8 Bizarre Music Collaborations That Were Surprisingly Successful

6. Jay-Z And Linkin Park - "Numb/Encore"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLlF2FMv968 One of the few nu-metal acts of the 2000s boon to make it out alive (or at least with a little bit of dignity), Linkin Park were always more adept at the rap-rock cross-pollination than their peers. That's probably because they actually knew how to incorporate rap. Whereas acts like Limp Bizkit and Korn had frontmen with a style one could generously describe as "kinda sorta rap-like," Linkin Park had an honest-to-goodness emcee in Mike Shinoda. With that credibility at play, it wasn't so crazy to think that a mash-up with Jay-Z could work. Two rappers on the microphone, trading off lines, complimenting each other's styles? With the slickest hard rock production available? That's gold! But that's not the way they went with "Numb/Encore," the only track anyone still remembers from the Collision Course EP. Strangely, Shinoda is relegated to the background here, only occasionally throwing in a "yeah" or "uh huh" like a second-rate P. Diddy. But the emcee swap-out worked pretty well, as the song hit every Billboard chart the US had to offer and nearing the top 10 in the UK.