#5 LPCatalog Exclusives: Linkin Park/Jay-Z Mix
2004 was a massive year for Linkin Park. On the road, the band blew through a 34-date sold out tour in North America, headlined European festivals (including the famous Rock am Ring 2004 show) along with a few stops in Asia, and played a huge Projekt Revolution Tour in the summer with Korn and many other bands. In the middle of all of this, they managed to release a collaborative album with Jay-Z, entitled Collision Course.
In between the June shows in Europe/Asia and the July kickoff of Projekt Revolution, Jay-Z flew in to Los Angeles to finish up the album, which was pretty much put together in less than a week (Mike claims four days in the Collision Course DVD). New parts were recorded by both Linkin Park and Jay-Z, they reconvened to rehearse the songs, and the live show was ready to go. The Collision Course album was played twice through (one of the takes is on the DVD), and you'll even find the performance of Step Up/Nobody's Listening/It's Goin' Down on the LPU 4 CD as well.
However, before any of that happened, let's take it back a few months to when MTV originally asked Jay-Z to do MTV Mashups. He hand-selected Linkin Park, and he and Mike started emailing ideas back-and-forth for a few months. That's where this exclusive comes into play. Dated May 19, 2004, this is the first true demo of the album to surface - eleven years later, at that. It's a mashup of One Step Closer, 99 Problems, and 1Stp Klosr.
In this version, you'll hear the song in a different structure than what finally appeared on Collision Course. Mike placed a One Step Closer chorus after the first 99 Problems verse, and the song then goes into the 1Stp Klosr verse instrumental before kicking back into OSC. Other 1Stp pieces are included...even the end of the song. Who knows if the Jonathan Davis part would have even remained in the final version, but it's interesting to see 1Stp Klosr mashed up with this version, before Points Of Authority took its place in the collaboration.
Mike even took the time to overdub the "yup" and other ad-libs by Jay-Z throughout the track, including the very end of the song. It's unclear if Jay-Z even re-recorded anything for this demo as it appeared that his meeting with Linkin Park in person (shown in the DVD) was his first time re-recording any vocals, but we do know that this is a legit demo put together by Mike in 2004.
Coming from a promo disc with both the explicit and censored versions, enjoy the only known demo from Collision Course!
-Mark from LPLive.net
EDIT: Seems that we had no idea about these tracks, mainly that they originally came from a DJ called AL-B! Theres more into the case since the cd itself is a legit internal promo cd with what looks like a fan-made mashup song. We do know that such thing also happened with Burn It Down Remixes promo where the BID Instrumental turned out to be a fan-made (thx ASTAT for the info). With that said, there could be some speculations about the Collision Course Points Of Authority/99 Problems/One Step Closer. We'll try to look into this in the future, hoping for a clear answer whether the fan-made mashup (OSC/99 Problems/1Stp Klosr) had something to do with the original track on the album.
Download Track 1 (Explict): Download .FLAC 25,7mb
Download Track 2 (Censored): Download .FLAC 26,1mb