Linkin Park Gave Us 1 of the Weirdest Hit Songs of the 2000s

Compared to other classic rock tunes, Linkin Park’s songs weren’t weird, but the band still gave us one of the weirdest hits of the 2000s. If you think about the track for even half a second, it makes no sense. What makes it even stranger is that we all collectively decided that this song was good, and it still receives airplay.

Linkin Park turned 1 of their songs into a rap hit that made no sense

Linkin Park released a perfectly good song called “Numb” that captures the feelings of angst that many people associate with being a teenager. Around the same time, Jay-Z released a song called “Encore” in which he rapped about how awesome he is, as is his usual modus operandi. These tracks have nothing to do with each other — except, somehow, they do.

The two artists teamed up to create a song called “Numb/Encore” that combined the two. What chaotic magic is this? You can’t go back and forth between Chester Bennington screaming about his insecurities and Jay-Z talking about how he’s the best rapper in the game. 

“Numb/Encore” is fine on a purely musical level but the lyrical fusion of the two songs is pure nonsense. The juxtaposition between “Numb” and “Encore” is so strange that it’s hard to feel anything when listening to the song, because “Numb” and “Encore” cancel each other out. We wouldn’t hear anything quite this incoherent until Elton John and Dua Lipa decided to slap several of John’s songs together in a multi-car pileup called “Cold Heart.” Both “Numb/Encore” and “Cold Heart” became huge hits because many people don’t want to feel much when they turn on the radio. For better or worse, they just want pleasant white noise.

‘Numb/Encore’ was part of a Linkin Park/Jay-Z mashup record

“Numb/Ecnore” was part of a whole Linkin Park/Jay-Z mashup album called Collision Course. During a 2007 interview with Loudwire, Bennington discussed the record. “A lot of people were involved, but all the credit goes to [Linkin Park’s] Mike [Shinoda] on this one,” Bennington said. “He really put the whole thing together and got everyone excited about it.”

Shinoda recalled how this all came together. “We got on the phone with Jay and his people and I basically said that we should make an EP together and make it so good that MTV couldn’t possibly do a complete series because we had done it as it would set the bar too high,” Shinoda said. “So that’s what we did.”

Creating mashups was a huge part of Shinoda’s musical development. “That’s pretty much how I learned to produce when I was growing up,” he said. “I’d been doing this kind of stuff since the early ’90s.”

Was this all a bid to make a Jay-Z song a hit?

“Numb/Encore” was a modest hit. It reached No. 20 on the Billboard Hot 100 and stayed on the chart for 20 weeks. Compare this to the source songs. “Numb” peaked at No. 11 on the Billboard Hot 100 and remained on the chart for 33 weeks. Meanwhile, “Encore” did not chart on the Billboard Hot 100.

For all we know, Jay-Z only created a monster to make “Encore” into a hit.