Linkin Park's first two singles off its upcoming album, "Heavy" and "Battle Symphony," saw the band move in an adult contemporary direction, and fans didn't seem pleased. Linkin Park initially caught some shade from ESP Guitars over the album not being "heavy," and then Linkin Park frontman Chester Bennington came out and straight up told fans to "move the fuck on" from Hybrid Theory already.
So that's the end, right? Bennington has cooled down? Nope. In an interview with Kerrang Radio, Bennington gets pretty pissed that people think Linkin Park sold out with the new stuff, and says he'll "will punch you in your fucking mouth because that is the wrong fucking answer" if you say that.
"Either you like the song or you don't. And if you don't like the song because you hear it and on a knee-jerk reaction it's like, 'Oh it doesn't have metal in it so I don't like it,' that's fine, like, whatever.
"But, if you're gonna be the person who says like, 'They made a marketing decision to make this kind of record to make money,' you can fucking meet me outside and I will punch you in your fucking mouth because that is the wrong fucking answer!
"Because guess what, calling us a sellout for that purpose is… selling out on your fucking excuse as to why you don't like it.
"You're a fucking pussy.
"For any band to take musical risks because you like what you're doing in spite of what you know some people will say they don't like, it doesn't matter if they like it or not – what matters is that you took the chance to do something that you felt was important to you and that's what being an artist is all about.
"When we did 'Minutes to Midnight' [in 2007], this was a conversation we literally had, 'This could end our career.'
"We all had that real honest conversation like. 'Look, I know we’re doing this because this is what we love and it's really really important to us. This could honestly be like the worst decision we've ever made professionally. Creatively probably the best thing, professionally it might be the worst.'
"We were like, 'We're good with that. We can live with that.'
"When you make it personal, like a personal attack against who we are as people, like dude shut up.
"That means that I can actually have feelings about it and most of the time my feelings are I want to kill you."
So you can not like it because it's not heavy, but you can't not like it because you think they sold out. Lest you'd like to get punched… because that's clearly the answer.
