ReCollision: Remembering The Time Jay-Z and Linkin Park Collaborated

I have an unhealthy obsession with Collision Course, the collaborative EP made by Linkin Park and Jay-Z in 2004. I call it unhealthy because it’s an intimate knowledge that truly serves no real world application, a burden of information whose usefulness exists somewhere above my ability to recite the movie BASEketball almost word-for-word, but below my ability to recall the entire history of the X-Men.

So if I have to constantly think about how, during a performance of ‘Numb/Encore’ at the 2006 Grammy Awards, Paul McCartney joined Linkin Park and Jay-Z to perform a rendition of ‘Yesterday’, then you do too.

But before we talk about Collision Course, we need to walk about Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album, a mash-up project that combined Jay-Z’s The Black Album with the Beatles’ White Album. Through remix he managed to find a common ground between two artists and genres, forming something unique on the other side. It is the gold standard of mash-up projects, bringing a legitimacy to the form that surpassed the usual novelty.

It was also released in 2004, nine months before Collision Course. This is not a coincidence. MTV, seeing the hype surrounding Danger Mouse’s project, quickly asked themselves the most important question possible: “Well, how can we make money from this?” The answer? MTV floated the idea of doing a mash-up to Jay-Z and, according to an interview with Mike Shinoda, he asked for Linkin Park by name. The collision course was set.

Jay-Z wanting to work with Linkin park is the thing I just can’t get past. He had just hit a career high with The Black Album the year before, and was supposedly retiring from music. Did Collision Course mean so much to Jay-Z that he came out of his self-imposed retirement to make it happen? Was he tossing and turning in his sleep, trying to figure out a way he could work with the guys who made ‘Crawling’?

These are the kind of questions that keep me up at night.

Meanwhile, Linkin Park’s sophomore album, Meteora, had tapped into the frustrated emotions of suburban teenagers worldwide, cementing their place as one of the biggest alternative acts of the 2000s.

There was some very obvious corporate brand synergy to MTV’s plan. This wasn’t another ‘Walk This Way’, where Run-DMC lifted a floundering Aerosmith back into the pop cultural consciousness, essential restarting the band’s career. It was a veteran artist teaming up with one of the hottest contemporary acts. Why target the pockets of one fanbase when you can get two at the same time? Linkin Park fans might not buy a Jay-Z album, but they will buy a mash-up album that features Jay-Z — and vice versa. As one of those aforementioned frustrated suburban teens, I genuinely had no idea who Shawn Carter was, but I appreciated that Linkin Park were helping blow up his career.

It’s that shallow brand synergy that missed the art of Danger Mouse’s original project. (An MTV headline from around the time the EP dropped boldly declared, “Jay-Z And Linkin Park Show Danger Mouse How It’s Done.”) And like a lot of Jay’s collaboration choices it was ultimately self-serving one, allowing him to tap into a wider audience. He’s a business, man. Collision Course hit at №1 on the Billboard charts, and was certified Platinum within a year.

Looking back, Collision Course is a footnote in both artists’ catalogues. Neither of them really needed it; no one really needed it. But like the off-brand videogame that your grandma buys you for Christmas, we got it anyway. Released at a time when both artists were, arguably, at the top of their game and despite their individual triumphs, the tragic irony of Collision Course is an incredibly uneven piece of music that somehow misses what makes either performer enjoyable in the first place.

Linkin Park’s vocalists, Chester Bennington and Shinoda, never fully gel with the non-Linkin Park instrumentals. Shinoda sounds particularly awkward on ‘Izzo/In The End’. In a testament to his dexterity, Jay has no problem rapping over ‘Faint’ or ‘Points of Authority’, but his involvement lacks energy. For someone who was supposedly chomping at the bit to work with Linkin Park, it never really shows. Was Jay just humouring them? The only moment on the EP where they reach some form of artistic equilibrium and create something truly listenable/interesting occurs on ‘Numb/Encore’, the collaboration’s sole single.

If you watch the making of documentary/live perfomance, (which I have, with the same fervor one might watch the Zapruder tape), it’s clear the project means a lot to Mike Shinoda. He was the guy who rapped in Linkin Park, and was responsible for producing the EP’s mashed-up beats. (In his early career he’d mash-up Jay-Z songs with Smashing Pumpkins and Nine Inch Nails.) He’d go on to release a rap-centric solo project under the name Fort Minor, with Jay-Z in the executive producer seat. After HOV lays down some bars on ‘Jigga What/Faint’, Shinoda is weak in the knees. I’m happy because he’s happy.

There’s also a bit in the live performance where Bennington lets a blood-curdling scream at the end of ’99 Problems/Points of Authority’ and the camera quickly cuts to Jay’s reaction, which is a mix of shock and confusion. It’s pretty funny.

As a novelty, it wasn’t that groundbreaking either. Rap sung over aggressive metal instrumentals wasn’t exactly a new concept in 2004. The popularity of nu-metal was still fresh in most people’s minds, and it’s that notoriety that allowed Linkin Park to carve out their space in the pop cultural landscape of the early 2000s. If you want to go further back, Public Enemy and Anthrax had already bridged rap and metal with their collaborative cover of ‘Bring the Noise’ in 1991.

Collision Course isn’t unimportant, though. The combining of two huge musicians with totally disparate styles might’ve seemed offbeat in 2004, but it feels normal in 2019. Indie folk darling Bon Iver has extensively collaborated with rapper Kanye West, rocker Jack White worked with pop queen Beyonce, and The Prince of Darkness himself, Ozzy Osbourne, guests on the new album by the spokesperson for ill-advised tattoos, Post Malone.

It was a corporate experiment, but it was still an experiment. Collision Course opened doors and exposed two sets of fanbases to music they might not have tried. People bought this EP — it was certified Platinum in multiple countries — and the Venn diagram crossover of the Linkin Park fans and Jay-Z fans grew. In a post-Spotify world where everything is available at a simple click and algorithms tell us what we should be listening to, it’s almost quaint to think that’s how people used to discover new music. While it didn’t create the cross-genre mash-up or set a new standard, it helped break down a portion of the wall of genre tribalism.

And at the very least, it’s only 21-minutes long.