Robert Everett-Green
The Globe and Mail

Jay-Z / Linkin Park
Rating: *½

The mash-up's underground cachet ends here. Like everything else that may be profitable, the guerrilla art of stapling well-known recordings to each other has been yanked from the shadows and given a three-media marketing deal.

How fitting that one of the co-opting parties should be Jay-Z, whose Black Album has been mashed more frequently than spuds from PEI. The most notorious case was DJ Danger Mouse's Grey Album, which made a fifth Beatle of the rapper last winter, and provoked EMI to threaten legal sanction over unauthorized use of the White Album.

That action, in turn, prompted on-line protests and a spree of downloading that media executives rightly interpreted as signs that the market was ripe for the first platinum mash-up CD. Which this scuffled-together product may soon become.

It arises from an episode of the MTV show Ultimate Mash-ups, which is itself a symptom of the genre's absorption by the industry. Warner's two-disc package features the show and related video clips on a DVD, and studio versions on CD of the six numbers essayed by Jay-Z and the boys.

The songs were paired up according to tempo and structure, not because of any kinship of subject. The very first number, Dirt off Your Shoulder / Lying from You, reveals the gulf in attitudes between a supremely self-confident rapper and a white nu-metal band that specializes in songs about anguish and self-loathing.

These marriages of commercial convenience hang together without committing any of the piquant juxtapositions found in a truly inventive mash-up. But invention is not the prime objective of MTV's program, which sets up the acts like contenders in a WWF bout.

The only drama in Collision Course is speculative, like the questions that hang in the air at the end of a soap-opera episode. Will Jay-Z's high critical standing rub off on lowly Linkin Park, who are loved only by their huge public? Will he cop any of the band's suburban fans with his mean-streets verses? And is this what "retirement" looks like for Jay-Z -- quickie projects that recycle his catalogue?

As for the mash-up, its underground life will continue only where record companies can't be bothered to follow. In the near future, we can expect the celebrity mash-up to become just another form of the Special Guests gambit that has produced so many unnecessary duets on stage and on disc.