Mike's 2005 VMA Score

Original Five Score Songs

In August 2005, Mike and Lil Jon were asked to score the MTV Video Music Awards for that year. This was right when the Fort Minor project was being finalized, so Mike definitely had some creative juice left over at the time. Mike commented and said, "The challenge was that they needed variety. I did 10 tracks, a couple of them a lot of Linkin Park fans will recognise the sound, while others are different, all the way down to some really stripped-down hip-hop sounds. And within each piece, there are different parts."

MTV.com at the time posted five of the songs on "The Leak" online for fans to download.

MTV.com's "The Leak" Tracklisting:

01. 100 Degrees (0:48)

02. Hype (0:46)

03. Saturday (0:50)

04. Montreal (0:54)

05. Madison (1:03)

During the awards show, fans immediately noticed another clip (during a cut to a commercial break) that had the familiar Shinoda sound to it and speculation arose that it was one of the remaining five songs from the score that were unreleased. Fast forward four years to when the LP Underground 9 promo video was released... You guessed it - a clip of another score track appeared in the video.

Full Score

In response to a January 2010 post on LPLive about unreleased VMA tracks, on March 1, 2010, Mike posted on his blog, "Kinda random: in the past few months, a bunch of you were recently talking about the “score” I created for the 2005 MTV VMAs (I did a small selection of beats for the show, and scored it with Lil’ Jon, who contributed his own tracks. We did not collaborate on any, FYI). Some of you have already found the tracks on my soundcloud page, but I figured I’d post them here. Enjoy!"

The SoundCloud page said, "These are the beats that made up some of the soundtrack of 2005′s MTV VMAs. I scored the show with Lil’ Jon. If you rap or sing over one of these beats, make sure to let me know at www.mikeshinoda.com." In this release, fans were treated to new score tracks as well as longer versions of the ones that were released by MTV. The unreleased track from the MTV VMA's turned out to be Teletronic and the one from the LPU 9 video was entitled Catharsis.

However, there was one problem with the tracks! The first track was labeled Hive instead of 100 Degrees, meaning track 3 was missing! Astat at the time added, "Probably "Hive" is the missing track and 100 Degrees is just mislabeled. The first track was labeled as "100 Degrees" on the VMA The Leak site when the short versions of the original 5 were posted (which was months before We Major came out with the full version of 100 Degrees with vocals), so I don't see why it would have an alternate title."

Shinoda SoundCloud Tracklisting:

01. Hive ("100 Degrees"?) (1:56)

02. Teletronic (1:42)

03. ---Unreleased---

04. Catharsis (2:06)

05. Saturday (1:34)

06. Montreal (1:28)

07. Selector (1:27)

08. A.15 (0:42)

09. Hype (1:32)

10. Madison (2:20)

In case you're unfamiliar with Fort Minor, '100 Degrees' later went on to be used for the song by the same name to kick off Fort Minor's "We Major" mixtape. Another interesting note, which hasn't been verified, is that a fan reported hearing two of these tracks ('Saturday' and 'Hype') on MTV's Rob & Big in 2010. Anyway, to this day, that third score track (whether it's called 'Hive' or something else) remains unreleased.

Download

MTV "The Leak" - 5 songs - mp3 (zip)

9 song score "full release - mp3 (zip)

Note: These tracks were only released in 128kbps on SoundCloud. The original MTV download of the first 5 songs is also in 128kbps.

You can view the original forum thread for the SoundCloud release here.