10 Rock Collaborations That Made Absolutely No Sense

Music has always been about the more collaborative spirit. Especially in this age where every genre is concaving in on one another, it's almost the order of the day to have songs that feature different guests appearing on every major event record. Some might be the peanut butter/chocolate comparison...and other times you get stuff like this.

Compared to some of the more obvious choices, the decisions that these artists made to collaborate with each other almost feel like oil and water when you look back on them. Whether it's because of an obvious mismatch of influences or just no real chemistry on and off the stage, these collaborations left more than a few of us scratching our heads as to why they would even want to work together in the first place. Some of these just shouldn't work, and yet they ended up succeeding with flying colors.

Though some of these aren't necessarily among the best work from the respective artists, they still have the same workman-like spirit and a genuine sense of fun whenever you hear them. Not only were these a rare feat in their day, but they also proved to be influential later down the line, eventually founding whole new genres of their own. At the very least, you can tell they had fun making these songs, and they're damn fun to listen to as well.

Throughout most of pop punk's tenure, you could usually count on artists making songs that are more tame and family friendly than the glory days of punk. No matter how edgy they may have sounded like when we were kids, it's not that easy to divorce the soundtrack of something like Simple Plan and New Found Glory from the pool party you hosted in the 5th grade. So to have one of the stalwarts of the genre actually go down the goth pop route is still mindblowing.

Granted, it's not like getting to this point was a relative cakewalk for Blink-182. Across their untitled record, Tom DeLonge was clearly getting on a different creative page than the rest of the group, wanting to explore more atmospheric sounds apart from songs like All the Small Things. Though there wasn't a lot of common ground, they did have one shared interest in the Cure on All of This.

Segueing perfectly out of Easy Target, this is the kind of plodding rhythm that the golden age of synth pop would have loved, which is made even more heavenly when Robert Smith appears and lays his shaky voice on top of it all. As much as this is a new flavor of Blink that what we expected, it's still smooth all the same.