It’s that old car-crash effect. You just can’t keep from staring, half in horror, half transfixed with a Ballardian fetishist’s appreciation of the aesthetics of a twisted flesh-and-tungsten mess. It might be a little mean-spirited to suggest the best thing about this mash-up album is that the suffering is mercifully short (26 minutes), but even the most sympathetic rubbernecker must find themselves asking: Why? Why? WHY? Why has Jay Z, composer of latter day hip-hop masterpieces like The Blueprint and The Black Album, a man who could’ve had his pick of hard-hatted acts to access through his association with Rick Rubin – System Of A Down, Slayer, et cetera et cetera – come out of ‘retirement’ yet again to hook up with po-faced one-chorus-fits-all metal geeks Linkin Park?
The results are not so much bad as bewildering. Rap-metal splicings are a hairy business, with even the better efforts (Anthrax/Public Enemy, Cypress Hill’s last couple of albums) resulting in a scoreless draw. So it is with Collision Course. The problem with such cyberphunk mutations as ‘Big Pimpin’/Papercut’ and ‘IZZO/In The End’ is the graft just won’t take, and Jay Z’s ebullient braggadocio always overwhelms the Park boys’ strangely anodyne scratch ‘n’ riff experiments. The listener’s inclination is to dig out the Z-man’s originals and leave Linkin to God or whoever will have them.
Perhaps the biggest indictment of the whole Frankensteinian enterprise is that the colossal ‘99 Problems’, one of the best singles of this or any year, sounds paradoxically cleaner and more lightweight than on Jay Z and Rubin’s stand-alone. Heterogeneous elements yoked by force together, as Eliot almost said. The result is as antiseptic as a dentist’s waiting room, and not much more inviting.