That guy from Linkin Park joined the remains of Stone Temple Pilots because God is dead and life is a joke
Chester Bennington, which is a person’s real name, joined a band that nobody cares about anymore. Presumably a number of people probably greater than six but less than 20 are super, super-psyched at this news but the actual cold hard fact is that nobody gives a flying fuck about Stone Temple Pilots anymore and nobody has for nearly twenty fucking years.
In the early to mid ’90s, STP was a band who put out music, much like many at the time. They were neither very good or very bad. They somehow managed to teeter in the balance between bland and exciting, forever putting out the kind of music you could easily tune out yet still recognize. Oh, you think this happened recently? No. No, no, and thrice no, dear reader. That was nearly 20 years ago. That’s a lot of time. That’s more than enough time to go back to college and learn a skill or trade and try something different with your life, something different than, say, being a member of the Stone Temple Fucking Pilots.
They probably have meetings. They probably have meetings where they all sit around a table and say “What’s happening this month for the Stone Temple Pilots.” There’s probably one guy that doesn’t like another guy all that much but he stays with the band because they still make a fair amount of money god knows why but that they still play gigs and have their music used in commercials in Asia. It probably eats at that guy’s sleep. He probably, having that internal struggle, takes it out on his kid by not playing catch with him. The kid grows up with a general feeling of guilt his whole life. Stone Temple Pilots ruin lives by still being around, is what I’m saying.
And Chester! Oh, ho ho ho, oooooh boy, he was in Linkin Park. They yelled a lot. He’s sort of like this regular dude who worked at Burger King and got addicted to meth and then kicked it and became really, really successful but in that “pre 9/11″ way where fame played out like a fucking Bob Seger lyric, where you could get away with releasing an intense song about feelings while screaming and there were drop-D-tuned guitars and oh, my my dear reader, how sweet is the nectar of our collected past? Chester is a relic from a time when being bummed out professionally could be a job because we weren’t in a war against a word, like, you know, “TERROR,” which basically is a religious war and George W. Bush never should have invaded Iraq and we’re still there and it’s this whole “our Vietnam” thing and basically Chester Bennington is the silliest name ever but that’s the point. He’s a total throwback.
So that guy joined that band and that’s totally great because now they’re band-married and we’re going to have little bratty band-babies coming along any minute now. Speaking of which, they made a song and it’s sort of shit but you probably already know that: