Jay-Z / Linkin Park - Collision Course

It began as a television segment. MTV pitched a mash-up special built around a song or two, and what came out the other side was a six-track EP recorded across four days in July 2004 that debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 with 368,000 copies sold in its first week. That made it Jay-Z's eighth chart-topping album and Linkin Park's second, an absurd result for a twenty-one-minute EP born as promotional filler.

Mike Shinoda handled most of the production, and the reason it works is that nobody treated it as a splice job. Verses pulled from The Black Album and Jay's earlier run were re-recorded and rebuilt over instrumentals from Hybrid Theory and Meteora, with the two camps tracking together rather than trading files. "Numb/Encore" is the one that outlived everything around it, reaching No. 20 on the Hot 100 and taking Best Rap/Sung Collaboration at the 2006 Grammys. "Dirt Off Your Shoulder/Lying From You" and "Jigga What/Faint" hit just as hard, and "Points of Authority/99 Problems/One Step Closer" folds three songs into one without ever sounding crowded.

The context matters. This landed a year after Danger Mouse's Grey Album turned the mash-up into a copyright standoff, and Collision Course was the version that cleared every sample, paid every lawyer, and put the form on major-label shelves. Critics at the time were split on it. The record has since gone double platinum, and "Numb/Encore" has become one of the few genuine crossover anthems of the era.

This vinyl edition from Warner Records collects all six studio mash-ups. A short, loud, unrepeatable snapshot of two enormous acts having a great time in the same room.