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This month marks the 20th anniversary of Collision Course, the six-song collaborative project from Jay-Z and Linkin Park. A landmark release between two superstar artists, Collision Course debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart following its release on Nov. 30, 2004, and spawned a Grammy-winning smash in “Numb/Encore.”
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To celebrate the anniversary, below is an excerpt about the genesis and impact of Collision Course from It Starts With One: The Legend and Legacy of Linkin Park, a new book from Billboard executive director of music Jason Lipshutz, published in October through Hachette Books.
Projects like Collision Course were not ordinary in popular music in 2004, so when it was first announced, it sounded like a fever dream. Jay-Z and Linkin Park collaborating on an official multi-song project?
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Two artists at the peak of their commercial power combining their biggest hits, Voltron-style, into new megahits? It was unfathomable, but somehow, it was happening.
Jay-Z had worked with rock artists before 2004, and Reanimation proved Linkin Park’s bona fides as hip-hop interlopers. Yet even so — Collision Course was something different. This was Godzilla versus King Kong, a mega-wattage showdown that, worst- case scenario, would be a publicity stunt guaranteed to move a lot of units. Best case? It could upend the way listeners thought of popular music.
Timing is everything when the world’s biggest rapper calls to collaborate on an extended project. In 2004, Jay-Z was the 34-year-old king of popular hip-hop: the coolest artist in any room, on a years-long hot streak that had transformed him from a rap headliner into a crossover pop star. While mega- selling albums like 1996’s Reasonable Doubt and 1998’s Vol. 2 . . . Hard Knock Life were met with critical acclaim and produced multiple videos in MTV’s hip-hop blocks, Jay turned into a Top 40 hit-maker in the early 2000s with singles like “Big Pimpin’,” “I Just Wanna Love U (Give It 2 Me),” and “Izzo (H.O.V.A.).”
In 2003, a few months after Linkin Park topped the Billboard 200 album chart for the first time with Meteora, Jay- Z hit No. 1 on the Hot 100 alongside his girlfriend, Destiny’s Child breakout Beyoncé, on the summer-ruling pop smash “Crazy in Love.” Then, in November, Jay released The Black Album, a record stuffed with more hits as well as fond-farewell messaging. The Black Album was positioned as Jay- Z’s final album: he was going to go out on top, relinquishing his throne to become president of Def Jam Recordings so that he could develop other artists (like his producer pal Kanye West and newly signed upstarts named Rihanna and Young Jeezy) into stars.
Jay- Z’s “retirement” was always tenuous, a sentence that ended with an ellipsis instead of a period. That’s because Jay didn’t really go anywhere after The Black Album. He was making moves in the Def Jam boardroom but would still pop up on remixes and as a guest artist on songs by Mariah Carey, Snoop Dogg, Lenny Kravitz, and Mary J. Blige, among others. Jay- Z even released Unfinished Business, a second collaborative album with R. Kelly following 2002’s The Best of Both Worlds, less than a year after supposedly hanging it up. So it was clear that, even though Jay- Z wouldn’t be working on a new solo album imminently, he wanted to remain active in the recording studio as a complementary voice and collaborator.
As luck would have it, that period was exactly when executives at MTV called him up with a new show idea.
MTV Ultimate Mash-Ups was pitched as a taped concert series in which a rap artist and rock artist would jump onstage and rearrange at least one song together in front of a live audience — think MTV Unplugged, but as a genre-splicing jam session. Jay-Z, who had worked with The Roots on an actual MTV Unplugged in 2001, was one of the network’s first calls, and they asked him point-blank which rock act he’d want to work with for the show.
At that moment, Linkin Park was headlining more North American arenas as “Numb” kept climbing the Hot 100 and Meteora trailed The Black Album on the Billboard 200. Jay pointed at them.
For the band, the call from Jay-Z’s management not only came at a fortuitous time — nearly a year into the Meteora campaign, around the same moment during the Hybrid Theory album cycle that Mike began to plot Reanimation — but also came from the right artist. “There are six guys in our band who all grew up listening to different things,” Mike explained. “There are very few artists I can say that we all like. Jay is one of them.”
While the whole band were fans, Mike was the one who had worshiped Jay-Z growing up, an adoring teenaged producer as the MC ascended the NYC hip-hop scene. Prior to joining Xero, Mike had mashed up Reasonable Doubt songs with tracks by Smashing Pumpkins and Nine Inch Nails in his bedroom; the Meteora track “Nobody’s Listening” opens with an adult Mike paying homage to Jay with a lyrical callback to his track “Brooklyn’s Finest.” So when Linkin Park received the offer to work with Jay, Mike wanted to ensure that — whatever this MTV show would eventually become — the collaboration would become more meaningful than a cable series one-off. “I didn’t just want to say, ‘Hell yeah, let’s do it.’ I wanted to show him what it might sound like if we did it,” Mike said.
The work itself was second nature to Mike. He had grown up watching artists like Public Enemy and Anthrax mash up their sounds into formative records, as well as literally making Jay-Z mash-ups himself! So, before any deal was agreed on, he slipped into the recording studio in the back of Linkin Park’s tour bus and fired up his laptop. Mike synced up Jay- Z’s vocals from a few songs on The Black Album with Linkin Park instrumentals by matching the beats per minute (BPMs) of each: the hater- shedding anthem “Dirt Off Your Shoulder” aligned with the Meteora wall-rattler “Lying from You,” and Jay’s self-mythologizing curtain call “Encore” paired perfectly with “Numb.”
For the latter, Mike chopped up his band’s still-rising hit and reorganized the instrumental into a repeating pattern, similar to a DJ sampling part of an old rock song for a new rap track. He then added in the flourishes of “Numb” — the keyboard hook, the guitar, the piano, the bass — in ways that would support Jay’s flow, before turning the back half of the song into a modified version of Chester’s vulnerable showcase.
Stitched together, the mash-up of Jay’s braggadocio and Chester’s bare emotion isn’t lyrically coherent, but somehow the tones make sense together. Jay-Z sounds more reflective spitting “As fate would have it, Jay’s status appears / To be at an all-time high, perfect time to say goodbye,” over brooding piano and splintered guitar chords, while the introduction of Chester’s verse with “I’m tired of being what you want me to be” acts as a dramatic shift into the song’s back half, his words driving comfortably over accented hip-hop beats.
Mike finished the demos for “Numb/Encore” and “Dirt Off Your Shoulder/Lying from You” in less than two days on the tour bus, then sent them to Jay-Z to see what he thought of the direction for the songs. “His reply was, ‘Oh shit!’” Mike recalled. “Needless to say, we were off on the right foot.”
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When Jay-Z hosted listening sessions for The Black Album prior to its release, he often looked around the room and realized that some of his lyrics weren’t connecting with listeners, his lines getting lost in the production. The solution was simple enough: he asked his main engineer, Gimel “Young Guru” Keaton, to play the songs a cappella.
As Jay watched the rooms absorb his unadorned words, he liked what he saw. So he asked Roc-a-Fella and Def Jam to release a full a cappella version of The Black Album, and it hit stores one month after the original. It was an outrageous request, but Jay wielded enough star power that the labels quickly acquiesced.
Mike had downloaded that a cappella album while making the demos to send to Jay-Z; without it, he couldn’t have made such clean mash-ups and may not have gotten such a strong response from Jay. But then again, without the a cappella version of The Black Album, MTV might not have come up with the mash-up show idea in the first place.
Jay’s secondary motivation for the a cappella edition of The Black Album was for other producers to “remix the hell out of it,” according to Young Guru — to place Jay’s voice over other instrumentals, share them online, play them at clubs, and help his legend grow during his “retirement.” This was a stroke of marketing genius, and plenty of producers were happy to oblige. Producer Kevin Brown created a funk- and jazz-based remix album titled The Brown Album, for instance, and Minnesota DJ Cheap Cologne placed Jay-Z’s vocals over Metallica’s own Black Album for . . . wait for it . . . The Double Black Album.
Most famous of all was The Grey Album, which fused Jay- Z’s Black Album vocals with The Beatles’ landmark 1968 self-titled double LP (aka the White Album), by the LA producer Brian Burton, who went by the moniker Danger Mouse. The concept was, at once, deceptively simple and musically brilliant: Jay-Z’s “99 Problems” smacked even harder over The Beatles’ “Helter Skelter” freakout, and “Public Service Announcement” became oddly blissed-out above the looped folk of “Long, Long, Long.” Created over two and a half weeks in December 2003 immediately after the a cappella Black Album was released, The Grey Album became internet lore in early 2004, with bootlegged CDs selling like hotcakes and file-sharing sites swarmed with its twelve songs.
Mash-ups had existed for decades before The Grey Album as an integral part of DJ culture, but they became even more commonplace at the turn of the century. Chalk it up to the proliferation of music-swapping platforms and production software, like the Pro Tools that Mike favored or the Acid Pro that Danger Mouse used for The Grey Album. Artists like Richard X, Soulwax (with their 2 Many DJs project), and Freelance Hellraiser rethought the remix in the early 2000s by jamming songs together with creative panache and lighting up the early blogosphere.
Yet The Grey Album represented a critical turning point for the medium: the project was the sort of underground sensation that functioned like a viral YouTube video before YouTube even existed. Suddenly, Danger Mouse became one of the most in-demand producers of the mid-2000s — helming albums from Gorillaz, Beck, and The Black Keys, among others — but not before entering a legal quagmire over The Grey Album, as EMI, The Beatles’ copyright holder, shut down distribution of the project. Obviously, the White Album samples hadn’t been cleared; then again, Danger Mouse had never intended to get rich off of The Grey Album, only to make something cool.
Jay-Z, for his part, liked The Grey Album — which made sense, since he was the one pushing for his a cappella vocals to become natural resources for producers like Danger Mouse. “I champion any form of creativity,” he said in a 2010 interview with NPR. “And that was a genius idea to do, and it sparked so many others like it.”
Although The Grey Album wasn’t legally sanctioned, MTV clearly saw the commercial potential of mashing up Jay-Z’s rapping with the familiar sounds of a famous rock band. So, presumably, did Jay-Z, he of the “I’m not a businessman, I’m a business, man,” credo. The music industry generally facilitates collaboration between artists, producers, and songwriters regardless of label or publishing info — it’s how chart-topping duets and cross-affiliate tour pairings are born. But a mash-up album is different, with more legal obstacles involving rights clearances, even when both artists are on board. As Mike and Jay traded demos over email and realized that this collaboration could become more significant than an MTV special, both camps pushed to make sure that, whatever was created, it was able to go on sale. Then, after Linkin Park worked on the rearranged production, Jay and the band logged a total of four days together at NRG in West Hollywood in July 2004, rerecording the vocals of their existing songs to better fit the deconstructed tracks.
The result: a retail-ready EP, featuring thirteen songs combined into six mash-ups, with all label partners— Def Jam, Roc- A- Fella, Warner Bros., and the Linkin Park imprint Machine Shop — on board and an “MTV Ultimate Mash- Ups Presents” sticker slapped on the cover.
At the end of that week, on July 19, 2004, the two artists took over the Roxy in Los Angeles for a special joint performance that would double as the pilot of MTV’s mash-ups show. Some fans at the Roxy sported LP tees, others held up the Roc for Jay symbol, and plenty did both. The mash-up project aired on MTV and showed up in big-box retailers by November, just in time for holiday shopping.
“To me, Collision Course is a landmark album,” Mike said later that year, “because it’s a first: two multiplatinum artists getting together, using their original masters and new performances and production to create an album of mash-ups — that’s something that has never been done before.”
Within a year of The Grey Album going viral, Jay-Z and Linkin Park had elevated its concept, jumped through all the necessary legal hoops, and primed it for big business. A couple years later, when Linkin Park and Jay-Z were standing on the Grammys stage together to collect a trophy for “Numb/Encore,” Mike made sure to thank “everybody in management and legal teams that made this record possible, because it was a nightmare!”
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What stands out most today about Collision Course, in both Linkin Park’s and Jay-Z’s respective discographies, is how fun it sounds.
Jay has made plenty of party hits over the years, but he’s never been a party rapper, his flow authoritative and grounded in gritty come-up stories even as catchy melodies float around it. Meanwhile, Linkin Park’s most uptempo singles still focused on heavier themes, and their first two albums had been laboriously fine-tuned by Don Gilmore. When set up side by side without a perfectionist producer lurking in the studio, however, both aesthetics relax, the lyrics freed of their intensity when placed in fresh, buoy-ant atmospheres.
Take “Big Pimpin’/Papercut”: Mike’s words about paranoia and stress from “Papercut” remain intact, but his rhyming is slightly slowed down and placed atop the opulent island boom of Timbaland’s “Pimpin’” production. On “Jigga What/Faint,” Jay re-creates the knuckle-bruising threats of 1998’s “N—a What, N—a Who” — but really, the main attraction of that song is the introduction of the “Faint” strings under his rhyming around the thirty-second mark, which becomes the EP’s purest rush of adrenaline.
By design, Collision Course is a stunt release, and the mash-ups can’t possibly hold the artistic power of the original tracks. Yet the inherent looseness of those moments — the playful energy of two giant artists in their prime, tinkering together in the same room — makes Collision Course worth returning to in the years since its release.
Ultimately, it was the shared studio time, with Jay-Z arriving at NRG and dapping up the band before laying down his verses one-on-one with Mike, that proved crucial to manufacturing the chemistry at the core of the EP. Collision Course gave Mike the opportunity to share space with, and produce, a childhood hero who had become a peer. Jay-Z had been a star for years before Linkin Park took off; it could have easily been a classic never-meet-your-heroes moment for Mike. But the recording sessions were full of bro-hugs and easy feedback, Chester clowning on Mike for working too hard and Jay uttering “That transition’s mean!” while scrunching his face behind the boards.
“I like this shit — I like to do different things,” an animated Jay-Z exclaims at one point on the Collision Course making-of DVD. He’s speaking to Chester while huddled in the corner of a studio room, gesturing and breathlessly trying to keep up with his thoughts. “You just bring what you do to the table, I bring what I do to the table, uncompromising — you’re not trying to be me, and I’m not trying to be you, that fusion, and just whatever happens happens. I love that!”
The casual tone provoked plenty of ad-libs that can be heard on the final cut of the EP: Chester muttering, “I ordered a Frappuccino, where’s my fucking Frappuccino?” and garnering a Jay-Z belly laugh; Jay quipping, “You’re wasting your talent, Randy!” to some guy in the studio Reddit users are still trying to identify. Even the decision to combine “Numb” and “Encore” was partially due to Mike just wanting to hear Chester bellow the “What the hell are you waiting fo-o-o-r-r-r?” line. Again: fun.
“There was no ego at all working with Jay,” Mike reflected later. “If I asked him to perform something a certain way or put a vocal line here or there, he was happy to do it. He’s really easy to work with.”
As they were finishing up in the studio and preparing to perform at the Roxy, a goal formed in Mike’s mind: he wanted the mash-up collection to be so good, so immediately effective, that MTV would never be able to make another one. And that’s exactly what happened. MTV Ultimate Mash-Ups transformed from a series into a one- off concert show that aired on November 10, 2004, with the CD and behind- the- scenes DVD hitting stores three weeks later. To this day, no follow-up episode has ever been executed.
Collision Course debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 — a rarity for a six-song EP, in any era — but its true legacy is “Numb/Encore,” which rose to No. 20 on the Hot 100 as the project’s lead single and gave alternative programmers an excuse to sneak Jay-Z onto their airwaves. Beyond that early radio play, “Numb/Encore” has endured as an immaculate equilibrium of rap and rock — its melodies joined logically and wholly, soul-mates that made their way to each other from different parts of the world. Although “Numb” has now crossed one billion Spotify plays on its own, “Numb/Encore” is not far behind it; rather astonishingly, the mash-up remains one of the five most-streamed songs on the platform across Jay-Z’s legendary career.
“‘Numb’s’ other dimension is ‘Numb/Encore,’” Brad asserted. “You could love just one. However, I think about them in tandem. And when you think of Meteora, you think of Collision Course — that moment in collaboration with Jay-Z, which is really special.”
Ultimately, Collision Course did not change popular music in a literal sense — officially released mash-up albums remain a rarity to this day, primarily because of the legal red tape. On a more abstract level, though, the project did foretell a future in which amateur and professional producers crashed songs into one another.
Soon after the release of Collision Course, hip-hop’s mixtape era exploded: artists like Lil Wayne, Gucci Mane, and Clipse spent the mid- aughts hijacking other rappers’ beats, freestyling over them, and releasing compilations for free online, one-upping the original artist and favoring internet buzz over commercial sales. Meanwhile, the release of mash-up songs and albums — from DJ Earworm’s annual “United State of Pop” singles, featuring the twenty-five biggest songs of the year rolled into one, to Girl Talk’s full-length pastiches of hundreds of samples, to a 2022 mash-up of Britney Spears’s “Toxic” and Ginuwine’s “Pony” that charted as “Toxic Pony” — became more commonplace in the years after the album’s release.
And the advent of social media and streaming platforms further delivered that mash-up power into users’ hands, with multimedia mash-ups constantly concocted and posted in ways that helped artists gain more listens — even today. Want to know why Lady Gaga’s 2011 song “Bloody Mary” suddenly became a Hot 100 hit in 2023? That’s because TikTok users synced up the song with a dance sequence from the Netflix series Wednesday, and the mash-up went viral enough to make “Bloody Mary” a belated sensation.
Collision Course was like a star-studded summer blockbuster that lived up to the hype upon its release, then proved sneakily influential in the years since. Its mainstream impact still reverberates today with every new spin of “Numb/Encore,” but perhaps most importantly, Collision Course further legitimized Linkin Park in the moment. Jay-Z is widely considered the greatest rapper of all time — and he picked this band, out of any artist, to reimagine his biggest hits.
Linkin Park had entered rarefied air, the type of rock stratosphere that’s reserved for only a few bands per generation. But they wanted more.
Excerpted from It Starts With One by Jason Lipshutz. Copyright © 2024. Available from Hachette Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
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It’s reading season! The holidays are about gifting, finding joy and relaxing with a good book. Whether you plan to travel or stay put for the holidays, an audiobook is a fun way to help you pass the time over the holidays (even though it goes pretty quickly). Audible offers access to more than a million audiobooks, including bestsellers and new releases such as Keke Palmer’s Master of Me and Cher: The Memoir, both released on Tuesday (Nov. 19).
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For a limited time, eligible Amazon customers can join Audible for only 99 cents per month for the first three months.
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The membership includes one free bestseller or new release each month and access to thousands of audiobooks, podcasts and Audible. Plus, Amazon Music subscribers can now access Audible titles, Amazon announced on Tuesday.
The Audible membership will renew at $14.95/month after the promo ends but you can cancel anytime.
See below for more on Audible new releases.
Audible Deep Dive: Audiobooks to Put on Your Radar
In her new memoir, Cher talks love, motherhood, loss and triumph — from her earliest childhood memories to her marriage and divorce from Sonny Bono and forging her own path as a solo artist. The book also details Cher’s relationship with rocker Gregg Allman, motherhood and her bout for independence.
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The audiobook is read in part by Cher and narrated by Tony Award-winning actress Stephanie J. who starred in The Cher Show. Cher and Brooks alternate between chapters creating a “unique audiobook treatment” to immerse listeners into her life story.
“When it came to completing the audiobook, I knew I wouldn’t be able to do it all myself due to my dyslexia. But then I thought of Stephanie, who won the Tony for playing me on Broadway in The Cher Show. I knew she would be the perfect choice to get across to the reader the essence of me,” Cher explained. “I called her and within hours she re-arranged her schedule to start the recording. I felt so safe having her help share my story, and she did a beautiful job.”
Reflecting on life lessons, Palmer goes into teaching mode with Master of Me: The Secret to Controlling Your Narrative. Read in her own words, the actress-singer-host gets candid about her struggles with boundaries, unconditional love, forgiveness and feeling worthy.
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“Don’t block your blessings and potential opportunities by allowing the voices of other people to influence your actions,” notes Palmer. “How you’re choosing to set yourself up for success is between you and the person looking back at you in the mirror.”
Other entertainment-focused releases available on Audible include The Mysterious Affair of Styles featuring actor Peter Dinklage, You Never Know by actor Tom Selleck, Stanley Tucci’s Taste, Britney Spears’ The Woman in Me, Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime, Mariah Carey’s Portrait of a Portrait and George Orwell’s 1984: An Audible Original Adaptation narrated by Cynthia Erivo, Tom Hardy and Andrew Garfield.
Read more on Audible’s holiday promo here.
All products and services featured are independently chosen by editors. However, Billboard may receive a commission on orders placed through its retail links, and the retailer may receive certain auditable data for accounting purposes. Move over Beyoncé and Solange, there’s another member of the Knowles family topping the charts. Tina Knowles’ forthcoming memoir is currently […]
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Reading requires focus, and for those who often multitask, that means having to pause and pay attention to just one thing for a bit. Amazon‘s Audible helps people enjoy captivating stories, but through audiobooks — and for a limited time you can try the service for more than 90% off.
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Audible’s latest promo gets new users access to the service for just $0.99 a month for the first three months. That includes Audible originals too, such as Words + Music, which spotlights artists including Mariah Carey and Snoop Dogg. Each episode gives you an exclusive look into a musician’s creative process while offering fans a more in-depth look into favorite artists and how they make some of their greatest hits. Audible also released a brand new series titled The Wonder of Stevie that takes listeners through Stevie Wonder’s music career, with commentary from Janelle Monae, Questlove and even Barack Obama and Michelle Obama.
The limited-time deal is going on from now until Dec. 31, and is stackable with Audible’s complimentary 30-day free trial.
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Keep reading to learn how to score the Audible deal.
How to Get Audible for $0.99 a Month for 3 Months
New members can take advantage of a complimentary Audible membership for 30 days free when you sign up. You don’t need to be a Prime member in order to receive the discount — just click the button to redeem the deal, and then fill out the information required to instantly get access to the service. Once your 30 day free trial is over, you’ll be charged the limited-time promo price of $0.99/month for the first three months (a savings of more than 90%).
Afterwards, your membership will auto-renew at $14.95/month for the Premium Plus plan that includes access to Audible Originals, audiobooks and podcasts in addition to a monthly free credit to purchase any premium book within the Audible library (regardless of price) and exclusive member-only deals and discounts.
Other Audible Originals you can check out include the eight episode series Origins, which, like Words + Music, spotlights a groundbreaking artist and gives you a peek into their mind, including where they find inspiration. You’ll also get to hear live performances, with each episode focusing on a different artist. Musicians you can look forward to learning more about include Billie Eilish, Doja Cat and King Princess.
Besides Audible Originals, the service includes a vast library of audiobooks that you can add to your listening list, including musician memoirs and music books. Instead of reading Lisa Marie Presley’s memoir, you’ll be able to listen to actress Julia Roberts narrate the star’s life, or hear from JoJo as the “Too Little, Too Late” artist narrates her own memoir.
It’s a good day to be a Taylor Swift fan. On Tuesday (Oct. 15), the pop star announced on Good Morning America that her official self-published Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour Book as well as The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology on CD and vinyl would be hitting Target shelves this holiday season, sending Swifties into […]
All products and services featured are independently chosen by editors. However, Billboard may receive a commission on orders placed through its retail links, and the retailer may receive certain auditable data for accounting purposes. Before Lisa Marie Presley‘s death in 2023, she had one last request for her daughter Riley Keough: to finish her memoir. […]
All products and services featured are independently chosen by editors. However, Billboard may receive a commission on orders placed through its retail links, and the retailer may receive certain auditable data for accounting purposes. The surviving members of The Tragically Hip (also referred to as the Hip) are continuing their year of behind-the-scenes insight with […]
For any fashion-friendly Swiftie, there’s only one place to go immediately after the pop star releases a music video, attends an award show, is snapped out and about, or supporting Travis Kelce at a Kansas City Chiefs Game: Taylor Swift Style, the fashion blog and popular Instagram account of writer Sarah Chapelle.
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On TSS, Chapelle documents with astonishing detail (and speed) the source and pricing of Swift’s ensembles (down to each ring on her fingers), but also provides insightful, in-depth critical analysis, illuminating how Swift’s fashion choices are often as revealing — and intentional — as her lyrics. “We’re very familiar with these confessional, emotional songs that she gives us about her life, but I always felt that her style is the other half of that story,” Chapelle tells Billboard. “It’s the visual half that icon-ifies her eras, and it creates these memorable moments that stick out in your brain. I think she’s always, in some form, used fashion as a way of carving out identity and saying something about herself.”
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On Oct. 8, Chapelle’s already devoted audience (over 300,000 strong on her @taylorswiftstyled Insta) will likely get even bigger when she releases Taylor Swift Style: Fashion Through the Eras (St. Martin’s Griffin), a book encompassing Swift’s career to date as viewed through Chapelle’s “critically-kind” and highly personal perspective. With essays along with commentary on over 200 photographs capturing Swift’s evolution in the public eye, Taylor Swift Style will certainly be catnip for fans – but it also proves to be a fascinating, often surprising lens into this additional layer of Swift’s creativity for anyone watching the artist’s continuing evolution.
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Chapelle spoke to Billboard ahead of her book’s publication about Swift’s style eras, fashion Easter eggs, and why she should always wear more green. When you were starting what would become Taylor Swift Style, how, if at all, was the fashion press treating Taylor? So I have been a fan of Taylor since around 2006, and I’ve been documenting her fashion since 2011. At that time, the social media landscape was certainly not what it is right now, and the celebrity fashion landscape and press coverage of it was also not as hyper-focused, and certainly not on Taylor, as it is now. When I created the blog, I was studying in university to become a journalist, and I was trying to figure out my own identity and navigate, you know, how do I express myself and figure out who I am? And one way that a lot of us would do that is through our clothes. The blog just kind of became an intersection of all of my interests — like a niche within a niche of the fandom — to offer a resource for all of her fashion to other fans who I hoped might feel the same way and have this highly specific interest that I did. I talk about it in the book, and Taylor has talked about it as well, how there was a certain period when her art just wasn’t really taken very seriously or was sort of brushed off as like a teenage girl thing. And now I think we take her art and her power and her business through her artistry, and also, by extension, through her fashion, so, so, so seriously. It’s been an amazing evolution and journey to witness and also document. As you note in the book, at the start of her career, Taylor’s stylist was her label head, Scott Borchetta’s wife. Her current stylist, Joseph Cassell, has now been working with her for many years. Do you see a parallel between how Taylor’s ownership over her creativity and over how she presents herself have evolved? One thing that has always resonated with me about how Taylor seems to approach her business is that it’s, in a sense, always seemed kind of personal — she retains staff and people around her for very long periods of time, obviously a reflection of the mutual understanding she has with the people around her and the level of trust she has in them to help execute her vision and bring her ideas to life. I think one kind of fascinating example of her taking an incredible amount of creative control over her image was in the folklore and evermore era when, due to the circumstances of the pandemic, she self-styled because she didn’t want to inconvenience or endanger her team. So the folklore and evermore eras’ [imagery is] a very undiluted look into her creative process of translating what was going on in her mind into the physical, into the visual of how she wanted that era to look and to feel. And I think that’s especially resonant when you consider how the folklore photo shoot feels like its music — you’re kind of traipsing through this imaginary, wooded place as she’s trying to escape the realities of life. It felt right for that era, for that time, for that music. How did your “critically-kind” ethos come about? I can’t remember exactly when it started, but I didn’t always write commentary. I used to feel that, oh, people don’t want to hear from you, they just want the information — they just want to know where the clothes are from and where they can get it, and you should kind of be like this invisible admin force, like “don’t look behind the curtain!” type of energy. And a few years in, people would just start being like, “You should write more. You should write longer captions.” It almost felt like taking a page out of Taylor’s book, of when you choose to be vulnerable and a little bit more open people resonate with that humanity, and that resonance is the entire reason why there’s a book in the first place. It’s very easy to fall into the internet pit of defaulting to [saying] unkind or cruel things, and that just never felt like the tone that I wanted to hit or the ethos that I wanted to drive conversation with. I think that there are a lot of people who crave the original intention of the internet, which is to connect with other people — and when you carve out an intentional space for those kinds of conversations to happen in a way that’s thoughtful and nuanced and kind, people will come. You are well known for your love of Taylor wearing green. Please explain! When people ask me this I feel like I’m almost disappointing with like, a very boring and underwhelming answer — which is, I just think she looks really pretty! (Laughs) I just think that she looks great in that color, and every time I see it, it makes my heart really happy. Luckily for me, she’s had quite a number of amazing moments in green; there’s like an entire sidebar dedicated to some of my favorite Taylor in green moments in the book. The most relevant from this year was the peridot green Gucci gown from the Golden Globes, which was fantastic.
Taylor Swift at the 81st Golden Globe Awards held at the Beverly Hilton Hotel on Jan. 7, 2024 in Beverly Hills, Calif.
Gilbert Flores/Golden Globes 2024
I was very into that long-sleeved crushed velvet green dress she wore out that everyone was very sure was Rep-coded… The Little Lies dress from January, yeah. Here’s the thing: I strongly believe that that outfit was an Easter egg, but it was an intentional misdirect, because — stay with me — [as part of] the Tortured Poets rollout, there was coding in the backend of her website that [when unscrambled] said “red herring.” She’s now comfortable enough playing with fashion, not only as a tool to reflect what’s coming next or her state of mind or her emotions or a vibe about a project, but also to intentionally mislead, because she’s aware that people will pick up on things.
And I believe that she had intentionally been using Reputation (Taylor’s Version) as a red herring, so that nobody would suspect that the bait-and-switch would be a new album, The Tortured Poets Department. Because how much more obvious can you get, wearing a green velvet dress and pairing it with Giuseppe Zanotti boots that have snakes on them? For once, I didn’t think that was a leap — I was like, “I think we are correctly interpreting what we are seeing with our eyes!” (Laughs) She just wanted us to be wrong, which is her right! It’s interesting to see how your readers react to different looks of hers. I noticed that there were very divided reactions to her wearing obvious logos on the recent weekend in New York when she and Travis were photographed together a lot. Why do you think that was? A logo-covered item [a Gucci shift dress Swift wore out] stuck out to my eye, because it’s not typical of her to go for something so ostentatiously branded, so I think it was just surprising to see her, you know, fully Gucci-fied for that particular outing. Especially because one signature of Taylor’s fashion is the high-low — she loves pairing like, a Reformation dress with, say, Louis Vuitton or Christian Louboutin heels, creating this balanced mix of aspirational and attainable, while still looking overall very relatable. So to wear something so obviously luxury-branded stuck out to a lot of people’s eyes. Are there particular eras when you think Taylor’s music and fashion aesthetics have matched especially well – and, conversely, when they’ve felt more incongruous with each other? I think that debut made perfect sense. Folklore and evermore make perfect sense to me. It’s hard for 1989; I look at it and I’m like, yeah, that makes perfect sense — it was her major breakthrough into pop music and so she had this, like, pop girl uniform of crop top and skirt — but also she briefly kind of introduced 1989 as, like, this ’80s album, which it’s not…. so debut and folklore feel more cohesive to me. I really loved how the Reputation fashion captured the duality of the album: I talk about it in the book, but obviously she kind of beats you over the head up front with a lot of leather and snakeskin and camo and combat boots, it’s very clearly a bombastic, quote-unquote revenge album, but then she accompanies it with softer sequins and rainbows and sparkles, kind of the signature Taylor Swift soft feminine aesthetic, which is appropriate for Reputation too, because underneath all of that, it is a falling in love album. For a lot of people, the most incongruous is probably Midnights — a lot of people were confused by this ‘70s aesthetic, like this smoky, hazy, wood scratched floors and vinyl and patchouli scented air…..and then this huge kind of return to shiny pop. Though I think I’ve come around to making sense of it I really like the Midnights album photo shoot visuals quite a lot. A big part of seeing Taylor publicly these days is seeing her with Travis — someone who’s intentional about dressing in maybe a very different way — and of course seeing their individual styles juxtaposed. Do you feel they’re complementary, or even rubbing off on each other in interesting ways? So that’s interesting…do you think that Travis dresses intentionally, or do you think that Travis just thinks fashion is fun?
Taylor Swift arrives at GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium prior to a game between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Cincinnati Bengals on Sept. 15, 2024 in Kansas City, Missouri.
Jamie Squire/Getty Images
Hmm, interesting question. I guess there’s a difference. I do think he finds it fun… I think that there’s a clear difference between somebody who thinks that fashion is a fun thing to play with and to experiment with, and somebody who’s intentionally using fashion as an extension of their artistry and messaging and communication. And I think Travis falls into the fashion is fun [camp]. Having somebody around who obviously injects what she said about him at the VMAs — like, magic and happiness and rainbows and puppies — having that sense of lightness in her life is obviously fun to see, as a fan. But I think watching her show up to Chiefs games has been a fascinating extension of her style, in that it’s the first time that I am analyzing her fashion and her choices not through the lens of “what does this say about her” but in her playing entirely a supporting role. And that’s her choosing Kansas City based businesses, women-owned businesses, choosing vintage — all of those careful, thoughtful, intentional choices kind of create this foundation of “I’m here as a supporting person. I am here to ‘Woooo!’” And I love how she’s made that clear. To me it’s a very clear delineation in her style that still feels very Taylor — like, cute little plaid skirt, little vintage Chiefs sweatshirt? That feels like a very Taylor outfit! It’s very clearly a “I am not the main character” outfit, but the core of the outfit is very recognizably Taylor. She still retains this semblance of recognizability, and I think that that’s one thing that she does incredibly well in all aspects of her branding and her fashion: even as she evolves as an artist, as a person, you can still see her as a human.
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The Billboard Family Hits of the Week compiles what’s new and worth your family’s time in music, movies, TV, books, games and more. Forget the mind-numbing scrolling and searching “what to watch for family movie night” … again. The best in family entertainment each week is all in one place, in this handy guide. Isn’t it satisfying to cross something off your list?
Dear readers, it’s October! Before your living room is lost in a Hocus Pocus–Halloweentown loop, catch up with what your family might have missed over the weekend — and get the scoop on some new releases sure to keep almost everyone entertained.
Whether you’ve got one fan in your family, or a full house of ’em (as some of us do), Taylor Swift lovers will be curious to flip through the soon-to-be released Taylor Swift Style: Fashion Through the Eras, a new book full of fashion photos and details on the pop icon’s looks over the years. It’s been a long time coming from the creator of @taylorswiftstyled, a go-to source on the internet for identifying the pop icon’s clothing, shoes and accessories on the double.
Before getting your hands on that, have a family movie night. Movie theater-goers will find a solid pick in DreamWorks Animation’s The Wild Robot. For those in the parenting era where you’d rather not pay for tickets to see a movie you can’t pause for popcorn refills and restroom breaks, stream new animated special The Bad Guys: Haunted Heist at home on Netflix this week.
Make it through your to-do list this week while listening to Lady Gaga‘s surprise Harlequin album. Here’s the family-friendly thing about Harlequin: You don’t really need to know anything about the Joker sequel it’s a companion to, or know the name of a single Gaga song, to vibe to the revived standards on this collection. But play it on repeat and you, or someone close to you, just might turn into a Little Monster.
Speaking of new tunes, there’s a single dropping later this week that’ll satisfy the K-pop fan of the fam and those of us who lived and breathed ’90s pop radio.
Find more about this week’s top picks in the Billboard Family Hits of the Week below:
Catch ‘The Wild Robot’ in Theaters Now