Blogocentric Formulations

Now can I get an encore, do you want more

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DAY 10

Song: "Numb/Encore"
Artist: Linkin Park & Jay-Z
Album: Collision Course (2004)

Collision Course is probably one of my favorite albums from the past 10 years. Originally, MTV has a feature called "MTV Mash Ups" where they would combine the tracks of two popular artists (this was way before the Glee made the mash-up concept popular, BTW ) to great - and sometimes not-so-great - effect. But when they approached Jay-Z and he, in turn, approached Mike Shinoda of Linkin Park about the idea, the decision was made to actually re-work and re-record the songs to make them fit together better rather than simply mixing two existing tracks together. The result was an album (or technically an EP, I suppose) with six tracks that mixed some of Jay-Z and Linkin Park's most popular songs into brilliant new arrangements.

"Numb/Encore" is probably the most popular on the album and I think it was the only single that was released. I actually like "Points of Authority/99 Problems/One Step Closer" a tiny bit better, but I think trying to mix three songs together was a little overly-ambitious and I usually end up losing a bit of interest in the track halfway through. "Numb/Encore" never gets old though; there's so much energy in both tracks that I think they really work well together.

I really wish more artists would take risks like this with their work. It's great that everyone focuses on making their own music and their own albums, but I would really love to see more of this kind of collaboration, where rockers and rappers, or other musicians of different types were willing to collaborate and try to come up with something new and exciting for audiences to listen to.