Lincoln Park: Minutes to Midnight F

This album gets an automatic F. Chester Bennington -- the band's emo member who sometimes sports bleached hair and cut-yourself glasses -- is a terrible lyricist. Here's a quick preview: "Put me out of my misery / Put me out of my misery / Put me out of my ... / Put me out of my fucking misery," he screams on the first track (post-intro). Wow. Powerful. Help me, Emo-Wan Kenobi. You're my only hope. \nSeriously, Bennington's lyrics make Fall Out Boy look like Rage Against The Machine. The rest of the album basically proceeds in similar fashion, with only one notable exception. \nMike Shinoda actually lays a decent verse or two on "Hands Held High." Now, I'm just as surprised as anyone to be writing this, but despite the terrible − and sacrilegious − chorus, Shinoda has written what I'm pretty sure is a shout-out to Jean-Paul Sartre: "My brother had a book he would hold with pride / A little red cover with a broken spine. / In the back he hand wrote a quote inside, / 'when the rich wage war, it's the poor who die.'"\nImagine that: the dudes from Linkin Park reading Sartre. \nTrue, one song doesn't make up for the MySpace lyrics of the rest of album, nor does it excuse the rehashed, Disturbed-era guitar riffs, themselves overly simplistic faux rock. But that's not to say it doesn't have its own topical appeal. But perhaps this is obvious, given the band's career multi-diamond record sales. \nJust as U2, Paul McCartney and others still make music to remind us how rock can be both appealing and worthless, Linkin Park reminds us that people who buy CDs listen to awful, lowest-common-denominator music. Yet if you don't listen too carefully, the album still has a glimmer of appeal.