Linkin Park's Most Confusing Song

if you've spent much time on music youtube recently, you've probably been recommended a video by Michael Jesse called Why Nobody Knows the Chords to Linkin Park's Biggest Song. the song in question is Breaking The Habit, and he noticed something really weird about it: everyone who does a cover plays a completely different chord progression unique to their version. and not, like, in a cool jazz reharmonizing way, either. no, it genuinely seems like no one agrees on what the chords are even supposed to be. (bang) so why is that? it's a fascinating question, and Michael's analysis is thorough and compelling. I'm not at all surprised the video blew up. but I'm not making this one just to piggyback on his success. no, I'm making it because, at the end of his video, he asked me to. ("if you want the truth, though, I am dying to know what 12tone thinks about this song. so do me a favor: if you happen to have a bluesky account, please post this video at them. ") and a lot of you did. which, like, thanks, I appreciate it, it's a great video, but also, I've seen it now. you can stop. still, as you probably know, I am never one to back down from a challenge, so… sure. let's give it a shot. (tick, tick, tick, tock) before we get started, if you want to see my next video as soon as it's finished or just watch this one ad-free, you can do that on Patreon. there's a link in the description, more on that at the end of the video. like I said, I agree with most of Michael's analysis, but the point where my approach differs from his actually happens pretty early on, when he says this. ("Breaking The Habit has chords. everybody agrees on that. ") and, like… does it? it has harmony, certainly, I think that's obvious, but that's not quite the same thing. when we're looking for a chord progression, we're assuming what music theorists call vertical harmony. or, I've also heard it called salami slice harmony. basically, the piece of music is divided up into discrete chunks of time, usually either a bar or half a bar. for each chunk, there's one chord that's in charge, defining what all the musicians are, and more importantly, aren't, allowed to play. this is easiest to see when someone's playing all the chord tones at once in some sort of block voicing: (bang) but it works just fine with arpeggios, too. (bang) in those cases, we just need to do some harmonic reduction. basically, we take all the notes that everyone plays and rearrange them to spell a chord. here, in the first bar, it's all As, Cs, and Es, so the chord is A minor. the second bar has Cs, Es, and Gs, so it must be C major, and so on. this might look simple, almost mechanical, but doing it well actually requires a lot of skill, experience, and most of all, judgment. and the most infamous example of that comes from the intro to Stairway To Heaven. (bang) three of these chords are easy to reduce, but what's happening with the second one? from the bottom, we have G#, C, E, and B. in Western music, most chords are built in stacks of thirds, so if we move these notes around, the chord they spell is C+ma7. so, ok. maybe it's that. but G# is the same as Ab, so these same notes can also be used to spell Ab+(add#9). but those are some pretty jacked-up chords. everything else is just basic consonant triads. these don't fit the harmonic vocabulary of the surrounding music, so to explain them, we're gonna have to get creative. one option is to say that the A from the previous bar holds over, at least in spirit: he may not play it, this theory says, but he could. we're still calling it a chord tone. and if we do that, we can spell Ami(ma7)... add9. or we could go the other way: in my extremely old video on Stairway, I decided this C wasn't really a chord tone at all. it's a holdover from the chords on either side. if we ignore it, the rest of the notes spell an appropriately simple E major. that gives us four different chord labels, each with its own justification, and which one is correct depends on why you're asking and what you want to do with it. and we can try a similar thing with Breaking The Habit, but as Michael found in his video, it doesn't really work. there's too many notes that pull the reduction in different directions. but here, we can take inspiration from the Stairway chord, because these days, none of those labels are how I like to describe it. instead, I'd turn to a much older theory of harmony. if you traveled back a couple centuries in Europe, you'd find some pieces that are reasonably approachable with vertical analysis, like Johann Sebastian Bach's Prelude in C major: (bang) but you'll also find plenty that aren't. just a few pages later in the same book, we find Bach's Fugue in C major: (bang) and that's a lot harder to reduce. even if we ignore

the passing tones and ornamentations, this one bar still uses all 7 notes of the C major scale. we can try cutting it in half, but each side still has five distinct notes, making this F major 9 to E minor 7 b9. I guess. but Bach wasn't writing jazz. these sorts of chord extensions were extremely rare in the Baroque period. in order to get stylistically appropriate chords, then, we're gonna have to zoom in even further. like, on the downbeat, the notes are F, A, C, and A. that's F major. great. an 8th note later we hear D, F, and A, for D minor, then C major, F major, and so on. and, sure, those are chords, but this feels… overly literal. the point of a vertical approach is that the music moves between different harmonic spaces. that often involves someone playing all the chord tones, but the chords themselves are more like abstract objects. they guide the music from the background, informing the choices that affect what you actually hear. but if we change chords every time anyone plays a note, that's not really chords, at least not as we understand them today. so if vertical harmony doesn't give us much insight, then we should probably try a different approach, one that would have been more familiar to the composers of the time: horizontal harmony, or counterpoint. in a horizontal approach, instead of the harmony influencing the note choices, the note choices are the harmony. a typical counterpoint piece will have multiple melodic lines playing at the same time. each one can stand alone as a decent melody, but they're also carefully written to sound good together. let's go back to the Fugue. (bang) a fugue is a particular style of composition where a series of voices in different registers all take turns playing a single theme in different shapes and on different pitches. this bit comes from the end of the first section, called the exposition, where the voices enter one at a time, each starting off by playing that central theme. here, we see the lowest voice take its turn, and the higher parts all weave around it, developing new, interesting melodies while staying consonant with both the theme and each other. our understanding of the most consonant intervals hasn't changed that much since the 1800s, so that tends to result in recognizable chords, but that's not quite how Bach would have been thinking when he wrote it. harmonic reduction doesn't work here, because there's no abstract harmony to reduce it to. it's a fundamentally different approach: vertical harmony assumes that you can draw clear, distinct boundaries between different chords, while horizontal harmony smashes through those boundaries, creating a harmonic sound that's less amenable to chordal analysis and more to questions of melodic contour and voiceleading. and that's what I think is happening in Stairway, too: across the first three chords, the middle two notes stay the same, the bottom line walks down in half-steps, and the top line walks up in scale steps. that gives you A minor on one side and C on the other, but the chord in the middle isn't really a chord. it's a product of the voiceleading that just sort of happens to look like one. but why are we talking about this? Linkin Park wasn't writing Baroque-era fugues. no, their sound combined lots of different influences, but mainly, it was a fusion of metal and hip-hop. and the thing is, those aren't genres that necessarily rely on chords. instead, they're built, respectively, on riffs and loops, two similar ideas in very different musical contexts. let's start with riffs. a metal riff is a short, repeated melodic phrase, typically played in unison by the bass and guitar. some riffs do lend themselves to chord labels: (bang) but many don't. one of Linkin Park's most obvious inspirations is, of course, Rage Against The Machine, so with that in mind, what are the chords in Bulls On Parade? (bang) I mean, most of these notes belong to F minor 7, so maybe it's that, but really, it just doesn't seem like a useful question to ask. if I was gonna cover this song, I wouldn't even consider replacing it with another F minor sound. (bang) yikes. hip-hop loops are also short, repeated phrases, but they tend to have multiple layers of sound stacked on top of each other, creating a rich, lush texture for the rapper to perform on top of. that can include chords: (bang) but it could also just be a melodic line: (bang) or even a percussive beat with no pitched instruments at all. (bang) given those influences, when we're looking at a Linkin Park song, it makes sense to start our analysis not by asking what the chords are, but if they are. and in Breaking The Habit, I'm not sure the answer's yes. like, ok, let's look at it. the verse, which is the section we're most concerned with here, consists of four melodic lines on four different instruments: Mike Shinoda's piano: (bang) Brad Delson's guitar: (bang) Phoenix Farrell's bass: (bang) and then

a solo violin. (bang) each of these tells a different story. in each bar, the piano plays, from the bottom, E, F#, G, and A. that doesn't spell a chord, but that's ok. remember, one thing we can do in reduction is declare that some notes are nonharmonic tones: that is, they're played during the chord, but they aren't actually part of it. basically, we can ignore notes we don't want to deal with. but if we're throwing notes out, which ones should we keep? we're looking for thirds to start building our chord structure, which means we should take either E and G or F# and A. but E and G are the notes on the strong beats, so the meter seems to tell us that this is meant to be heard as an incomplete voicing of E minor. the rest is decorations. the guitar, on the other hand, has two patterns, both sitting primarily on B. in the first bar, he adds a single syncopated D: (bang) which the second bar replaces with C. (bang) on its own, this looks like maybe some sort of B minor thing with the C being nonharmonic, but we don't hear it on its own. I said the piano part was an incomplete E minor chord, and B is the exact note we need to complete it. we could even call it E minor 7, to account for the D, but I'm not sure we should. D and C both happen in the same metric position, during beat 2, when the piano plays A. of all the notes in that line, A is the one that's least consonant with B, so moving to a higher note avoids a potentially dissonant rub. and we're already starting to see a bit of counterpoint creep in: this choice makes the most sense if we think of it not in terms of chord tones, but in terms of the relationship between two independent melodies. but still, E minor works so far, and it mostly fits with the violin too. but let's check in with the bass. (bang) ok, so, this is where things get a little tricky. the bass typically provides the chord's root: there's always room for decoration, but with long, held notes like this, you'd expect those notes to at least be harmonic. so if we're on E minor the whole time, he should just play E. and he does start there, but then he moves, dipping down to D in bar two and stepping up to F# at the end of bar 4. this implies chord motion, but no one follows it. not the piano, not the guitar, not the violin, and not Chester Bennington's vocals either. as such, I'm inclined to simply view this as more ornamentation. extremely slow ornamentation, certainly, but ornamentation none the less. it provides a melodic contour to the bassline, but it doesn't imply a changing harmony. at least, not vertical harmony. but I'm getting ahead of myself. hold that thought. if we take all these parts together, we definitely start on E minor, and there's no clear indication that we ever leave it. so the obvious answer is that the verse is 16 bars of E minor. in his video, though, Michael rejects that analysis, because listening to it: (bang) there's a clear sense of motion. and I agree. calling it all E minor is, at best, incomplete. I'm just not sure that harmonic motion implies chord motion. instead, I might view this as an example of what Dr. Philip Tagg calls one-chord changes. in his book, Everyday Tonality, Tagg contrasts two different philosophies of harmonic function: harmonic traveling, where chords are thought of as somewhere worth going, and harmonic being, where they're thought of a somewhere worth staying. most of our classical and jazz-informed theories are based on traveling, where you move through a progression in a directional, goal-oriented way, working toward a final climactic resolution. but modern, loop-based harmony tends to rely more on being, providing an interesting harmonic landscape in which the piece to simply exists. one-chord changes is the ultimate expression of that idea, sitting on just one chord but elaborating within that space. the classic example of this is Aretha Franklin's Chain of Fools. (bang) here, the rhythm guitar is playing stabs on C minor for the entire song, and again, no one else really pulls your ear away from that chord. but the bass is playing walk-ups with non-harmonic tones for contour, and the lead guitar has all these fills, often including E natural to give it a more bluesy sound. they're exploring the space, and that exploration creates motion, even without ever really leaving that single chord. but that still has a definite chord: C minor. it's right there in the rhythm guitar. Breaking The Habit doesn't have that, so I'm inclined to view the chord we find inside it the same way I viewed the chords from Bach's Fugue: they exist simply

because the four melodic lines that comprise the section were written to sound good together, and the chords we use were also designed to sound good. because the people making those choices come from similar cultural traditions, they mostly agree on what sounds good, so the consonant interwoven melodies naturally take shapes that resemble chords. it's convergent harmonic evolution, but the thought process here feels very horizontal. and Linkin Park does do stuff like that. Breaking The Habit isn't even the best example: we can hear it more clearly in another song off Meteora, Hit The Floor. (bang) this verse is supported by two melodies: the distorted guitar riff, and a syncopated, percussive line that sounds like maybe a synth marimba? not sure. point is, multiple simultaneous melodies that don't form any obvious chord. it doesn't have quite the same feeling of ambiguity as Breaking The Habit, probably because there's fewer layers, but clearly it's a mode of composition the band is familiar with, and it wouldn't be surprising to see them use it with a little more subtlety elsewhere. so if I had to pick chords for the verse of Breaking The Habit, I'd say it's E minor throughout. but I don't have to, so instead I'm just gonna say it's some form of nu metal counterpoint. but what does that tell us? this is all about analytical frameworks, so what insight do we gain by taking this horizontal approach? three things. first, we can look at the lines individually. as Michael observes in his video, the piano has this constant falling sound. (bang) it's not actually going down, but with the lowest note on the beat 1, there's a sort of barberpole illusion, where it feels like it's always descending without ever really moving. the guitar, on the other hand, has a very different shape. (bang) it's mostly static, with occasional accent notes popping out, and unlike every other line here it's aggressively syncopated, but the overall effect is very restrained. the bass has a different shape again, this time very tidal, rising and falling around that central pitch, and the strings have large, jagged leaps in both directions. second, we can look at how they interact. this includes things like noticing how the leap in the guitar aligns with the piano, or comparing the intervals in the long held notes from the bass and violin. but it can also be more philosophical. as we saw, each melody has its own very different contour. not only are they playing different notes at different times, they're doing it with different goals, in different directions. this gives the verse a sprawling, expansive sound, simultaneously capturing the downward pull of depression, the static anxiety of obsessive rumination, sudden, unprepared jolts of unexpected stress, and the slow, plodding rhythm of days passing by without purpose. all in one groove. and third, we can look at durations. the piano loop is 1 bar long, the guitar is 2, the bass is 4, and the strings are 8. this results in a sort of fractal looping structure, with patterns of repetition unfolding on multiple time scales simultaneously. it makes the section more compelling to listen to, and it creates a sort of perceptual hierarchy among the various emotions of the song. they're not all the same: some are sudden and urgent, while others are so routine as to become invisible, even if they probably shouldn't. this, I think, is also responsible for that harmonic motion we were talking about earlier: the shorter patterns define a basic unit of length that the long ones contradict, so it feels like there are distinct boundaries that naturally imply chords. but none of this answers our real question, because Michael didn't invent the idea of a chord progression. he looked at dozens of covers and found that every one played some sort of chords, so if I'm gonna say there aren't any, I need to explain that too. and I can. looking at all 20 examples in Michael's video, 2 of them have full bands, 4 are on piano, 1 is electric guitar, and the other 13 are all acoustic guitar. that's 90% solo instruments, and 65% just acoustic. and that makes sense: solo instruments, especially the acoustic guitar, are the primary aesthetic of the youtube cover. they're easy to arrange, perform, and record, all from the comfort of your bedroom. but that presents a problem. Breaking the Habit is four intersecting melodies, played on four different instruments. I'm not gonna say it's impossible to play them all at once, I've learned over the years to never underestimate what youtube guitarists are capable of, but it would be very hard, and I don't think it'd sound better than just doing what acoustic guitars were built to do: strum chords. and this turns Breaking The Habit into a sort of harmonic Rorschach test. you're given a song with no chords in a context that strongly encourages you to find them anyway. there's no single riff you can extract and play on its own, but also no definite guidance on which chords to replace them with. so you wind up making something up that supports the vocal melody and at least sounds close enough to the original. I can't say for certain whether these artists are thinking of it that way, or if they do hear those chords in the song, but either way, the context dictates they make a choice, so they do. and when you leave a blank, different people will fill it differently. as far as I can tell, that's all that's happening here. the reason this caught my attention, though, is that it highlights something that's become kind

of a north star for my work: approaching songs on their own terms. when you're this far down a rabbit hole and still struggling, it's easy to think that if you just keep digging deeper, you'll eventually find the answer. but in my experience, getting to that point in the first place is a good sign that you're not asking the right question. and I don't say that as any sort of judgment: the same thing happens to me all the time. it almost happened in my last video, on 99 Luftballons. regular viewers will know I have a particular model I like to use for analyzing chord loops, but the chords there didn't make sense. they broke my rules in ways I couldn't explain, and it took me a long time to realize that I needed to step back and try a different approach. but as soon as I decided to treat them not as a chord loop but as a punk riff, everything clicked into place. the tools I have for those fit perfectly with what I was hearing. and that's what music theory is all about: having as many models as possible in your back pocket, so when one doesn't work, you can always switch to another. you can find the right lens, instead of trying to wrestle it into a specific framework that's not helping. if a song refuses to tell you what its chords are, then, by Occam's razor, it probably doesn't have any. and once you realize that, all you have to do is figure out what it does have instead. it's not surprising to me that this song could be so confusing: the 2000s were a transformational time for popular music. not only were there new genres being blended in, like metal, hip-hop, and EDM, there were also new technologies and production techniques that changed how music got made, and, of, course, the internet caused a radical shift in how the music industry worked. the stuff that made it to the radio was a bizarre amalgamation of sounds and styles unlike anything we'd ever heard. to blatantly misuse an Antonio Gramsci quote, The old world was dying, and the new world struggled to be born. but when the dust finally settled, one of the first true megahits of the new pop sound was Gotye's Somebody That I Used To Know. this came out near the end of my time at college, and if you weren't there, it's hard to describe just how ubiquitous this song was. but believe me, it was everywhere. so much so that Gotye himself felt overwhelmed by the attention and quickly withdrew from the public eye. but the song had a lasting impact on the music of the decade that followed, so for my next video, I decided to finally take it apart. it was a really fun song to break down, with tons of layers to dig through, both musically and figuratively. and if you want to see that video, it'll be up in a couple weeks on Patreon. it'll come on youtube at some point in the new year, but my Patreon patrons help make this channel possible, so to say thanks, I always put my videos up early over there. as always, there's a link in the description if you want to check that out. and hey, thanks for watching. thanks to our featured patrons, Susan Jones, Jill Sundgaard, Howard Levine, Warren Huart, Damien Fuller-Sutherland, Neil Moore, and Geoff! check out Patreon for a fuller outro, and as always, keep on rockin'.