In The End Points Of Authority Linkin Park

In the End and Points of Authority by Linkin Park

In the End lyrics are based on the struggles lead singer Chester Bennington went through growing up.

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."

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."

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."

Points of Authority is about a person who tries to control someone through intimidation and aggression. Chester Bennington was molested by acquaintances when he was young, which influenced the song.

This appears on Linkin Park's debut album, Hybrid Theory, which established the band as nu-metal stars. It sold 5 million copies in the US (on its way to 12 million by 2020), making it the best-selling album of 2001 in America. But the band weren't fond of the nu-metal tag, which lumped them in with acts like Limp Bizkit and Korn. "We never liked it," Shinoda said in a 2008 Kerrang interview. "People lazily slapped that label on bands like us, but we never shared much in common with most of the bands we were grouped with. We didn't have the same interests, goals, musical influences, or sound. I felt like we weren't from the same scene."

Shinoda's vocal scat in the intro was inspired by Black Thought of the hip-hop group The Roots. "I heard him doing that on Illadelph Halflife, and I just thought there was something so cool about that. And I thought it would mix well with the scratching, so we kind of did this back-and-forth with those things," he told Billboard in 2020.

The song initially had a different guitar line that Shinoda thought sounded too basic, so he used ProTools to chop it up and move the pieces around to create a different sound. "I treated it like a sample off a record," he explained.

Lead guitarist Brad Delson shared his view of the tune with Kerrang in 2020. He said: "The ethos of that song is deconstructing live music. The guitar is chopped up, so you've basically taken live instruments, something organic, and we were really making use of the technology at the time, digital technology, which is stutters and chopping things up. So, it's like taking organic ingredients, putting them in a digital blender, and 'Points Of Authority' is what comes out."

Delson also explained that Shinoda's work on the riff was a prime example of the rapper's technical wizardry. "That's one of his superpowers," he said. "Even when he has basic technology, he really learns how to use it and he almost plays some of the recording technology like an instrument. I think you can hear that on this song."

A remixed version of the album, Reanimation, was released in 2002 and the new version of this track, titled "Pts.OF.Athrty" was released as a single. It was remixed by Jay Gordon of the industrial-metal band Orgy.

Joe Hahn, the band's DJ/programmer, directed a music video for the remixed version of the song. He also came up with the clip's concept, which involved Linkin Park waging a CGI-robot battle against an alien race. "I remember I was referencing Saving Private Ryan, and looking at a lot of anime, and the dynamics of things blowing up," he told Billboard in 2020. "It was so fun, because I had this crazy idea, and everyone was like, 'Okay! Go do it!' And they let me do it!"