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 calle.