Jay-Z and Linkin Park’s Collision Course was at once a cash-in and a labor of love

In We’re No. 1, The A.V. Club examines an album that went to No. 1 on the Billboard charts to get to the heart of what it means to be popular in pop music, and how that concept has changed over the years. This installment covers Jay-Z and Linkin Park’s Collision Course, which went to No. 1 on December 18, 2004, where it stayed for one week.

Though album sales were down a bit from their turn-of-the-century peak, they were still hovering at near-historic heights in 2004. Thanks to strong consumer enthusiasm and blockbuster releases from artists like Usher, Eminem, and Norah Jones, the music industry moved 667 million albums that year, more than twice as many as it would in 2012. That figure would paint a mighty rosy picture of the industry at the time, if those sales hadn’t also been bolstered by something far more unseemly: fear. The RIAA had recently escalated its war against online piracy, filing hundreds of lawsuits against citizens accused of downloading or distributing MP3s, seeking damages of up to $150,000 per copyright violation. As if to send the message that anybody could become a target, the organization directed these suits not just at pirate-ring captains, but also at casual, everyday file sharers. Among the accused: a 12-year-old girl, a 71-year-old grandfather, and a 66-year-old retired schoolteacher, who was alleged to have pirated extreme volumes of gangsta rap.

It was this campaign of fear that lent steam to mash-up culture, an Internet phenomenon that reached its commercial culmination that year with Jay-Z and Linkin Park’s multimillion-selling Collision Course EP. Mash-ups, the sometimes inspired but usually just kind of tacky fusion of two preexisting songs, had existed in some form for decades, but they only emerged as a cultural force in the early 2000s, when new software made it easier than ever to smash together two tracks and, just as importantly, the Internet gave those hybrid songs a vast, undiscerning audience. Today mash-ups are so ubiquitous—and usually joyless, the source of so many uninspired YouTube shares and hammy Glee setpieces—that it’s hard to believe they were ever considered genuinely daring, yet in the early-2000s they represented a very real kind of rebellion. To violate the copyright on a Britney Spears song was to taunt the music industry’s litigious powers, and to risk a potentially bankrupting lawsuit. That threat made the whole endeavor seem exciting and dangerous, even if the end result was just a crappier version of a Britney Spears song.

This danger eventually became overstated. To judge by the breathless 2006 write-ups of Girl Talk’s Night Ripper, Gregg Gillis could have been whisked off to a Guantanamo Bay holding cell at any moment for not clearing a Hall & Oates sample. But in 2004, the risk couldn’t have felt more real. Danger Mouse, in particular, had reason to pause that February before he leaked his breakthrough work, The Grey Album. A blend of Jay-Z’s widely sampled Black Album and The Beatles’ landmark White Album, The Grey Album became the most famous mash-up of all time, and to this day it remains the lone masterpiece of the form. Where most mash-ups played the contrast between their dueling samples for cheap novelty, Danger Mouse married his sources seamlessly, finding the emotional common ground between Jay-Z’s boastful reminisces and The Beatles’ florid 8-track collages. In infringing on one of the most sacred copyrights of all time, however, he also incited a legal showdown that set the precedent for how the industry responded to mash-ups. Fiercely protective of The Beatles’ catalog—which wouldn’t even be made available for legal download until more than six years later—EMI waged war on The Grey Album, firing off rounds of cease-and-desist letters to any site that hosted it. Those efforts backfired, only calling more attention to the black-market album by giving the press reason to write about it. EMI eventually saw its legal campaign for the lost cause it was, and other labels heeded the lesson: The best way to combat a victimless copyright violation was to not even bother.

That’s a great story. It’s one of the most inspiring artist-triumphs-label stories of the 2000s, right up there with the commercial and critical vindication of Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, and it marked a crucial moral victory for fair-use proponents across the Internet. Because it’s so well-known, it’s hard not to compare The Grey Album’s rousing backstory to the decidedly duller one of 2004’s other major Jay-Z-based mash-up, Collision Course. One album was the work of a lone, renegade auteur, which spread through word of mouth on the Internet, where it was passed around like contraband. The other was a fully authorized label release whose birth required a lot of paperwork. There was no sexy creation myth behind Collision Course; it was just a guaranteed return on investment that, true to its end of the bargain, made Warner Bros. the boatloads of money that the label’s actuaries predicted it would.

All that makes Collision Course sound like a cynical exercise in profiteering, and for Jay-Z it almost certainly was. The rapper has always been torn between his passions for hip-hop and for commerce. This is his defining contradiction: He’s a bastion of street credibility who nonetheless has no qualms about sampling the Annie soundtrack, an artist who makes no distinction between The Blueprint and The Blueprint 3. But if Collision Course was a cash grab for Jay-Z, for Linkin Park’s Mike Shinoda, at least, it was a genuine labor of love. As a rule, nü-metal rappers aren’t taken seriously in rap circles, partly because of all the rage and screaming and guitars, but mostly because so many of them rap like they’re reciting an eye chart. Yet Shinoda’s passion for hip-hop was always greater than his reputation as “Linkin Park’s rappy guy” did justice to. In 2005, he’d demonstrate that with a thoroughly respectable (if not quite good) album from his hip-hop-minded side-project Fort Minor, but Collision Course represented an even bigger dream come true, the chance to work side-by-side with rap’s biggest name. If that couldn’t legitimize him as a rapper, what could?