Understanding In The End

It starts with one thing.

Linkin Park was one of the bands that absolutely defined my teenage years. Their work sounded like nothing else going on at the time, taking the evolving nu metal scene and elevating it to new heights. Songs from Hybrid Theory and Meteora were in constant rotation on my iPod, so if you'll indulge me, I'd like to take a moment to revisit that era of my life and connect with some of the music that made me who I am today.

And thanks as well to Henry Reich, Gene Lushtak, Eugene Bulkin, Oliver, Anna Work, Adam Neely, Dave Mayer, David Bartz, CodenaCrow, Arnas, Caroline Simpson, Michael Alan Dorman, Blake Boyd, Charles Gaskell, Tom Evans, David Conrad, Ducky, Nikolay Semyonov, Chris Connett, Kenneth Kousen, h2g2guy, W. Dennis Sorrell, Andrew Engel, Peter Brinkmann, naomio, Alex Mole, Betsy, Tonya Custis, Dave Shapiro, Walther, Jake Sand, Graeme Lewis, Jim Hayes, Scott Albertine, Evan Satinsky, Conor Stuart Roe, ZagOnEm, Kai, רועי סיני, Kottolett, Brian Miller, Thomas Morgan, Mark James, Matty Crocker, Adam Ziegenhals, Mark, Amelia Lewis, Justin St John-Brooks, DialMForManning, JD White, Andrew Wyld, Joe Johnston, Claymore Alexander, A Devoted Servant of the Holy Water Bottle, gunnito, Graham Orndorff, Kayla Sparks, Douglas Anderson, Foreign Man in a Foreign Land, Paul Tanenholz, Tom, William Christie, Joyce Orndorff, Kyle Kinkaid, Stephen Tolputt, Isaac Hampton, Mark Mitchell Gloster, Andy Maurer, William Spratley, Don Jennings, Cormag81, Derek H., Bryan, Mikeyxote, Milan Durnell, Dan Whitmer, Thel 'Vadam, M3RK Chaos Official Patreon page, Mike Wyer, Michael Morris, Bill Owens, Martin Romano, George Burgyan, N Zaph, Marc Testart, Carlfish, Matthew Soddy, Flavor Dave, Belinda Reid, DraconicDon, John W Campbell, StellarDrift, Jimmy2Guys, Megan Oberfield, morolin, An Oni Moose, Ken Birdwell, Blue 5alamander, Panda, Cliff Hudson, Olivia Herald, Macy Allen, JayneOfCanton, or dahan, Alin Nica, Ethan Savaglio, Robert Bailey, Deirdre Saoirse Moen, juneau, Sina Bahram, Ira Kroll, Patrick Minton, Justin Katz, Roahn Wynar, Chuck Dukhoff of The Stagger Lee Archives, Bob D'Errico, Robert Shaw, Shawn Beshears, David Shlapak, JD, Rennie Allen, Travis Briggs, Donald Murray, Cindy Klenk (Highlands Recording Arts LLC), Jonah C., Greyson Erickson, Matt Deeds, Claire Postlethwaite, Strife, Brian Covey, Miles_Naismith, Jordan Nordstrom-Young, Jay Harris, Sean Murphy, JasperJackal, Tommy Transplant, Wolfgang Giersche, Autographedcat, ParzivaLore, Alexander Whisnant, Amanda Jones, Olaf, Colleen Chapman, Gil, M. Dodge Mumford, Jon Purdy, Ken Brown, Colin Kennedy, Christopher Bork, Granger Meador, The Mauses, Tom Belknap, christopher porto, Steffan Andrews, William Wallace, Billy Abbott, Otto Koivunen, Karel P Kerezman, and Ted Trainor! Your support helps make 12tone even better!

Also, thanks to Jareth Arnold!

[tone]

Some additional thoughts/corrections:

1) Harmonics are a hard thing to explain in this particular editing style. Would've loved to use some motion graphics animations, but alas, I've committed to a bit, so I just left the explanation a little vague instead.

2) There's a lot to be said about the digital manipulations on Shinoda's voice, but the video was getting super long and it didn't really fit into the structure of the script. Broadly, though, I think my take is similar to the glitch track in the intro: It adds a sense of digital choppiness and ugliness that interferes with the implied smoothness of the underlying track, creating a technologically oppressive atmosphere that smothers the listener.

3) I feel like I should have more things to say here but honestly the production process of this video was really weird 'cause I had to go to a big conference in the middle of it so I can't really think of anything else. Still! Good song!

[christophermartin]

It's worth saying that in the chorus the drummer doesn't switch to the ride cymbal, he just opens up the hi hats for that sloshy sound.

[liamannegarner]

Now I understand the 4chan story of the guy whose iTunes Library was just "In The End" with 20, 000 plays. "You played it two more times between these posts. What is wrong with you?" "I like the song."

[NoobixCube]

The weird thing about In The End is, we are blessed with a demo version that has completely different rap verses, so we can actually analyse how the lyrics changed from version to version. The whole album makes an arc of personal growth, though. You wouldn't think of a 2000s "nu-metal" band as releasing a concept album, and I don't know if they'd call it that, but you can clearly see a progression from the early tracks being directionless anger, lashing out at everyone, and at the self. If there were one central protagonist to Hybrid Theory, he wouldn't know who to be angry at, for the first half, and then By Myself is kind of a lost despair as the protagonist thinks they're the problem. In The End marks a kind of awakening, finally realising they've been gaslit or manipulated all along, and it's an articulated response to that realisation. The end of the album is shaky, retreating sometimes back to that self-recrimination and whiplashing back to the anger, because it's _new_ to the protagonist, but Forgotten, Pushing Me Away, and above all, Place for my Head, reinforce the direction, like a definite antagonist has been identified, and exactly how they've been antagonising you has been discovered.

[mikesmusic]

What he said at 24:00 is *EXACTLY* what I've been trying to verbalize for decades. I was just a little kid (3-4 yrs) when Linkin Park got big, but my older siblings were in Middle/High school listening to them. Due to cultural osmosis, I've been dedicatedly listening to LP for almost [literally] my entire life. Despite realizing how depressed the lyrics & themes often were, I've always felt a deep comfort in them.

It was this unexplainable sensation, & I suddenly felt forced to quantify it when Chester Bennington passed in 2017. I was in college, first time on my own, & the singer of my lifelong *favorite* band took his own life. It felt like, just... the worst irony possible, because Linkin Park was *my* depression music.

I asked myself, "Am I dishonoring Chester's legacy by using his music this way?"

But eventually, I came to a realizaton: I don't love LP because I "revel in my own misery"... but because I felt my own feelings of depression, anxiety, loneliness, su¡cidality, etc, being *validated.* I no longer felt alone, because it proved that someone out there could empathize with me. Even if I *couldn't* solve the problem, at least I was being told for certain that I wasn't crazy for feeling what I did. That there actually were real, problematic issues both in my home life, & in the world broadly.

[billyjack]

And then “In the middle of all those noise sits Bennington”
After having not heard Linkin Park in a few months, this isolated pure perfect vocals brought me to tears. 😭😭😭
Miss him so much.

[gsuberland]

That description of "we just wanted someone else to recognise that things were broken" is so accurate. I would listen to Hybrid Theory at night on a Walkman hidden under my pillow when I was about 11 years old, right around the time I was starting to become cognizant of problems around me and a complete lack of agency to do anything about them. While I certainly didn't make that poignant connection at the time, it strongly shaped my teenage years.

[stormix]

I never thought I’d see LP on here. They are a popular band, but I see their technicality and sophistication beyond just the cool screams. It’s so nice to see them getting appreciated :)

[Insert_Bland_Name_Here]

The first "ruined" version of the riff you played actually sounded pretty much exactly like the Reanimation Remix version, "Enth E Nd". It's not a bad riff, it just gives a different vibe, which fits the remix pretty decently.

[Mirro]

Honestly one thing that I have discovered for myself... or rather rediscovered for myself through Linkin Park was that in a world that treats depression like a foregone conclusion and just something that happens to you and that you need working, that there are reasons from the outside that make me that way and that at times I am well within my rights to be angry at them for it. That there is an anger in depression and that this is not a failure of me as a person, but that this is also me trying to get up from the hole I have partially dug/partially been pushed into. And in the End fills that little niche perfectly. It's defeated, depressed, but also angry at the world that made us that way and in a sense also a call to stand up, because for being shit on all your life, the fact that I tried should mean something, GOD FUCKING DAMNIT

[emmbeesea]

And all in all, there's few songs as good as this one that make you want to shout out your distraught emotions at the world. It holds up arguably even better today than when it was first released in that regard.

[RubyRoks]

This song is heartbreaking, empowering, cathartic, isolating, cold, aggressive, simple, convoluted, calculating, and pissed all at once, and despite that, it makes sense. It, like many Linkin Park tracks, is a masterclass in distilling the chaos of life into something radio friendly without actually removing the complexity, just arranging it

[PenneySounds]

5:31 That beat is nor made by the turntablist. That's the hip hop beat by Mike Shinoda. Every LP song in those days started with the hip hop beat as the foundation onto which everything else was built.

5:57 Who is Brad Delman? Brad Delson is the guitarist and stood in for bass during the recording of this track.

7:18 There's a lot more going on in that beat than just Rob's drums. Once again, there is a hip hop beat underlying the whole thing, built from synths and samples. These are heard much more clearly in demo versions of the track, because contrary to what you said at the start, the band were not free to m ake this album the way they wanted. Their label wanted to sell them to rock listeners even though they were primarily a hip hop group, so the final album is mixed to bring up the guitars and downplay the beats, very different from the demos the band mixed themselves.

[MannnisEi]

Wish you woulda talked about how cool it is that the bridge repeats the same lyrics twice, but because of the change in instrumentation, the melody itself and the final line, the same set of lyrics take on a whole different meaning the second time around

[sayakmukhopadhyay]

Linkin Park is one of the most technical rocks bands out there. Just that their technique has always been to know how to tug at human emotions. Not just making an earworm, like pop artists, but music and lyrics that people can identify with.

[dancellmovies]

Great video! A note: The guitarist is Brad DelSON and not Delman. This song was pivotal to my interest in music when I was younger, and seeing you break the raw tracks down brings lots of great perspective!

[gabe_s_videos]

I knew this song had become a part of pop culture history when I heard it on the piped in music at the supermarket.

[TheOneWhoKnocks]

The thoughtful choices these musician makes is crazy

[petermiddo]

I was an adult in the early 2000's (28) and I was still struggling. All my friends had their 💩 together, settling down, having kids, top end jobs, and I was flat-lining. I remember when I first heard 'In The End' on the radio and fell in love in an instant.

Fast forward all these years and I was diagnosed, at age 44, with Autism. I still loved the song but now it really meant something, as did the whole album.

Devastated doesn't begin to describe my emotions when I heard the news that mr Bennington had died.

I really didn't think I could love the song anymore, until I listened to this. Now it drops down a gear and plants it's foot on the thank you!

[Kiaulen]

RIP Chester, my favorite singer of all time.

Thanks Cory, for showing off just how incredibly deep this song is layered. I'd always heard the high guitar, piano, vocals, and scratches, but it's been hard for me to pick out the drums and bass. Fantastic analysis as always, this is my favorite of your videos.