Linkin Park co-headlined Hellfest over the weekend with heavy acts like Aerosmith, and fans weren’t too happy when the band performed their infamous new song “Heavy.” Fans flipped off frontman Chester Bennington, with one even throwing a jug at him. Bennington responded by blowing a kiss, and with a series of tweets.
“Hellfest was fun. Had a blast watching people mosh to ‘In the End’ and then flip me off when we played ‘Heavy.’ I blew them kisses.”
“After I blew kisses to the guys flipping me off. They smiled and gave me heart hands back.”
“I welcomed the huge crowd of condemned souls to HELLFEST in my metal voice then we played ‘Invisible.’ The look of shock on people’s faces.”
“All kidding aside… the crowd was great and handled our set pretty well. Our French fans are awesome.”
“Does anyone else find it funny that the same people calling us sellouts are suggesting that we change our set to conform to HELLFEST?”
Chester Bennington discussed the reaction to “Heavy” last month.
“Either you like the song or you don’t and if you don’t like the song because you hear it and on a knee-jerk reaction it’s like ‘oh it doesn’t have metal in it so I don’t like it’, that’s fine, like whatever,” said Bennington. “But if you’re gonna be the person who says like ‘they made a marketing decision to make this kind of record to make money’ you can fucking meet me outside and I will punch you in your fucking mouth because that is the wrong fucking answer.
“Because guess what, calling us a sell out for that purpose is… selling out on your fucking excuse as to why you don’t like it. You’re a fucking pussy. For any band to take musical risks because you like what you’re doing in spite of what you know some people will say they don’t like, it doesn’t matter if they like it or not–what matters is that you took the chance to do something that you felt was important to you and that’s what being an artist is all about.”
