In late May legions of emo-metal fans were delighted to the latest morsel dribbled out by rock’s biggest boy band, Linkin Park. The song, titled "New Divide," scored the band their third top-ten hit after debuting at #6.

The song has caused a massive controversy among bored and angry suburban 16-22 year olds. Why? Many claim it sounds exactly like previous hits "Crawling," "Somewhere I Belong," and the group’s contribution to the first Transformers movie, "What I’ve Done."

Text messages flew between teens sitting next to each other in their parents’ half-finished basements upon first hearing the song. One exchange between a pair of soon-to-be college freshman caused a new divide in their friendship. As the song ended one of the youngsters, John, texted "OMG new LP rox!" to his buddy Grant. Grant’s reply? "AYSOS? old Transformers song." It got heated after a few more texts resulting in John typing out "4Q" before storming out of the basement to hide in his pitch-black bedroom.

While Internet boards and Myspace profiles have been flooded with similar whiney arguments over the song, don’t blame diehard fans for not initially noticing the similarities – they needed a little help from Apple to get them out of a stupor. You see, if you start a playlist with any of those four songs using Apple’s newish iTunes feature, Genius, all four songs make the list. Sometimes they even get played in a row. Fans thought they had duplicate copies of some songs only to realize the striking similarities.

The band refuses to comment on the similarities, focusing on the new musical direction of the song. Apparently if you play the same music and cry similar lyrics over a song, but add synthesizers, you are heading down a new musical direction. Someone should tell Bon Jovi this, they keep releasing the same song over and over (oh wait, adding some twang does mean a new musical direction, even if it is the same awful song).

At Linkin Park’s message board, loyal fans have given the song solid reviews. Regular poster 'qwetrz' gave his review of "New Divide" to the delight of fellow LP fans:

first verse: makes me think of pokemon. i see Ash and Pikachu standing opposite each other in a black, thundering night, and the scene spins in a typical anime 'opponents measuring each other up'. omg. i can even see the wind waving Pikachu's ears. emotion: O.0?!

chorus: Ash running with Pokemon. then the scene switches to something like Dune. emotion: creeped out

second verse: ragged people going through a desert. emotion: hmmm...

the rest doesn't give me any images at all, just a feeling of being overwhelmed by something undefineable.

I couldn't have said it better, qwertz.