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
