LINKIN PARK‘s Mike Shinoda spoke to Rock Sound TV about the song “In The End” recently surpassing one billion views on YouTube. It is the second LINKIN PARK track to reach the milestone; back in November 2018, “Numb” achieved the same feat.
Shinoda said: “We were rehearsing in this little room in Hollywood. And when I say ‘Hollywood,’ it was the grossest part of Hollywood. At the time, Hollywood and Vine had prostitutes and drug dealers. And there was a taco shop on the corner, an all-black hair salon next door, a grocery store with a Korean couple who ran that on the corner, and a bunch of Scientologists. There was a place that was calling itself a reading center, to teach you how to read, but all of the books were Scientology books, which is really kind of dark. And that was the place where we found a rehearsal room that we could afford. And we were writing it there. And we were working on our show and our songs there. And I decided to stay overnight in that building, and I wrote ‘In The End’. And I think Rob Bourdon [drums] was the first one to show up the next day for rehearsal, and I played it for him, and he was freaking out.
“There’s a weird battle with hopelessness and the ephemeral nature of time and our lives that the song is really about,” he continued. “And what’s so odd about the song is it’s almost talking about these things and saying, ‘I don’t have any answers.’ ‘Cause 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 didn’t know what to make of things, and, in a sense, that’s still what goes on today. It’s a timeless and universal thing.
“It’s also easy to ‘Monday Morning Quarterback’ these types of things where you go, ‘Okay, it’s popular, so this is why it’s popular.’ You can’t say, ‘This is what will be popular,’ and then make that thing. [Laughs] You can only do it after the fact. The fact is that, yeah, it’s been one of our biggest songs, it’s been our biggest song for a long time.”
The official “In The End” clip that has hit the one-billion mark wasn’t uploaded to YouTube until October 2009, almost a decade after the video’s original release.
Surprisingly, LINKIN PARK frontman Chester Bennington didn’t care for “In The End” when it was first recorded. “I was never a fan of ‘In The End’ and I didn’t even want it to be on the record, honestly,” he told VMusic back in 2012. “How wrong could I have possibly been? I basically decided at that point I don’t know what the fuck 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. 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. I actually see how good of a song it is, it was just hard for me to see it at the time.”
LINKIN PARK recently said it had some “special things planned” this year to celebrate the 20th anniversary of its debut album, “Hybrid Theory”.
The band’s YouTube channel boasts more than 16 million subscribers, and the highest-viewed video on the channel is the aforementioned official clip for “Numb”, which has been seen 1.4 billion times.
LINKIN PARK has not performed together in public since October 2017, when the surviving members staged a tribute concert in Los Angeles to Bennington.
The band has not officially announced whether it intends to carry on following the death of the singer, who committed suicide at the age of 41.
