Art & Creativity Quote by Chester Bennington

There is a quiet defiance in Bennington's "We'd like to think" - a hedge that gives away how hard this promise is to keep. Rock culture, especially in the MTV-to-social-media arc Linkin Park lived through, rewards a face, a backstory, a single consumable narrative. Bennington pushes against that gravity. The line is less about modesty than about survival: if the music can outgrow the people who made it, then the band isn't hostage to ego, scandal, burnout, or the industry habit of turning artists into characters.

The subtext is also an appeal for collective authorship. Linkin Park was a rare mainstream machine built on collaboration: rappers and screamers, programmers and guitarists, hooks and abrasion. Saying the music should be "bigger" isn't just myth-making; it's a claim that the work has its own architecture, separate from whichever member happens to be most visible or most mythologized at the moment.

In context, the line reads differently now, after Bennington's death made his "personality" - his pain, his voice, his biography - impossible to disentangle from the songs for many listeners. That hindsight adds poignancy, but it also proves his point. The catalog has continued to function as a shared language for fans who don't know the band members as people, only as a set of emotional coordinates. The ambition is almost anti-celebrity: let the art be the container, not the artist. In a culture that keeps trying to shrink music into a brand, it's a surprisingly radical wish.