What I've Done Details

"What I've Done" is a song by American rock band Linkin Park. It was released as the first single from their third album, Minutes to Midnight. The song is composed in the key of G minor and is set in 4/4 time. The song was released as a radio single on April 1, 2007, as a digital download on April 2, and as a CD single on April 30. The live version of "What I've Done" from Road to Revolution: Live at Milton Keynes was nominated for Best Hard Rock Performance at the 52nd Grammy Awards.It is also featured on the Transformers soundtrack, Transformers: The Album. The song is featured in the video game Guitar Hero World Tour and was released in a Linkin Park DLC pack for Rock Band 3 in January 2011.

The music video for "What I've Done" explores the many ironies of humanity and its ill effects on the earth and the environment. It juxtaposes various pieces of footage: a large, well-fed man eating fast food, a woman measuring her waist and a man who is so malnourished that his ribcage is visible through his skin; African Americans being hosed down by the Ku Klux Klan; nuclear explosions, the World Trade Center towers collapsing, children waving American flags, a Middle Eastern child holding an AK-47, clips of oil tankers torn in half and birds covered in an oil slick. The band's turntablist Joe Hahn directed the video for the single, which was shot in the California desert. The video premiered on April 2, 2007 on MTV and Fuse. It premiered on MTV-Asia, MTV-Germany, TMF Netherlands and Canada's MuchMusic on April 3, 2007.

It features footage of the band performing in the desert, interspersed with stock footage reflecting on a variety of social and environmental issues including pollution, global warming, racism, Nazism, the Ku Klux Klan, abortion, starvation, terrorism, warfare and nuclear warfare, deforestation, poverty, drug addiction, obesity, destruction, rising gasoline prices and crimes committed by humanity. The video also features short views of important historical figures, such as Mother Teresa, Abraham Lincoln, Robert Kennedy, Fidel Castro, Saddam Hussein, Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Mao Zedong, and Mahatma Gandhi. Some cut scenes like the traffic scene and the napalm exploding were also featured on the Rise Against music video for "Ready To Fall".

Music video

The video clip was featured and won on MTV's Battle of the Videos against videos by Evanescence ("Sweet Sacrifice") and Lil' Mama ("Lip Gloss"). The video also marks the first appearance of a Linkin Park video in the #1 spot on MTV's TRL, hitting #1 six times so far. The video is among the all-time top 50 most viewed on YouTube with over 41 million views. AOL currently has a live performance of "What I've Done" on their website.

When the band's logo is shown for the first time in the video (on the front of Rob's bass drum), it features a complete circle with the stylized letters "LP" within it. However, every time the logo is shown after this, the circle is not complete, being "separated" by two blank spaces above the "L" and below the "P". This is explained in "Making of What I've Done", where the band shows the original drums that were incorrectly made, and that they had to use black tape to make the breaks in the circle.

Chester's jacket was lent to him by Yellowcard frontman Ryan Key as mentioned in an episode (Episode 89) of MTV Cribs.

Alternate music video

A second video, made exclusively for Australia, features a considerably different scenario from the first; instead of clips of human sin, the video tells the story of a woman (played by Emma Mullings) working at a government-run pharmaceutical company learning of a plan to develop a deadly new virus for "social control", and - with the help of several people dressed in black hooded sweatshirts with Linkin Park's logo on them - smuggles out several blood samples of a human test subject of the virus to expose the conspiracy. The video can be seen on YouTube and Linkin Park's Australian website