.

But these days, Linkin Park has evolved into a band that seems less concerned about being all things to all people.

On the their latest album, "Minutes to Midnight," Linkin Park's third, the group bristles with invective at times, directing their anger outward for a change, targeting the Bush administration and critiquing the war in Iraq, the first time the band has delved into this kind of social commentary.

"I think we're more comfortable with talking about those things," says Bennington, whose band also will be playing a show at the Hard Rock during their stay in Vegas for the VMAs. "When we wrote 'Hybrid Theory,' we were kids. When we wrote 'Meteora,' we were a little bit older, we were more experienced to a certain degree, but I don't think that Mike (Shinoda, band rapper) and I were in a very comfortable place within ourselves to talk about politics without feeling preachy. Now, I think we feel that we can communicate what we want to say without clouding it with an agenda."

If the band's political leanings have become more pronounced, so has the breadth of its catalog. "Midnight" is the band's most sweeping disc, a much more layered and nuanced effort than its predecessors, with an emphasis on atmosphere and electronic textures, buffering their slick and moody hard rock with a variety of instrumentation, like banjos, accordions and xylophones.

"We knew that we could do pretty much whatever we wanted," Bennington says of writing "Midnight," which they pared down from a batch of 150 songs. "It was all just a matter of inspiring something new and breaking out of this mold that we had kind of put ourselves into. We could have written a record that sounded like 'Meteora' or 'Hybrid Theory,' it would have been out two years ago, and that would have been easy. But it was a very good experience in pushing ourselves, trying new things and really experiencing a whole new way of finding music in us."

If the band's changed, so has Bennington. He's working toward something more substantive, more mature, attempting that treacherous balancing act of growing up without growing old.

"I'm a totally different person now than I was even two years ago," he says. "Twelve years ago, it was like, 'I want to make heavy music that's totally in your face and I want to party and find hot chicks.' Whereas now, that's just not what my game is.

"I want to make music that's important and meaningful," he adds, "music that stands the test of time."