The most unexpected rap collaborations ever
Hip-hop started because people were playing around with different styles and sounds, cutting them up, mixing them together, reshaping and turning them into something new and unexpected, with reverence for its sources.
Rooted in African-American culture, it has always borrowed from and been influenced by other people and places, too, remaining open to pulls from all directions to this day. On the streets of New York and Los Angeles, other ethnic groups, like, for instance, people from Caribbean and Latin American diaspora communities, directly played their part in developing the sound while, crucially, other cultures made their way into the music in a less direct way through the use of sampling.
As burgeoning hip-hop producers were experimenting with sampling, they started to construct beats that borrowed elements from all sorts of pre-existing music. This meant that, even as this fundamentally hybrid entity cohered into a singular, distinct genre, it always retained a flexibility that meant fresh influences could be easily introduced at will; these could be totally idiosyncratic and unexpected sounds to incorporate, yet they so often worked.
Hip-hop’s flexibility and its natural openness to other sounds have meant that rappers have been drawn to some surprising figures over the years, be they pop stars, metalheads or any other style of musician one can think of for some wild collaborations, both good and bad, and here’s a look at five of the most jarring.
Five wild rap collaborations
5. ‘XXX’ – Kendrick Lamar & U2 (2017)
As big as U2 were in their heyday, by the mid-2010s, they were hardly the most urgent band around, which made it profoundly surprising to discover in 2017 that they were going to feature on Damn, the then-upcoming album from Kendrick Lamar, an artist who decidedly was, at that time, capturing the zeitgeist. Not many people imagined that the collaboration would work, but when the song came out, it was clear that, contrary to expectations and doubts, ‘XXX’ was a great song.
“It was really just that we were fans,” U2 guitarist, The Edge, told Stereogum, speaking of their relationship to Kendrick, while Bono added how in a list of artists they respect, Lamar sat on top because “we look for artists that we feel have a similar spirit”. He added, “There’s a righteous anger that is hard to argue with. I asked him would he rap about where America is at, his reply was to rap about where America isn’t at. Smart dude.”
4. ‘We Are’ – Nas & Justin Bieber (2015)
When a young Justin Bieber first emerged as a teen idol, few would have imagined that he would, one day, work alongside Nasty Nas. Of course, even this adolescent, poppy version of Bieber held hip-hop credentials, given that his hit song ‘Baby’ had featured Ludacris, but the notion that this young boy who sang “Like baby, baby, baby, oh / I thought you’d always be mine, mine” would go on to work with, arguably, one of the greatest lyricists that rap has ever produced would have seemed fanciful, but it happened in 2015.
Only a few years earlier, during a 2012 interview with Complex, Bieber had listed Nas as one of his top-five favourite rappers, along with 2Pac, André 3000, Eminem and Lil Wayne. The fact that he actually got to work with him on the track ‘We Are’ for his fourth album Purpose must have felt like a dream come true, albeit it must also have been bizarre. One wonders if Bieber was as surprised as everyone else that Nas actually said yes to the collab.
3. ‘End of Time’ – Q-Tip & Korn (1999)
Q-Tip, as the silky-voiced leader of A Tribe Called Quest, is about as smooth a performer as one can ever expect to encounter, but for his first-ever solo album in 1999, following Tribe’s disbandment the previous year, he decided to create a song that was about as far away from something like ‘Electric Relaxation’ as possible, and for the penultimate song on that album, Amplified, he recruited the services of nu metal group Korn.
Korn and Q-Tip do not seem like a natural match, but, for their part, Korn’s members have always been hip-hop fans and have worked with plenty of other rappers, as frontman Jonathan Davis told Stereogum in 2022, “We were inspired by hip-hop music. We subtly would sprinkle it in. We weren’t like a rap-rock band like Limp Bizkit or anything like that. But we were fans of it”.
2. ‘This Means War!!’ – Busta Rhymes & Ozzy Osbourne (1998)
Busta Rhymes always loved the Black Sabbath album Paranoid, and, like a lot of other hip-hop producers, he was enamoured by the snare sounds found in metal recordings. He was especially interested in the Sabbath classic ‘Iron Man’, so while he was putting together his third album Extinction Level Event: The Final World Front, he finally took the opportunity to play around with it. ‘Iron Man’ is at the heart of his song ‘This Means War!!, and although he doesn’t straight-up sample it, and he got a band to recreate the track in the studio, that still left the vocals. For the full effect, he needed the original voice, the ‘Prince of Darkness’ himself.
“Ozzy came to my studio and didn’t want anything,” Busta later recalled of the unlikely collaboration, speaking to NME about it in 2020, “He refused all the food and drinks I offered him, he’d only accept things to eat and drink from his own people. In the past, people had put shit in his food, and he wasn’t going to let it happen again. He had super-good energy and sang whatever I wanted him to, and it’s still one of my favourite records in my catalogue.”
1. ‘Numb/Encore’ – Jay-Z & Linkin Park
Linkin Park co-founder Mike Shinoda was always a huge hip-hop fan, and before he made it big with his band, he used to play around by mixing Jay-Z songs with those of rock bands like the Smashing Pumpkins and Nine Inch Nails. There must have been something in the air around this time because Jay, inspired by Danger Mouse’s mashup album that combined his Black Album with the Beatles’ White Album, had himself become very interested in the concept, too, so much so that he actually reached out to Linkin Park to see if they wanted to do something together.
The project started out through email exchanges, but eventually, Shinoda and Jay met for real and decided that, rather than combining the existing songs as they were, they would re-record the vocals over the tracks that Shinoda had created. The fruits of their labour ultimately were released as an EP called Collision Course, which featured lead single ‘Numb/Encore’, that went on to win a Grammy and, in 2024, surpassed a billion streams on Spotify, cementing itself as a classic.