Points of Authority

This song is about a person who tries to control someone through intimidation and aggression. Chester Bennington was molested by acquaintances when he was young, which influenced the song.

This appears on Linkin Park's debut album, Hybrid Theory, which established the band as nu-metal stars. It sold 5 million copies in the US (on its way to 12 million by 2020), making it the best-selling album of 2001 in America. But the band weren't fond of the nu-metal tag, which lumped them in with acts like Limp Bizkit and Korn. "We never liked it," Shinoda said in a 2008 Kerrang interview. "People lazily slapped that label on bands like us, but we never shared much in common with most of the bands we were grouped with. We didn't have the same interests, goals, musical influences, or sound. I felt like we weren't from the same scene."

Shinoda's vocal scat in the intro was inspired by Black Thought of the hip-hop group The Roots. "I heard him doing that on Illadelph Halflife, and I just thought there was something so cool about that. And I thought it would mix well with the scratching, so we kind of did this back-and-forth with those things," he told Billboard in 2020.