‘Come to Daddy’: The record that “revolutionised” how Mike Shinoda looked at music
Linkin Park’s Mike Shinoda knows what it takes to break through the seemingly unrelenting noise of the music industry, but away from his own songwriting and sonic ventures, he also clearly has a defining ear for the sounds that have become the holy grail for him in crafting his trade. Yet between the screeching riffs of his own work and the electronic high of 1980s new wave, there was always one particular album that stood out to Shinoda as changing the course of his musical life.
While the influences of the Beastie Boys and Rage Against the Machine were seminal to the rapper’s blend of alternative rock and hip hop, it was the boom and beats of a record by another musical genius that “revolutionised” the way Shinoda looked at the artform where he would later make his name.
That was the EP Come to Daddy by the electronic cult king Aphex Twin, released in 1997 as a warbling dystopian drone of drum and bass that proved an artistic muse for a young Shinoda. Speaking of its title tune, he claimed it was “Such a good song, it’s crazy. The idea of using a computer to rip apart sounds and make a song? Wow.”
But Shinoda aside, it seems he wasn’t the only one who became wrapped up in the Cornish producer’s pioneering wrath. The single ‘Come to Daddy’ became Aphex Twin’s most critical mainstream chart success, peaking inside the top 40 and, in doing so, opening up a world of trippy tunes and blasting beats.
The Linkin Park founder went on to explain his reverence of the song further by saying: “It completely revolutionised the way that I approached making music, and you can hear my Aphex Twin homages – all the glitchy, stuttering audio – all over Hybrid Theory,” the band’s 2000 debut album.
However, in many ways, Shinoda’s seminal Come to Daddy was but a later manifestation of Aphex Twin’s underground paralytic peak that had taken place in the earlier part of the 1990s with his two volumes of Selected Ambient Works, released in 1992 and 1994, respectively. These records were the soundtrack of the unlikely raver, the underdog, and the non-city livers like Aphex Twin himself, whose trips into the drug dance culture produced much more twisted results than those dominating the clubs could ever conceive of.
The electronic ingenuity and slight off-the-cuff weirdness of Aphex Twin garnered a critical cult following, with Shinoda clearly a leading voice among them. But what is most interesting is not only how he cites the pioneering producer as not only an inspiration but a direct influence on the brand of music Linkin Park went on to create, making Aphex Twin’s sonic legacy one that spans all the way from the ‘90s underground to the 2000s and 2010s alternative rock.
It’s maybe not the most conventional or expected route for the impact of an electronic visionary to take, but it certainly fits the bill of Aphex Twin taking us on journeys we couldn’t imagine.
