My husband likes “divorced dad rock” — music full of death and despair. These songs are angsty, and full of anger, pain, regret, and grief. Music in the “divorced dad rock” category must be about one or more of the following topics: breakups, suicidal ideation, anger against a parent, or intense emotional pain.

Incidentally this kind of music has contributed to the social glorification of numbness and romanticism around internal suffering. This normalization of undigested pain can be deadly and likely is because more people are taking their lives every day. To mentally healthy and stable people with little undigested pain like my husband, this music is harmless, and actually inspiring. To those with what feel like bottomless pits of undigested pain inside, this music is resonant, but also, often keeps them in a place of suffering.

On another note, some artists are special in a way no industry plant or AI vocalist can beat. Such artists have talent that is so clearly a sacred gift from their Creator. When I hear Carrie Underwood sing, I am almost instantly moved to tears for this reason. God is in her voice. However, she is not the artist that led me to the subject of this post or who inspired me to consider this topic at all. That artist is Chester Bennington.

“Numb” is about the inner critic — the internalized parent who makes us abandon our true selves and numbs us through shame and undigested pain.

This song is likely about a broken relationship, and is believed to be about a lover. While I see the potential for it to be romantic, it feels more abstract than that. The other person is never named, gendered, or even recognized as a person. Who is the subject singing to? It seems likely that he is singing to a part of himself, maybe a younger self. Regardless, this song is deeply personal, cryptic, and emotionally charged.

Alternative rock is the last place I expected to find a voice so powerful, so charged, that it would move me to tears. But it’s undeniable. Talent is a gift from God. Even secular music can carry God’s presence if the artist has a God-given gift.

When I hear Chester sing, I hear humility and awareness of God. What I sense is distance from God—because of pain. It reminds me of the song When I’m Gone by 3 Doors Down— “somewhere in this darkness there’s a light that I can’t find, maybe it’s too far away, or maybe I’m just blind.” The light is there because you can hear it in his voice, but in the words he’s saying and the heaviness they carry, you also know that he feels far from it.

True talent trivializes the things they sing about because the magnitude of the gift transcends the topic. In other words, it doesn’t really matter what the meaning of the song was because the real power behind it was his talent. And that is what sets Chester apart from any other divorced dad rocker. God is in his voice, and it gives so much more depth to his work.

Chester Bennington is someone who experienced horrible pain and suffering most people could not even imagine. He was molested for years by other men in his childhood, and despite achieving massive success, fame, fortune, and building a loving family, he took his own life in 2017. When I look at Chester Bennington, and hear his voice, I sense his pain and self-hatred — through no fault of his own. He was violated. I would imagine he didn’t have any person, tool or resource in his lifetime that helped him begin to grasp the depth of undigested pain that lay in his unconscious. I can assume this because his music is not about healing or conquering so much as it is fighting. Living with undigested pain and trauma of such intensity is a daily fight. After three decades of fighting, he withdrew and ended his life. I can’t imagine he did so for any reason other than the pain inside was too much to bear any longer.

This makes it even more painful for the listener who hears God in his voice to know that Chester never found the light. He never experienced the healing and freedom he deserved from the heavy pain he carried.

While I consider Linkin Park to be an outlier of the genre because of the talent between Bennington and Shinoda, they still contribute to the glorified numbness that marks the category of “divorced dad rock” and society at large. It’s become more acceptable to be emotionally suffering than to be thriving — and it’s far more common. Songs about enjoying life and love don’t do nearly as well in the mainstream media as those about breakups, mourning, loss, angst, bitterness, and seeking revenge.

more on glorified numbness in “divorced dad rock”

Bring Me to Life by Evanescence

This song is about dissociation–a trauma symptom that involves “leaving your body” psychologically because the pain you experience is too great and you don’t have the tools to process it. Amy Lee wrote this song at 19 after an abusive relationship and losing her younger sister. In an interview, Lee said that she did not allow herself “a lot of outward grief” to protect her parents’ emotions, instead turning her pain into creating music. In other words, she admits to self-abandoning to protect her parents instead of herself. She was parentified; she was not allowed to grieve. That self-abandonment gave birth to dissociation, numbness, and both of those things dramatically packaged and conveyed in this hit song.

My Own Prison by Creed

This song is about feeling condemned to a life of pain, suffering and hatred that the singer feels he deserves. While he knows someone is willing and able to forgive him (God), he believes he has confined himself to a life stuck in his own pain. There is no resolution to the song, because he does not receive mercy, forgiveness, or healing. This is because he must give these things to himself in order to be “acquitted” in the court. Which is why, he is condemned to stay in his “own prison” that he created.

Scott Stapp, the lead vocalist of Creed, wrote this song.

In a podcast interview with Theo Von, he claimed that his parents would physically abuse him “in the name of God”, and that he would live his life “on a timer”, having to finish certain activities by a certain time to avoid further punishment.

Stapp also attempted suicide twice. This fact and the above statement reveal a lot about the nature of his inner world. Stapp believed that he deserved to suffer because God wanted it which meant that he did actually glorify undigested pain. He grew up with an understanding of God as vindictive, cruel, and harsh, rather than warm, loving and forgiving. As such, in order to be faithful and serve his God he must take whatever suffering life hands him and endure it, without ever being free from his “prison” of undigested emotional pain. Long before I ever heard this song, this topic was the subject of my senior undergraduate thesis in psychology. Our parents are the first and only God we know of, and unless we grow up and pursue a revelation of God independent of our parents, we will never truly know Him as He really is. We will assume God is the same way our parents were, and our life will be guided by the same beliefs no matter how wrong or painful they are. This is why having a personal relationship with God is so important to psychological well being, and why many people who experienced parental religious abuse choose to flee from any belief in God altogether. In Stapp’s case, rather than flee, he clung to the same understanding of God his parents taught him by being his first gods.

There is a lot more to say on this topic, and many more songs to unpack. I will likely continue to discuss this in future posts. For now, be sure to read the posts referenced here, in which I discuss some of these topics in further detail.