Robbed hit of the week 2/13/23 - Linkin Park's "Crawling"...

 

 

"Crawling" - Linkin Park

from the album Hybrid Theory (2000)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #79 (three weeks)

 

This week's "robbed hit" comes from the nu-metal band Linkin Park, who started out as Xero in the Los Angeles suburbs in the latter half of the 1990's with schoolmates Mike Shinoda who sang and rapped and played rhythm guitar, Brad Delson on lead guitar, and Rob Bourdon on drums, adding drummer Dave Ferrell, singer Mark Wakefield, and DJ Joe Hahn. However after struggles getting signed, Ferrell and Wakefield left, with the latter being replaced by singer Chester Pennington, who became a positive force in the group and their music. At first changing their name to Hybrid Theory, to signify their rap/sung approach to vocals on songs, and released an EP independently, before being signed to Warner Brothers Records and settling on the name Linkin Park (a nearby location to their start in the Santa Monica mountains). 

In the autumn of 2000, the group released their first full-length album Hybrid Theory, with Delson doing most of the bass work on the record (Farrell would return to the band after its release). The lead single from the record, "One Step Closer", was a perfect encapsulation of their sound, which had the interplay between Pennington's singing and Shinoda's shout-rapping on the chorus, along with turned-to-eleven guitar crunch. Mind you, there were comparisons to another band that rapped and sung (but by one person), Limp Bizkit, who conveniently appeared really close in the alphabetical record store bins. However, Linkin Park rode heavier and angrier, and the public responded favorably. The song made the top ten on both the Mainstream (#4) and Alternative (#5) Rock radio charts, and slipped on to the "big chart", Billboard magazine's Hot 100, at #75 that following spring.

The second single from the record was the equally menacing "Crawling", written by the band and produced by Don Gilmore, who helmed the whole album. Pennington handles most of the vocals on this track, as he sings about the terror of addiction, which he himself had a long history with. Shinoda is a good counterpoint in the pre-chorus, and the record is a fury of emotion that carries it to another level than the lyrics by themselves allude to. The music video swaps drugs and alcohol to the pain of domestic violence to great effect, while Farrell, recently returning to the band, is back as well...

 

While "Crawling" spent four weeks at #3 on Billboard's Mainstream Rock radio chart, and peaked at #5 on the Alternative counterpart, it was a bit hard at the time for pop radio (that would change), and stopped at the lower quarter of the Hot 100 in August of 2001, although it spent a hefty 20 weeks on the list (the most it could before going "recurrent"). Internationally, the single peaked at #8 in Austria, and reached the top-40 in Germany (#14), the United Kingdom (#16), Ireland (#16), Belgium (#25 Flanders), Sweden (#27), Australia (#33), and New Zealand (#37). The Hybrid Theory album, released in October of 2000, spent a month at #2 on the Billboard 200 sales tally, but stayed on the list for a total of 286 weeks, going on to sell over twelve million copies and was in the top ten of the year-end albums sales charts in both 2001 and 2002. At the Grammy Awards in 2002, "Crawling" won for Best Hard Rock Performance. The Hybrid Theory album was also up for Best Rock Album, which U2 took home for All That You Can't Leave Behind, while the band was nominated for Best New Artist, losing to Alicia Keys. But the band would go on to even bigger fortunes in a very short time, and be in my main Song Of The Day top-40 series.

(7/10)

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Here's the band performing the song to a smaller show in San Francisco in 2001...

In 2002, the band released a "remix" album of the tracks on Hybrid Theory, named Reanimation, which also climbed to #2 on the Billboard 200 and sold over a million copies, and included a rework of the song titled "Krwlng"...

By the following year, Linkin Park was playing stadiums, like this one in Texas...

Lastly, here is the group on the One More Light tour in 2017 before Pennington's tragic death at his own hands...