‘That Moment Is Really Special’: Linkin Park & Jay-Z’s ‘Collision Course’ Turns 20

This month marks the 20th anniversary of Collision Course, the six-song collaborative project from Jay-Z and Linkin Park. A landmark release between two superstar artists, Collision Course debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart following its release on Nov. 30, 2004, and spawned a Grammy-winning smash in “Numb/Encore.”

To celebrate the anniversary, below is an excerpt about the genesis and impact of Collision Course from It Starts With One: The Legend and Legacy of Linkin Park, a new book from Billboard executive director of music Jason Lipshutz, published in October through Hachette Books.

Projects like Collision Course were not ordinary in popular music in 2004, so when it was first announced, it sounded like a fever dream. Jay-Z and Linkin Park collaborating on an official multi-song project?

Two artists at the peak of their commercial power combining their biggest hits, Voltron-style, into new megahits? It was unfathomable, but somehow, it was happening.

Jay-Z had worked with rock artists before 2004, and Reanimation proved Linkin Park’s bona fides as hip-hop interlopers. Yet even so — Collision Course was something different. This was Godzilla versus King Kong, a mega-wattage showdown that, worst- case scenario, would be a publicity stunt guaranteed to move a lot of units. Best case? It could upend the way listeners thought of popular music.

Timing is everything when the world’s biggest rapper calls to collaborate on an extended project. In 2004, Jay-Z was the 34-year-old king of popular hip-hop: the coolest artist in any room, on a years-long hot streak that had transformed him from a rap headliner into a crossover pop star. While mega- selling albums like 1996’s Reasonable Doubt and 1998’s Vol. 2 . . . Hard Knock Life were met with critical acclaim and produced multiple videos in MTV’s hip-hop blocks, Jay turned into a Top 40 hit-maker in the early 2000s with singles like “Big Pimpin’,” “I Just Wanna Love U (Give It 2 Me),” and “Izzo (H.O.V.A.).”

In 2003, a few months after Linkin Park topped the Billboard 200 album chart for the first time with Meteora, Jay- Z hit No. 1 on the Hot 100 alongside his girlfriend, Destiny’s Child breakout Beyoncé, on the summer-ruling pop smash “Crazy in Love.” Then, in November, Jay released The Black Album, a record stuffed with more hits as well as fond-farewell messaging. The Black Album was positioned as Jay- Z’s final album: he was going to go out on top, relinquishing his throne to become president of Def Jam Recordings so that he could develop other artists (like his producer pal Kanye West and newly signed upstarts named Rihanna and Young Jeezy) into stars.

Jay- Z’s “retirement” was always tenuous, a sentence that ended with an ellipsis instead of a period. That’s because Jay didn’t really go anywhere after The Black Album. He was making moves in the Def Jam boardroom but would still pop up on remixes and as a guest artist on songs by Mariah Carey, Snoop Dogg, Lenny Kravitz, and Mary J. Blige, among others. Jay- Z even released Unfinished Business, a second collaborative album with R. Kelly following 2002’s The Best of Both Worlds, less than a year after supposedly hanging it up. So it was clear that, even though Jay- Z wouldn’t be working on a new solo album imminently, he wanted to remain active in the recording studio as a complementary voice and collaborator.

As luck would have it, that period was exactly when executives at MTV called him up with a new show idea.

MTV Ultimate Mash-Ups was pitched as a taped concert series in which a rap artist and rock artist would jump onstage and rearrange at least one song together in front of a live audience — think MTV Unplugged, but as a genre-splicing jam session. Jay-Z, who had worked with The Roots on an actual MTV Unplugged in 2001, was one of the network’s first calls, and they asked him point-blank which rock act he’d want to work with for the show.

At that moment, Linkin Park was headlining more North American arenas as “Numb” kept climbing the Hot 100 and Meteora trailed The Black Album on the Billboard 200. Jay pointed at them.

For the band, the call from Jay-Z’s management not only came at a fortuitous time — nearly a year into the Meteora campaign, around the same moment during the Hybrid Theory album cycle that Mike began to plot Reanimation — but also came from the right artist. “There are six guys in our band who all grew up listening to different things,” Mike explained. “There are very few artists I can say that we all like. Jay is one of them.”

While the whole band were fans, Mike was the one who had worshiped Jay-Z growing up, an adoring teenaged producer as the MC ascended the NYC hip-hop scene. Prior to joining Xero, Mike had mashed up Reasonable Doubt songs with tracks by Smashing Pumpkins and Nine Inch Nails in his bedroom; the Meteora track “Nobody’s Listening” opens with an adult Mike paying homage to Jay with a lyrical callback to his track “Brooklyn’s Finest.” So when Linkin Park received the offer to work with Jay, Mike wanted to ensure that — whatever this MTV show would eventually become — the collaboration would become more meaningful than a cable series one-off. “I didn’t just want to say, ‘Hell yeah, let’s do it.’ I wanted to show him what it might sound like if we did it,” Mike said.

The work itself was second nature to Mike. He had grown up watching artists like Public Enemy and Anthrax mash up their sounds into formative records, as well as literally making Jay-Z mash-ups himself! So, before any deal was agreed on, he slipped into the recording studio in the back of Linkin Park’s tour bus and fired up his laptop. Mike synced up Jay- Z’s vocals from a few songs on The Black Album with Linkin Park instrumentals by matching the beats per minute (BPMs) of each: the hater- shedding anthem “Dirt Off Your Shoulder” aligned with the Meteora wall-rattler “Lying from You,” and Jay’s self-mythologizing curtain call “Encore” paired perfectly with “Numb.”

For the latter, Mike chopped up his band’s still-rising hit and reorganized the instrumental into a repeating pattern, similar to a DJ sampling part of an old rock song for a new rap track. He then added in the flourishes of “Numb” — the keyboard hook, the guitar, the piano, the bass — in ways that would support Jay’s flow, before turning the back half of the song into a modified version of Chester’s vulnerable showcase.

Stitched together, the mash-up of Jay’s braggadocio and Chester’s bare emotion isn’t lyrically coherent, but somehow the tones make sense together. Jay-Z sounds more reflective spitting “As fate would have it, Jay’s status appears / To be at an all-time high, perfect time to say goodbye,” over brooding piano and splintered guitar chords, while the introduction of Chester’s verse with “I’m tired of being what you want me to be” acts as a dramatic shift into the song’s back half, his words driving comfortably over accented hip-hop beats.

Mike finished the demos for “Numb/Encore” and “Dirt Off Your Shoulder/Lying from You” in less than two days on the tour bus, then sent them to Jay-Z to see what he thought of the direction for the songs. “His reply was, ‘Oh shit!’” Mike recalled. “Needless to say, we were off on the right foot.”

——————

When Jay-Z hosted listening sessions for The Black Album prior to its release, he often looked around the room and realized that some of his lyrics weren’t connecting with listeners, his lines getting lost in the production. The solution was simple enough: he asked his main engineer, Gimel “Young Guru” Keaton, to play the songs a cappella.

As Jay watched the rooms absorb his unadorned words, he liked what he saw. So he asked Roc-a-Fella and Def Jam to release a full a cappella version of The Black Album, and it hit stores one month after the original. It was an outrageous request, but Jay wielded enough star power that the labels quickly acquiesced.

Mike had downloaded that a cappella album while making the demos to send to Jay-Z; without it, he couldn’t have made such clean mash-ups and may not have gotten such a strong response from Jay. But then again, without the a cappella version of The Black Album, MTV might not have come up with the mash-up show idea in the first place.

Jay’s secondary motivation for the a cappella edition of The Black Album was for other producers to “remix the hell out of it,” according to Young Guru — to place Jay’s voice over other instrumentals, share them online, play them at clubs, and help his legend grow during his “retirement.” This was a stroke of marketing genius, and plenty of producers were happy to oblige. Producer Kevin Brown created a funk-  and jazz-based remix album titled The Brown Album, for instance, and Minnesota DJ Cheap Cologne placed Jay-Z’s vocals over Metallica’s own Black Album for . . . wait for it . . . The Double Black Album.

Most famous of all was The Grey Album, which fused Jay- Z’s Black Album vocals with The Beatles’ landmark 1968 self-titled double LP (aka the White Album), by the LA producer Brian Burton, who went by the moniker Danger Mouse. The concept was, at once, deceptively simple and musically brilliant: Jay-Z’s “99 Problems” smacked even harder over The Beatles’ “Helter Skelter” freakout, and “Public Service Announcement” became oddly blissed-out above the looped folk of “Long, Long, Long.” Created over two and a half weeks in December 2003 immediately after the a cappella Black Album was released, The Grey Album became internet lore in early 2004, with bootlegged CDs selling like hotcakes and file-sharing sites swarmed with its twelve songs.

Mash-ups had existed for decades before The Grey Album as an integral part of DJ culture, but they became even more commonplace at the turn of the century. Chalk it up to the proliferation of music-swapping platforms and production software, like the Pro Tools that Mike favored or the Acid Pro that Danger Mouse used for The Grey Album. Artists like Richard X, Soulwax (with their 2 Many DJs project), and Freelance Hellraiser rethought the remix in the early 2000s by jamming songs together with creative panache and lighting up the early blogosphere.

Yet The Grey Album represented a critical turning point for the medium: the project was the sort of underground sensation that functioned like a viral YouTube video before YouTube even existed. Suddenly, Danger Mouse became one of the most in-demand producers of the mid-2000s — helming albums from Gorillaz, Beck, and The Black Keys, among others — but not before entering a legal quagmire over The Grey Album, as EMI, The Beatles’ copyright holder, shut down distribution of the project. Obviously, the White Album samples hadn’t been cleared; then again, Danger Mouse had never intended to get rich off of The Grey Album, only to make something cool.

Jay-Z, for his part, liked The Grey Album — which made sense, since he was the one pushing for his a cappella vocals to become natural resources for producers like Danger Mouse. “I champion any form of creativity,” he said in a 2010 interview with NPR. “And that was a genius idea to do, and it sparked so many others like it.”

Although The Grey Album wasn’t legally sanctioned, MTV clearly saw the commercial potential of mashing up Jay-Z’s rapping with the familiar sounds of a famous rock band. So, presumably, did Jay-Z, he of the “I’m not a businessman, I’m a business, man,” credo. The music industry generally facilitates collaboration between artists, producers, and songwriters regardless of label or publishing info — it’s how chart-topping duets and cross-affiliate tour pairings are born. But a mash-up album is different, with more legal obstacles involving rights clearances, even when both artists are on board. As Mike and Jay traded demos over email and realized that this collaboration could become more significant than an MTV special, both camps pushed to make sure that, whatever was created, it was able to go on sale. Then, after Linkin Park worked on the rearranged production, Jay and the band logged a total of four days together at NRG in West Hollywood in July 2004, rerecording the vocals of their existing songs to better fit the deconstructed tracks.

The result: a retail-ready EP, featuring thirteen songs combined into six mash-ups, with all label partners— Def Jam, Roc- A- Fella, Warner Bros., and the Linkin Park imprint Machine Shop — on board and an “MTV Ultimate Mash- Ups Presents” sticker slapped on the cover.

At the end of that week, on July 19, 2004, the two artists took over the Roxy in Los Angeles for a special joint performance that would double as the pilot of MTV’s mash-ups show. Some fans at the Roxy sported LP tees, others held up the Roc for Jay symbol, and plenty did both. The mash-up project aired on MTV and showed up in big-box retailers by November, just in time for holiday shopping.

 “To me, Collision Course is a landmark album,” Mike said later that year, “because it’s a first: two multiplatinum artists getting together, using their original masters and new performances and production to create an album of mash-ups — that’s something that has never been done before.”

Within a year of The Grey Album going viral, Jay-Z and Linkin Park had elevated its concept, jumped through all the necessary legal hoops, and primed it for big business. A couple years later, when Linkin Park and Jay-Z were standing on the Grammys stage together to collect a trophy for “Numb/Encore,” Mike made sure to thank “everybody in management and legal teams that made this record possible, because it was a nightmare!”

——————

What stands out most today about Collision Course, in both Linkin Park’s and Jay-Z’s respective discographies, is how fun it sounds.

Jay has made plenty of party hits over the years, but he’s never been a party rapper, his flow authoritative and grounded in gritty come-up stories even as catchy melodies float around it. Meanwhile, Linkin Park’s most uptempo singles still focused on heavier themes, and their first two albums had been laboriously fine-tuned by Don Gilmore. When set up side by side without a perfectionist producer lurking in the studio, however, both aesthetics relax, the lyrics freed of their intensity when placed in fresh, buoy-ant atmospheres.

Take “Big Pimpin’/Papercut”: Mike’s words about paranoia and stress from “Papercut” remain intact, but his rhyming is slightly slowed down and placed atop the opulent island boom of Timbaland’s “Pimpin’” production. On “Jigga What/Faint,” Jay re-creates the knuckle-bruising threats of 1998’s “N—a What, N—a Who” — but really, the main attraction of that song is the introduction of the “Faint” strings under his rhyming around the thirty-second mark, which becomes the EP’s purest rush of adrenaline.

By design, Collision Course is a stunt release, and the mash-ups can’t possibly hold the artistic power of the original tracks. Yet the inherent looseness of those moments — the playful energy of two giant artists in their prime, tinkering together in the same room — makes Collision Course worth returning to in the years since its release.

Ultimately, it was the shared studio time, with Jay-Z arriving at NRG and dapping up the band before laying down his verses one-on-one with Mike, that proved crucial to manufacturing the chemistry at the core of the EP. Collision Course gave Mike the opportunity to share space with, and produce, a childhood hero who had become a peer. Jay-Z had been a star for years before Linkin Park took off; it could have easily been a classic never-meet-your-heroes moment for Mike. But the recording sessions were full of bro-hugs and easy feedback, Chester clowning on Mike for working too hard and Jay uttering “That transition’s mean!” while scrunching his face behind the boards.

“I like this shit — I like to do different things,” an animated Jay-Z exclaims at one point on the Collision Course making-of DVD. He’s speaking to Chester while huddled in the corner of a studio room, gesturing and breathlessly trying to keep up with his thoughts. “You just bring what you do to the table, I bring what I do to the table, uncompromising — you’re not trying to be me, and I’m not trying to be you, that fusion, and just whatever happens happens. I love that!”

The casual tone provoked plenty of ad-libs that can be heard on the final cut of the EP: Chester muttering, “I ordered a Frappuccino, where’s my fucking Frappuccino?” and garnering a Jay-Z belly laugh; Jay quipping, “You’re wasting your talent, Randy!” to some guy in the studio Reddit users are still trying to identify. Even the decision to combine “Numb” and “Encore” was partially due to Mike just wanting to hear Chester bellow the “What the hell are you waiting fo-o-o-r-r-r?” line. Again: fun.

“There was no ego at all working with Jay,” Mike reflected later. “If I asked him to perform something a certain way or put a vocal line here or there, he was happy to do it. He’s really easy to work with.”

As they were finishing up in the studio and preparing to perform at the Roxy, a goal formed in Mike’s mind: he wanted the mash-up collection to be so good, so immediately effective, that MTV would never be able to make another one. And that’s exactly what happened. MTV Ultimate Mash-Ups transformed from a series into a one- off concert show that aired on November 10, 2004, with the CD and behind- the- scenes DVD hitting stores three weeks later. To this day, no follow-up episode has ever been executed.

Collision Course debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 — a rarity for a six-song EP, in any era — but its true legacy is “Numb/Encore,” which rose to No. 20 on the Hot 100 as the project’s lead single and gave alternative programmers an excuse to sneak Jay-Z onto their airwaves. Beyond that early radio play, “Numb/Encore” has endured as an immaculate equilibrium of rap and rock — its melodies joined logically and wholly, soul-mates that made their way to each other from different parts of the world. Although “Numb” has now crossed one billion Spotify plays on its own, “Numb/Encore” is not far behind it; rather astonishingly, the mash-up remains one of the five most-streamed songs on the platform across Jay-Z’s legendary career.

“‘Numb’s’ other dimension is ‘Numb/Encore,’” Brad asserted. “You could love just one. However, I think about them in tandem. And when you think of Meteora, you think of Collision Course — that moment in collaboration with Jay-Z, which is really special.”

Ultimately, Collision Course did not change popular music in a literal sense — officially released mash-up albums remain a rarity to this day, primarily because of the legal red tape. On a more abstract level, though, the project did foretell a future in which amateur and professional producers crashed songs into one another.

Soon after the release of Collision Course, hip-hop’s mixtape era exploded: artists like Lil Wayne, Gucci Mane, and Clipse spent the mid- aughts hijacking other rappers’ beats, freestyling over them, and releasing compilations for free online, one-upping the original artist and favoring internet buzz over commercial sales. Meanwhile, the release of mash-up songs and albums — from DJ Earworm’s annual “United State of Pop” singles, featuring the twenty-five biggest songs of the year rolled into one, to Girl Talk’s full-length pastiches of hundreds of samples, to a 2022 mash-up of Britney Spears’s “Toxic” and Ginuwine’s “Pony” that charted as “Toxic Pony” — became more commonplace in the years after the album’s release.

And the advent of social media and streaming platforms further delivered that mash-up power into users’ hands, with multimedia mash-ups constantly concocted and posted in ways that helped artists gain more listens — even today. Want to know why Lady Gaga’s 2011 song “Bloody Mary” suddenly became a Hot 100 hit in 2023? That’s because TikTok users synced up the song with a dance sequence from the Netflix series Wednesday, and the mash-up went viral enough to make “Bloody Mary” a belated sensation.

Collision Course was like a star-studded summer blockbuster that lived up to the hype upon its release, then proved sneakily influential in the years since. Its mainstream impact still reverberates today with every new spin of “Numb/Encore,” but perhaps most importantly, Collision Course further legitimized Linkin Park in the moment. Jay-Z is widely considered the greatest rapper of all time — and he picked this band, out of any artist, to reimagine his biggest hits.

Linkin Park had entered rarefied air, the type of rock stratosphere that’s reserved for only a few bands per generation. But they wanted more.

Excerpted from It Starts With One by Jason Lipshutz. Copyright © 2024. Available from Hachette Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.