Nu metal’s commercial darlings Linkin Park have added yet another entry to Spotify’s Billions Club, with their 2001 single “Crawling” crossing the streaming milestone earlier today. Of the over 1,200 songs that have accumulated one billion streams, only 24 at the time of writing could plausibly be called nu metal, and Linkin Park is responsible for eight of those two dozen.
“Crawling” was the second single off of Hybrid Theory and has always had a mythological aura about it. It's more explicitly autobiographical than many of the album’s tracks, eschewing some of the vagueness that earned them a reputation for being infinitely relatable to teenagers. On “Crawling,” Chester Bennington is singing about his addictions, his lack of control, and his fear that healing may be out of reach. The song is also notoriously one of their most difficult to perform live. The deceptively simple melody hides complex vocal flips and a chorus that was right at the top of Bennington's range. It's been the downfall of countless aspiring cover artists and karaoke rockstars, becoming a sort of nu metal "Take On Me." In their modern configuration, Linkin Park transposes the song up a whole step to better accommodate current vocalist Emily Armstrong’s range.
While “Crawling" didn’t achieve the smash success of Hybrid Theory’s other singles (although any lack of success is relative when talking about an album that's sold over 30 million copies), it did earn the band their first Grammy award, winning Best Hard Rock Performance in 2002.
