Linkin Park co-founder Mike Shinoda has recently been interviewed by Kerrang Radio’s Sophie K. this week and talked about Linkin Park’s role in destroying the genre barriers in the early 2000s as well as the artists who are blending music genres these days.

As you may already know, Linkin Park was founded by Dave Farrell, Joe Hahn, Rob Bourdon, Brad Delson, and Mike Shinoda himself back in 1996 and the original name of the band was ‘Hybrid Theory’ which was also the debut album of the band.

As the name of the album has indicated, the band aimed to break the barriers between genres and managed to sell over 5 million hardcopies in a year and became the best-selling album of 2001. In that period, Linkin Park got many invitations from the musicians and bands of different genres like Snoop Dogg, Ozzy Osbourne, Cypress Hill, Adema, Jonathan Davis, etc.

In his latest interview with Kerrang!, Mike Shinoda talked about why Hybrid Theory had such an impact on the music industry and his inspirations while making it.

Here is what Mike Shinoda said:

“It’s part of the mission statement of Linkin Park. We were called Hybrid Theory and we played a role in it. None of us would try and claim that we broke all the boundaries between genres, but we played a role in breaking boundaries between genres.

It’s funny, ’cause I think some of the new generations don’t even know the way things were before bands like us, and then how albums like ‘Hybrid Theory’ and so on changed the way people looked at music.

They were born after that, and they got born into that just being the way things are — mixed genres is just the way you listen. ‘Hey, what’s your favorite type of music?’ ‘I like whatever.'”

He continued:

“When I was a kid, if somebody said, ‘What’s your favorite type of music?’, you had an answer — it was rap or it was metal, it was a specific kind of metal, and that was it. ‘You listen to these things too?’ ‘No. Fuck those things.‘ It’d be that serious. And now people don’t even think about it.

“I heard Led Zeppelin because beastie boys sampled them. My first concert was Public Enemy with Anthrax and Primus. So those guys were paving the way for what was teaching me about blending genres. Rage had just come out. It’s crazy.”

You can check out the whole interview below.

Click here for the source.