30.01.2001 San Francisco, CA, The Fillmore

[felipeintheend]

Midway though Linkin Park’s raucous forty-five-minute set, MC Mike Shinoda paused to take stock of the crowd. “Where are my pit masters?” he demanded. A hundred sweaty arms waved from the darkness. “Well, this song is dedicated to you,” he continued, “and to all the street-team soldiers in the house.” DJ Josephn Hahn fired up the turntables, and the band crashed into an early song, “And One.” Pit masters, street soilders and grunts moshed in time. Rallying the troops is a familiar rap-rock conceit, but Linkin Park go the formula one better by lacing the usual aggro conventions with a dose of punk solidarity. The band’s debut album, Hybrid Theory, is a rapcore manifesto of alienation that has found a following large enough to push it into the upper regions of Billboard’s Hot 200. The Southern California quintet reciprocated that support by giving the sold-out Fillmore crowd of 1,000 young, mostly male fans a short but frenetic run-through of the entire album. Hahn, drummer Rob Bourdon and bassist-guitarist Brad Delson churned out rap-punk collisions for frontmen Shinoda and Chester Bennington as the pair energetically traded rhymes and hyperbolic singing. They waxed nostalgic on the synth-pop “Crawling,” got cool and creepy on the grinding love plaint “Pushing Me Away” and chanted with members of the warm-up act, Styles of Beyond, on “Points of Authority.” Linkin Park are more Deftones than Limp Bizkit, more about being young and pissed-off than dumb and aggressive. Even better, they adhere to a set of punk ethics rare in the rock industry. With feedback still buzzing from the night’s final number, “One Step Closer,” Shinoda and Bennington dove into the crowd. They stayed there, signing autographs and chatting, long after the house lights went up. Now that’s proletarian punk.

 

Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20011218105204/.../article17.html