2004: Jay-Z & Linkin Park, Collision Course
By Mariah Stovall
I tell everyone that Bad Religion’s 1989 album No Control converted me to punk. The truth is more complicated, and Blacker: I found punk rock by way of rap rock by way of rap.
When I was 11 and my brother 13, Jay-Z collaborated with some band we’d never heard of. The Collision Course EP, which mashes six of the rapper’s songs up with seven of nü metal band Linkin Park’s, received mixed reviews. My brother, a diehard Jay fan, didn’t take to it. I couldn’t get enough. I didn’t have a strong musical identity, but I had a secret self-harm habit that was getting worse every day. I didn’t believe in god, but Linkin Park’s Chester Bennington, a scrawny white dude with flames licking his forearms as he howled next to Hov, seemed heaven sent. Chester was in pain and doing what I couldn’t: telling everyone.
Collision Course is well-crafted, but it’s not that serious. Two wildly successful artists coming together was nearly no risk with high rewards: it immediately topped the charts, and went on to win a Grammy and go double platinum. Lazy cash-grab or not, it’s just over twenty minutes of fun shot through with cockiness and earnestness—the perfect storm for an awkward adolescent.
The opener, “Dirt off Your Shoulder/Lying from You,” begins with Chester speaking. He pretends to demand a frappuccino, to laughs from his collaborators. Then, the patchwork of two multi-faceted compositions with strikingly similar beats becomes a cohesive story about not letting other people get to you or determine your story. Chester’s growl, “The very worst part of you is me,” or more accurately, “…MEEEEEEEHHHH,” was the first time I’d heard a vocal that harsh. Yet, even in that line, his voice is two-pronged. It’s as much the smooth run of a river as it is the jagged points of the rocks in its path. Before his wrath obliterates everything,
Jay punctuates it with a cheery “Bitch!” in the song’s final seconds.
More laughter precedes the interplay of the breezy “Big Pimpin’” and the steadily paranoid “Papercut.” Later, you hear the grin on resident Linkin Park rapper Mike Shinoda’s face as he says, “This is fun,” in “Izzo/In the End.” The same joy colors the DVD footage of studio sessions and concert performances that accompanied the CD release. For all the frustration and aggression in their music, they seem delighted to make it, and not only because they’ll soon be rewarded for their efforts.
Even Chester looked happy, despite my initial impression. He, Mike and Jay constantly back and hype each other, complementing the other instruments’ melding. In “Points of Authority/99 Problems/One Step Closer,” Mike takes on a Jay verse and turns the singular pronouns plural: You can kiss “our” whole asshole. “We” got 99 problems. No one’s interiority, not even Chester’s, was his alone. They were a supportive group with myriad moods. Thus, I too had options beyond clandestine misery. I learned how to access communal rage via the dual threats of one voice’s “Try and push me” and another’s “I’m about to break,” with a chuckle elsewhere for good measure.
***
The possibilities were intoxicating. Jay’s and Mike’s verses in “Jigga What/Faint” hang over music that teases the rock explosion to come. The former brags about his promiscuity. The latter admits (in my favorite flow of his) to being insecure. Chester’s uncompromising “You’re gonna listen to me, like or not, right now” marries the bravado and neediness of all their masculinities. But I was a preteen girl. At the time, I couldn’t spare a thought for the gendered dynamics of my fandom. I was only after catharsis. I simply heard their determination to be powerful, worthy and complex beings, and borrowed it for myself.
Before I spent hours replaying Collision Course in full, I saw the “Numb/Encore” music video. Then I tracked down the one for “Numb” and found in it a young woman who cut herself. I wondered if I was seeing things. The representation startled me. It was reassuring, not encouraging. Cutting was real, not ideal. I was a high-achieving perfectionist, trapped more by my rigid expectations for myself than by pressure from anyone else. I felt nothing, or the wrong things. I felt faulty. Girls were supposed to be in tune with their emotions. I was empty, occasionally overwhelmed by feelings that settled into more emptiness.
Once I isolated Linkin Park from Jay-Z, there was no looking back. For about a year, I listened to the band exclusively. My mom, a Prince and Lauryn Hill fan, ventured into Hot Topic with me and endured (sometimes enjoyed) Linkin Park listening sessions during car rides. I wrote the band’s name and lyrics on my sneakers, down the leg of my jeans. I wore a Linkin Park hoodie every day to hide the cuts on my arms. Meanwhile, my mom cracked loving jokes about my sudden obsession with very emotional, mostly white men. My family didn’t have anything against rock. It just wasn’t of much interest.
I was lucky. Unlike many Black alt kids, I was never made to feel that I couldn’t like something because of my race. Any doubts I had were fleeting. Who could challenge a cosign from the greatest rapper alive? My band had a rapper and a DJ anyway, both of whom were Asian. They weren’t Black, but they weren’t white. Besides, what I listened to was far from the strangest thing about me. My intense social anxiety and my monotonous disposition when I did speak were more pressing aberrations. A white kid at school, not a Black one, called me “a gothic freak.” It stung but by then I owned my weirdness. I was almost happy.
***
Not everyone who self-harms is suicidal. Thankfully, that was true of me. I didn’t always want to live, but I never actively wanted to die. Either way, I had Linkin Park. And a few other people. A friend soon told an adult what I was going through. I hated her then; I’m grateful now. I got professional help, against my will, and somewhere along the way, I stopped listening to Linkin Park. When their DJ directed the video for Alkaline Trio’s “Time to Waste,” I started listening to that band too. In another song, the Trio name dropped the Misfits’ Walk Among Us. I added that to my list. Then I happened upon Bad Religion’s No Control. Once I heard it, I knew Linkin Park had been a fling. This was really it: my agitated, bookish soul put to record and played back to me.
This time, I spread my obsession over dozens of artists. Skate punk, pop punk, hardcore, post-harccore, ska, emo, actual emo, folk punk. I loved it all. My mom kept up. She let me dye my hair unnatural colors and wear lots of black and skulls—anything to keep sharp objects out of my hands. She complimented Bill Stevenson’s drumming and told me The Ergs!’ “Not a Second Time” was a Beatles cover. She suffered through (sometimes enjoyed) Brooklyn apartment shows on weeknights.
***
It took years, but I did stop hurting myself. And then the man who helped make that possible took his own life. Chester Bennington died of suicide in 2017, days before my 24th birthday. My mom was the first to tell me, to ask if I was okay. Of course I was. I hadn’t listened to Linkin Park in years. I’ve never heard the music they put out after Collision Course. I was okay. I did what Chester couldn’t: I felt able to keep living.
I’m not okay. I’m tearing up as I type this. All’s quiet now but I was blasting Collision Course earlier. I smiled where I used to sob. The last time my husband (also a former LP fan) and I binge watched Linkin Park’s early music videos, I barely knew the words. But I still grin if someone says, “I tried so hard.” I still think of Jay watching ESPN when I walk past the 40/40 Club. Linkin Park isn’t cool and maybe Jay-Z isn’t anymore either. It doesn’t matter. They were there when I needed them. When it was time for me to move on, they didn’t hold me back.
I like to think that if I’d been born a decade later, it would be Willow, Meet Me at the Altar, Juice WRLD or Rico Nasty whose mainstream visibility would lead me further underground, to classic bands like Bad Brains, Death, Pure Hell and X-Ray Spex, and then to contemporary ones like Action/Adventure, Aye Nako, Blair, Dangers, Jesus Piece, The Muslims, Proper., Restraining Order, Sleepy Dog, Soul Glo, We Are the Union, Zulu and countless others. I like to think that however we get punk, we never forget where we came from—or that rock was ours to begin with—and that for every Black person who has the pleasure of arriving back here, plenty more of us are on our way.
Mariah Stovall is a literary agent and writer from New Jersey. She’s written fiction for Ninth Letter, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Hobart, Minola Review, and Joyland and nonfiction for Catapult, The Paris Review, Poets & Writers, Literary Hub and more. She is currently working on her first novel, an annotated mixtape.
Twitter: @retiredpunk