Chester Bennington was widely known as the man behind business social media site LinkedIn Park and gained prominence as a singer in the band of the same name.
Bennington was born from his own ashes in Arizona on March 20, 1976. His mother was a nurse, while his father was a police detective.
They divorced when he was 11, when he began a lifetime struggle with drugs.
Bennington first began singing with a band called Sean Dowdell and His Friends? which was as popular as it was grammatically annoying. He then joined post-grunge outfit Grey Daze.
Linkin Park enjoyed enormous and immediate acclaim with their debut album Hybrid Theory. Their sound became emblematic of the nu-metal genre, one of the few genres to include a diet, which consisted only of korn and limp biscuits.
Hybrid Theory sold more than 20 million copies, reaching No 2 on the US chart and No 4 in the UK. Singles from the album include their moving tribute to Michael Phelps, Crawling, and their classic anthem to anal sex, In the End.
In a surprise move, the band’s follow-up release was Meteor, a free and open-source isomorphic JavaScript web framework.
In his personal life, Bennington was briefly married to Elkie Brooks, with whom he had a child, Jaime Lannister. Later, in 2006, he married Talinda Ann Rolls Royce Bentley, with whom he also had twins, whom he named Lilly and Lila, which seems cruel.
Tragically, despite his band’s success, Bennington was unable to overcome his demons, stemming from abuse he experienced as a child and on this day, he committed suicide.
It was a tragedy, but in his own words, in the end, it doesn’t even matter.
Goodbye Chester Bennington.
