NOTE: This interview is translated into English, you can read the original in German HERE


On June 18th Linkin Park will perform at Festwiese in Leipzig. In an interview with LVZ frontman Chester Bennington explains, why he thinks it’s curious that conservative parents got nothing against their music, and why it’s hard for him to see himself as a rock star.


Question: Linkin Park became famous over a decade ago with a musical mix of metal and hip hop. You where called “modern rock stars”. What is it today that a modern rock star has to have and would you still describe yourself as one?


C.B.: At least I would describe our music as contemporary. And for the rock star life: generally you are a rock star if a lot of people think what you are doing is pretty cool. Meanwhile everybody has got the chance to become a rock star overnight, if you’ve got a song, you can it publish easily on the internet and present yourself to a huge audience. All you need is an idea and a guitar – and probably you’re gonna be the next Justin Bieber! With all this you should never forget about, is self-criticism. Nobody is good enough to stop working on yourself, change and improve.


Q: Rock stars live by their image. The american Rolling Stone wrote about your first years as a band:” Linkin Park where those kind of metal band that you could play to your mother.” Because you don’t swear at your record. Back then do you wanted to seem harder the you were seen?


C.B.: We didn’t conscious decided to not swear at our songs. And it was a little bit strange that conservative parents got nothing against their children listen to our music- even at home. Even if we don’t use the f-words that much, we sang about some pretty dark things. At least when parents went with their kids to a Linkin Pak show, they realized and thought about it later: “Maybe we shouldn’t support that!”


Q: The hardness of your band was underrated?


C.B.: Yes, finally hardness isn’t created by constantly using f-words. For example Crawling is a pretty hard song. It’s about addiction and a part of your personality that you can’t control. It is hard if a song like that became the favourite song of countless teenager.


Q: Over the years Linkin Park became musically softer and more mainstream. Other bands change in that direction if they have problems to sell records. Linkin Park didn’t got that problem so what is it that made you become softer?


C.B.: We just wanted to break with some old concepts. For years you got that one vision of us and our music. And because people expected to hear that sound from us, we wanted to surprise them with something else. As a musician I want to be free and don’t have to stick with certain formulas to be liked. Sure, as we started to make music, there wasn’t a connection of metal and hip hop out there, like in songs as Pushing me away or One step closer. We were successfull, but don’t wanted to repeat, just ‘cos it works.


Q: But as your career goes on you stick to songs with political and social events. Whether it’s Hurricane Katrina, the war in Iraq or the earthquake in Haiti – you said it through a song. Is it part of the job as a rock star to be politically in certain moments?


C.B.: If there is something that inspires us a lot it influences our music, like the war in Iraq. I personally think war is unnecessary and it didn’t make any sense to kill people. Back then the decision for another war made me that much angry, I had to write a song about.


Q: You where lucky to spread your message early to a massive audience. In Europe you wher perform in big venues from the beginning. Does it come to fast – or do you got that typical american ‘bigger is better’ setting?


C.B.: If you grow up in a capitalistic society, where there is ‘bigger is better’, you kind of develope that point of view quickly. With us it was, that in only two years we came from playing in friends backyard to shows in the biggest arenas in the world. Except of that we sold hundreds of thousand records a month. ‘Til today I never get used to that circumstances, that’s why I find it hard to call myself a rock star. As a band we always thought big, but because of that extremly development we never learned what ‘big’ means. What we know is, we have to earn our audience again and gain. We have to prove ourselves with every record and we couldn’t expect that someone attend our show once wants to see us again.