The lyrics are based on the struggles lead singer Chester Bennington went through growing up. He was often picked on.
This video was shot on a Los Angeles sound stage. The statue's head, where the band is performing, was built there, but the rest was CGI. The areas where Mike is standing "in the desert" are real - he was sitting on real grass and he was walking on real stones, but they were about 10 feet by 5 feet. The rest was, you guessed it, CGI. Halfway through filming, directors Joe Hahn and Nathan Cox decided to set water pipes off above the band, so they all got completely soaked. Nathan could see how irritated the band were by this, so he invited his friend (who's in a Bluegrass band) over and he performed some Linkin Park songs, including an hilarious version of "Crawling." In the video, if you look very closely, you can see Joe's belt buckle, which says "MR HAHN." The song is about feeling like there's no point in living, and was originally seen as being very negative, so the video was very positive. It's like a cycle of life (the song starts and ends with the piano) - the desert is very dead, but the rain comes and at the end, there's flowers and rivers and butterflies.
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Suggestion credit:
Abbey - Essex, England
In March 2001, 15-year-old Charles Andrew Williams shot and killed two of his classmates at his high school in Santee, California. He left a note for his father with the lyrics to this as an attempt to explain his feelings. The key lines were, "I tried so hard and got so far, but in the end, it doesn't really matter."
The video was shot in a California desert while the band was between stops on the 2001 Ozzfest tour.
Although Hybrid Theory was the best-selling album in America in 2001 with nearly 5 million copies sold (14 million worldwide), the number could have been much higher. Unfortunately, the band's rise to fame coincided with the boom of music piracy on the internet via file-swapping sites like Kazaa and Napster. In April 2002, The Guardian reported that Hybrid Theory was the #1 most-pirated album on the internet, with 5.3 million downloads. Because of this, their next album, Meteora, was shrouded in secrecy. Instead of receiving advanced copies of the album for review, journalists were invited to a listening event and frisked for recording devices upon entry.
This was the third single from Linkin Park's first album. Their first two singles were "
One Step Closer" and "
Crawling." All three songs explore the dark side of growing up.
"Hybrid Theory" is the original name of the band. They decided to use it as the album title.
This was released as a single about nine months after the album. It took a while for the album to catch on, but it eventually sold very well.
On their 2002 album, Reanimation, this was remixed by Kutmasta Kurt with vocals by Motion Man. The title was changed to "Enth E Nd," and it was given a hip-hop sound.
At the 2002 MTV Video Music Awards, this won for Best Rock Video. Sammy Hagar and David Lee Roth, who were touring together at the time, presented the award. Before announcing the winner, Roth asked Hagar what his favorite Linkin Park song was, and Hagar said he didn't know any Linkin Park songs.
Mike Shinoda: "I remember putting this together in our rehearsal studio on Hollywood and Vine, working overnight in a room with no windows. I had no idea what time of day it was; I just slept when I was tired, and worked on this song until it took shape. The first guy to hear it was Rob, who told me (I'm paraphrasing) that this was 'exactly the kind of song he wanted us to write."
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Suggestion credit:
Bertrand - Paris, France
This was used on the animated TV series American Dad! in the 2018 episode "Paranoid Frandroid."
Shinoda thought this was the most important song for the band to release at the time because it contrasted with the more aggressive tunes in their catalog and introduced their range of skills. "It showcased kind of the breadth of things that we can do: melody and rapping and beats and rock stuff and screaming and whatever," he recalled in a 2020 interview with SiriusXM. "It was kind of the song that brought all of the stuff we did at the time together into one song."
Unlike the rest of the band, Bennington wasn't a fan of the song at first and didn't even want it on the album, let alone as a single. When it ended up being a hit, he realized choosing singles wasn't his strong suit.
"I basically decided at that point I don't know what the f--k I'm talking about, so I leave that to other people who are actually talented at somehow picking songs that people are going to like the most," he explained in a 2014 interview. "It also gave me a good lesson, as an artist, that I don't necessarily have to only make music, in my band, that I want to listen to. More often than not, something that I like, very few other people like, and something that those people like is something that I kind of like, or don't like at all. And that's cool, it gives me a new appreciation for the songs. But, you know, now I love 'In The End' and I think it's such a great song."
In July 2020 the music video surpassed 1 billion views on YouTube.
Upon the album's 20th anniversary, Shinoda spoke with Rock Sound about the timeless nature of the song's lyrics. "There's a weird battle with hopelessness and the ephemeral nature of time and our lives that the song is really about," he said. "What's so odd about the song is its almost talking about these things and saying 'I don't have any answers.' Because usually a song isn't about having no answers right? It just kind of runs itself around in a circle lyrically. And especially as a young person that's just how I felt, that's how we all felt, we just didn't know what to make of things. In a sense that's still what goes on today, it's a timeless and universal thing."
Shinoda doesn't feel overly sentimental about the band's classic songs. He told Forbes in 2020: "I don't get a visceral, emotional reaction from Hybrid Theory. It's got its own ubiquitous identity at this point. When you've heard 'In The End' in a Starbucks bathroom it's hard to get emotional about the song anymore."
The band spoke out against President Trump using the song in a video for his re-election campaign in 2020 and successfully had the clip taken down from Twitter. Fans also rallied around the band and dug up Chester Bennington's 2017 tweet that warned Trump was "a greater threat to the USA than terrorism."
