The Linkin Park Anthem We Need in 2025

 “When the rich wage war, it’s the poor who die.” - Sartre 

Track number seven on Linkin Park’s third studio album, Minutes to Midnight (2007), is a song about the aftermath of 9/11. Unlike much of their other rock and hip-hop sounds from their two previous albums, “Hands Held High” uses a snare drum, pipe organ, and the vocal harmonies of the entire band to create a wholly different sound closer to an army ballad hymn. 

Uniquely situated between rock, nu metal, and hip-hop with a little “industrial” vibe, Linkin Park’s sound along with their raw lyrics about anger, depression, and mental health struggles had already shot them up on the billboards with singles like “Crawling,” “In the End,” “Breaking the Habit,” and “Numb” from their first two albums, Hybrid Theory (2000) and Meteora (2003). And while Minutes to Midnight boasted the single “What I’ve Done” which was included in the Transformers movie soundtrack, the mood of their music had shifted. 

In May of 2007, the Minutes to Midnight album was released, the title a reference to the Doomsday Clock and signaling the band’s intentions to redirect their art both musically and thematically in their lyrics. This is especially true of “Hands Held High.” 

I’ve circled back to this song in the wake of Trump’s return to power. Foreign affairs are increasingly tense even this early in the presidency and as I’ve watched in horror as the United States has walked back international pacts, left global organizations, and, as a mother might say, chosen the wrong friends to run with, I can’t help but scramble for the comfort music I had to cling to back from the first time I was aware of the international scene and America’s place in it. 

I could argue that the P.O.D. song “Youth of the Nation” actually reminds me more of the event of 9/11 itself seeing as how that album was released on the day of the tragedy and speaks of another national tragedy: the Columbine school shooting from 1999. I get chills when I hear that song, the introduction of children laughing before the guitar and rap starts, narrating what it is to be a student in an American school experiencing violence. The parallels of that intro perfectly fit what that day felt like for me, coming in from fifth grade recess to see the teacher wheel in the television where we saw, live, the second plane crash into the tower. 

But “Hands Held High” was released six years later after America had changed forever and I’d personally had enough time to live through horrors of my own against the backdrop of the toxic Christian nationalism I was surrounded by. By the time this song came out, I was beginning to wonder about the war in the Middle East, about why “See You at the Pole” was such a big deal to the adults around me, about what my parents were hiding from me when they quickly turned off the nightly news when I got out of bed for a glass of water. 

The first verse criticizes the power structure between the federal government and ordinary American citizens, asking for protest. It goes on to condemn the war being called “a different brand of war” and the imbalance of the rich and the poor before moving to the bridge that will be repeated in the second verse. The bridge is about George W. Bush “stuttering and mumbling for nightly news to replay / And the rest of the world watching at the end of the day / In the living room, laughing like, "What did he say?"

This song, especially the musicality of it, speaks perfectly to the Christian leaders’ attempt to call for a revival after the events of 9/11, the desperation of Christian groups to use the tragedy for their benefit. The song begins with pipe organs before introducing a snare beat reminiscent of an army drum before the rapping begins. Between verses, the pipe organs come back into focus and the snares drop off, evoking the scene of a solemn congregation in church and the band members harmonize together singing “Amen” over and over until the snare picks back up and leads into the second verse. An important difference is that the evocation of religious music doesn’t signal towards Christianity, but to a solemnity of the political moment.  

The second verse is more globally aware of the destruction that war brings and Shinoda wonders what it must be like to live in a place surrounded by soldiers and musing on the horrors children in that environment endure and what that must feel like. He comments in this verse: “It's ironic, at times like this you'd pray / But a bomb blew the mosque up yesterday.” He even includes a Sartre quote, though in an interview expressed disappointment that the quote had been misattributed. The quote is: "When the rich wage war, it's the poor who die." The second verse ends with a bridge adjusting the audience to being scared and angry instead of laughing at the nightly news. The rest of the song includes the harmonizing “Amen” and two lines over and over again against the pipe organs: “With hands held high into a sky so blue / as the ocean opens up to swallow you.” The tone invites listeners to take pause and consider the serious reality of war as they experience it on the nightly news and also how those across the world experience it. 

In the current moment, this song seems to fit the bill. As Americans, we must have a global understanding of politics, especially as the mood continues to sour in our foreign affairs. As Mike Shinoda rapped in “Hands Held High,” I leave you with the following lines: 

“Risk something, take back what's yours / Say something that you know they might attack you for.”