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Album Review
by SashaS
1-12-2004
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| Jay-Z/Linkin Park 'mash-up' tunes/course |
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Jay-Z/Linkin Park: 'Collision Course'
(Warner)
Jay-Z/Linkin Park: great ‘mash-ups’ damn short
Jay-Z and Linkin Park on the same album? It may have looked outta place few years ago but it not the first time for such a ‘mash-up’. It’s been going on ever since Blondie and Tom Tom Club [Talking Heads’ side project] hijacked the then emerging Hip-hop and dropped it on the unsuspecting and mainstreamed suburbia.
The most famous crossover was/still is Aerosmith/Run-DMC’s ‘Walk This Way’ collaboration although over time we’ve had plenty of ‘fusions’, some planned and some bootlegged, such as Danger Mouse’s ‘The Grey Album’ [blend of Jay-Z’s ‘The Black Album’ and The Beatles’ ‘The White Album]. It’s now turn of a “retired” Jay-Z and Linkin Park who got the idea after an MTV concert in which two acts performed live for an invited group of fans.
The record - 'MTV Ultimate Mash-Ups Presents Jay-Z/Linkin Park: Collision Course', to give it its full nomenclature - contains songs known as ‘mash-ups’, musical collaborations where two different songs are combined into one track. Jay-Z said there was never any doubt about what everyone wanted to get out of the collaboration.
"The first thing we said to each other is, ‘What we're here for’," Beyoncé’s fiancé explains; "‘I'm not trying to be Linkin Park and you're not trying to be Jay-Z. I'll bring what I do to the table, you all bring what you do to the table and we mix it and we uncompromise and have fun with it.’"
Jay-Z and Linkin Park spent just four days in a Los Angeles studio creating and recording six ‘mash-ups’. Yep, six cuts by the Linken-ers that are filled in with Jay-Z’s corssbeats, as in the case of ‘Points of Authority/99 Problems/One Step Closer’. The band’s ‘Numb’ and ‘Papercut’ also form bases for some fine expeditions into sound.
There is also an accompanying DVD - featuring “the entire once-in-a-lifetime concert - inclusive of a documentary that shows Linkin members being too sycophantic to their new ‘friend’ and partner that gets embarrassing at times. Otherwise, very good [studio] disc but at under 22-minutes it is hardly over one vinyl side, meaning - no more than an extended play. On that count alone it gets a lower mark despite general quality…
Apart, perhaps, from the title because it is not a collision but actually complimentary courses. It also proves that Linkin Park’s debut album was indicating their working method - ‘Hybrid Theory’.
8/10
SashaS
1-12-2004
Jay-Z/Linkin Park’s [mini-]album ‘Collision Course’ is released 29 November 2004 by Warner
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