Decifrando CRAWLING - Linkin Park: A música que revelou os traumas de Chester Bennington

There's something about this song that makes it different from all of Linkin Park's other hits. In it, Chester not only revealed his struggle with the cruel disease that took his life, but also exposed to the world the root of all these problems: the terrible traumas of his childhood. Today we will reveal the story behind Linkin Park Crawling.

I'm Guilherme, and you're on DecifraHITS. Despite being an incredible song, Crawling was written under the excruciating pain of the late singer Chester Bennington, who already declared that the song was the most difficult for him to sing live, and also the most literal song he had ever written. It's no surprise that the lyrics and symbolism represented in the clip have an intimate relationship with the singer's traumatic past.

To understand this better, we need to go back to 1983, when Chester was just a 7-year-old child. At that time, his parents worked a lot to support the home, and he ended up spending a lot of time alone at home. It was during one of these that an older man, who claimed to be a friend of the family, approached him with disgusting intentions.

Chester said that it all started with curious touches from the attacker, but soon he started being beaten and forced to do things he didn't want to do. The abuse Chester suffered obviously became something that haunted him his entire life, triggering a cascade of problems that would soon consume him completely. And here we see the first reference to this event in the song's title, which also starts the chorus: Crawling in my skin These wounds, they will not heal Chester's traumas were like a parasite that crawled under his skin, causing him agony that tormented him throughout his life.

In an interview, he said that whenever he remembered what happened, his body immediately started shaking. Chester never revealed the abuser's name, but in the demo version of Crawling he seems to give his opinion about him at the beginning of the track: (shout) I hate you so much right now! As he was very young, he was confused, scared and didn't tell anyone for fear of the abuser wanting revenge, of his family thinking he was lying or even thinking he was homosexual, something that would be abhorrent to his conservative family.

All of this caused him enormous anguish and distress where he felt uncomfortable inside his own body, which he also reports in the lyrics: Discomfort endlessly has pulled itself upon me. Distracting, reacting. Unfortunately, Chester's nightmare was just beginning.

When he turned 11, his parents divorced, and Chester was left alone much longer than before, which only increased the frequency of abuse he suffered. His mother was not around as she had lost custody of him. And his father was emotionally unstable, as well as working long periods as a police detective.

Do you know what is most tragic about this? Chester's father specialized in child abuse cases, but was unable to protect his own son. Feeling abandoned and unprotected, fear began to take over Chester, who at the age of 11, took a dangerous path to try to control this fear, but which would quickly send him into an irreversible spiral towards rock bottom: drug addiction.

Fear is how I fall Confusing what is real The pain that Chester felt only got worse with the drugs, confusing even his perception of what was reality or not. Chester was aware that the abuse he suffered as a child directly influenced his adult life. He said that, when he saw a photo of himself when he was little, he realized that all of this had been happening even before he could remember.

But now, beneath his skin, were not only his traumas, which came back and haunted him; but also the drugs he injected, pushing him into an endless cycle of self-destruction. Chester only stopped being abused when he was 13 years old, but from then on he only felt good with drugs. For him, it was as if he regained his happiness, self-confidence and everything that his abuser took from him for so many years.

However, as we explained in Otherside's review of Red Hot Chili Peppers, the happiness provided by drugs always comes at a high price. And before long, Chester had become addicted to narcotics, thus losing all of his self-control. This lack of self control I fear is never ending Chester used everything, and his addiction was ruining his life.

"You look like you came out of a Concentration Camp," his mother said to him one day. She discovered Chester's addiction and, trying to get her son off drugs, stopped him from going out. He then tried to kick the habit, leaving all drugs aside, with the exception of marijuana, which whenever he felt like using a hard drug, he smoked.

The only healthy way he found to try to escape this torment was through his passion in writing poetry and music, something that soon became his main vocation. For a time, Chester even managed to quit drugs. In 1996, at the age of 20, his life seemed to be going very well, and he even married Samantha, with whom he had a son.

And just 3 years later, he was invited to be a vocalist in the Californian band Xero, which would soon change its name to Linkin Park. However, with the band's success, Chester's marriage began to deteriorate, and in 2005 they were officially divorced. With the end of the marriage came a terrible relapse, and a few years later, Chester opened up about his mental health, telling fans that he suffered from depression.

This place right here, this skull between my ears, that is a bad neighborhood I should not be in there alone I can't be in there by myself Interviewer: What are you talking about? You're just crazy man. .

. If I'm in there. .

. I don't say nice things to myself There's another Chester in there that's like. .

. He wants to take me down Unfortunately, like this interviewer, many people don't understand how serious this psychiatric illness is, which makes it much more difficult for the person to open up, for fear of judgment or of thinking it's just “coolness”, “sadness”, “life easy” or “nothing to do”. Chester fought his entire life against this terrible anguish, and one of the ways he had to express himself was through his music, which is why so many of Linkin Park's lyrics address this topic, where he described in detail the affliction he felt: There's something inside me that pulls beneath the surface.

Consuming, confusing. To make matters worse, at the time of the divorce, Chester started using all kinds of drugs again. He got to the point where he was so out of it that his band friends had to intervene before the worst happened.

"They said sometimes I was Chester, and others I was that damn guy. I didn't want to be the other guy. I already knew about my addictions, but I had no idea how much it affected people around me" declared the singer.

Chester had everything: fame, money, success, and even remarried in 2007 with his new wife Talinda, with whom he had three more children - but inside he lived a void so distressing that nothing seemed to be able to fill it. As he said in that interview, he was battling an enemy that lived inside his own head, and his biggest fear is that this enemy would take control once and for all. I can’t seem to find myself again; my walls are closing in.

Without a sense of confidence, I'm convinced that there's just too much pressure to take I've felt this way before, so insecure He carried within him a pain that only increased throughout his life and which had its origins in that little Chester who was just 7 years old. And that's why when the band started working on Crawling's music video, the abuse he had suffered became the main theme of the narrative, as the clip's director himself said: They wanted to really mix in a storyline that helped tie them to their fan base, to their kids. And so that's why we kinda worked in the child abuse.

Like the song, the clip begins with what appears to be the sound of something being sucked down a sink drain, a metaphor for how Chester felt about himself. The doll in contrast to the jewelry indicates that we are in the room of a young girl who has just entered adolescence. We then see the young woman in the bathroom, crying dark tears as if it were a mixture of makeup and blood, representing all the weight she was carrying at such a young age.

The bruise marks on the arms, still painful, and around the girl's eyes reveal the reason for the tears. This reason is the same one that opens the bathroom door handle and approaches the young woman from behind: a man apparently much older than her. When he touches her on the shoulder, her world collapses, and she seeks refuge by isolating herself within.

There seems to be a safe place but unfortunately not for long, as her subconscious is full of traumas that are represented here in the form of blue crystals that could have easily torn the girl apart, if it weren't for one detail. With all the heart and commitment, the song is sung by the band Linkin Park, which here represents a fortress that prevents the crystals from falling on the girl, protecting her from suffering more damage than she has already suffered. In this way, the band creates a strong identification in her where she knows she is not alone, and that there is still hope.

Anyone who knows Linkin Park knows that they have always taken the messages of their songs seriously, not to shock or sell, but to transform people's lives, and that is what they tried to represent with the video, according to Mike Shinoda himself. . References to the trauma Chester suffered are everywhere, from the inappropriate and inconvenient touching, to the fear of judgment from other people.

Love relationships are also impacted, as the victim did not develop sexual maturity in a healthy way. All of this causes those sharp crystals to begin to collapse again on top of the girl, who once again seeks refuge in the music, while crawling inside, making yet another reference to the song's title. When she isolates herself in this place, she has no scars or bruises, but no matter how hard she tries, she always ends up finding within herself that scene she tried to forget.

It is exactly at this moment that Chester sings: Against my will I stand beside my own reflection, it's haunting When someone is a victim of abuse, it is very common for them to feel guilty or uncomfortable with their own body, and therefore have difficulty facing their own image, as it is exactly where everything that haunts her lives. Chester represents the girl's reflection in this scene, precisely because he identifies in real life with everything the character has experienced. Eventually, the band puts so much energy into the song, that they manage to banish the trauma crystals that threatened the girl.

She finally manages to face her own reflection again, and smiles again after escaping those abuses and moving on. But unfortunately, this happy ending was not the same for Chester Bennington. On July 20, 2017, he lost the battle against his inner demons, and left this world, leaving his family, friends and a legion of fans eternally missed.

Some people say that the death of his friend Chris Cornell, lead singer of Audioslave and Soundgarden, would have been a strong trigger that ended Chester once and for all. And tragically this makes sense, if you look at how similar Chris's story was, who even sang about his own death in this famous song: If you want to know more about this story, just click on this video. Thank you very much for your company, and I hope to see you in the next video.