In conversation with Rick Rubin

Rick Rubin is a legendary record producer who co-founded Def Jam records, which helped popularize hip hop. He has worked with everyone from Johnny Cash (whose career he is credited with reviving) to Paul McCartney and Kanye West. He sat down with The Spectator’s Rory Sutherland to discuss creativity, Bach, Sherlock Holmes, JFK assassination theories and more.

Rory Sutherland: It’s a huge pleasure to see you again. Just for the benefit of older Spectator readers, it’s probably worth defining what a music producer does because it’s ambiguous. People might imagine someone sitting there, adjusting the levels on one of those enormous mixing decks. In fact you never touch any of that stuff. You don’t really play an instrument. And you don’t read music. (No shame in that. The Beatles couldn’t read music either.) Your involvement, as you often say, is that in the studio you’ll be found lying on a couch and listening rather than interfering with any of the equipment or any of the specifics of the piece. Is your value as a kind of catalyst?

‘The downside to being middle class is your taste is constrained by what’s fashionable to like’

Rick Rubin: It’s a lot like being a coach. I listen. I take in whatever’s going on. I give feedback honestly, clearly, as best I can. What I’ve come to learn from doing it for a while is it’s more helpful to point out the problem areas than to give solutions. The artist can figure out what they can do to solve the problem. Seeing where the weak links are is a big part of my job.

RS: It’s an approach in which — and I’m vaguely familiar with it in advertising in the sense — your task is not to be right, it’s to be interestingly less wrong.

RR: “Interestingly” is a good word because so much of what it’s about is creating something that can capture the imagination, which tend to be the things that don’t fit.

RS: There’s a wonderful book by a neuroscientist at the University of Sussex whose theory holds that most of what we perceive is actually a prediction. The limited bandwidth in our optic nerve is reserved for those things we don’t expect. We effectively only notice things that are surprising — that’s how we can compress information efficiently. It’s similar to what happens in a television. There’s an expectation value for each pixel and the data is only used to the extent that the pixel deviates from the expected level of the one that precedes it, or the one that adjoins it. So that very thing of being interestingly less wrong: there’s a complete difference between things we notice and things we perceive.

RR: And maybe more wrong is preferable sometimes.

RS: The great influence on the Sex Pistols was someone at their art school who said: “You think I want you to succeed. I don’t. I want you to fail spectacularly.” One of the great influences you mention in your book, The Creative Act, is the Ramones, who couldn’t play instruments very well, but had boundless enthusiasm. I suppose you are a near neighbor of theirs because you grew up in Long Island?

RR: I did, and they grew up in Queens and probably less than an hour away. I got to see them play maybe fifty times. They were my favorite band, after the Beatles. The idea that songs about sniffing glue or pinheads would be mainstream pop… Maybe they didn’t understand how unusual their perspective was.

RS: You had this wonderfully bipolar upbringing, in the sense that you spent your weekends in Manhattan with an aunt who had a creative job at Estée Lauder. So you had highly cultured weekends and blue-collar weekdays.

RR: It was a great combination. The suburban blue-collar upbringing is much closer to the way most people live. For my friends in Manhattan, there were certain rules about the things that they could and couldn’t like. They didn’t really get to decide that — the culture made things. It was a very small world and what was cool was very narrow. On Long Island, just an hour away, you could like anything.

RS: The downside to being middle class is your taste is constrained by what’s fashionable to like. Two very authentic musical forms, country and gospel, which are traditionally working-class, just get on with doing what they’re doing without any concern for changing fashion.

*****

RS: Your aunt, you said, read poetry to you. She also introduced you to Sherlock Holmes, which I’m delighted to hear because I think it should be on the curriculum of every school. Holmes is slightly misrepresented, particularly in film, as if he’s a paragon of reason. In fact, detective work is a huge act of imagination. In the first phase of an investigation, you’re very open-minded and you ask questions like: “Did you notice anything unusual on the night of March 17?” The answer could be anything: a dog that doesn’t bark in the night. Eventually you have the evidential phase. You have to prove that the person is guilty in a court of law, but you shouldn’t allow the second phase to constrain the first.

RR: No, you can’t. If you do, it’s like tampering with the information. The beauty of when we’re making things is there’s a thing that wants to blossom. If you put too much of yourself on top of it too soon, it doesn’t get to blossom. It turns into something else, something smaller. Let the idea bubble and let it change. Let it grow. Sometimes, a day later, a week later, you’ll have a much greater understanding and vision of it than if you jump too quickly.

RS: It strikes me that this general insight into the creative act could be informing politics or business decision-making. There’s a very large part of life which wants to pretend everything’s deterministic, that we make these decisions as though they followed laws like physics. You’d almost argue that creativity is actually having enough time to, if not escape from that process, at least delay it.

RR: Or outright reject it.

‘Sometimes doing the same thing and doing it well is the best form of reinvention’

RS: Have you got involved [in politics]? You had some involvement, I think, with Robert Kennedy [Jr.]…?

RR: Not politically, but creatively. I got asked to do a Super Bowl commercial for him. I had not made a commercial before, but I agreed to do it because it sounded like a fun experiment. Then I found out I had three days to do it and there were no materials available. I came up with several different ideas. I chose the one that was the least like anything else you would have seen, to the point where you might think it was a mistake or that something was broken.

RS: Perfect. There’s no point in being the seventeenth-tallest redwood in the forest.

RR: In hip hop, so much of the things that we do involve sampling. We sampled an uplifting commercial from JFK’s 1960 campaign and then changed it to be for RFK. It was just a happy, upbeat jingle. It’s so unlike political commercials today, which are very angry and it’s like somebody shaking a finger at you. This made you feel like it was from a happier time. You’ve never seen anything like it on a flat-screen television. It differentiated itself and everybody talked about it.

*****

RS: I suppose the Beastie Boys were your first big creation, weren’t they? And that was a completely counter-cultural moment. But from there, you went into hip hop fairly extensively.

RR: Yes, and also heavy metal artists and a lot of different things. Each step of the way, I was told not to do the new thing. Once I established myself in hip hop, the perception was that’s just what I did. Then when I started making heavy metal records, people were like: “That’s a bad idea.” When those got successful, it was like: “OK, he does hip hop and he does heavy metal, but avoid country at all costs.” Then that was successful as well. I don’t listen to music by category. If you put a label on anything, you’re just making it smaller.

RS: Have you heard of a death metal band called Party Cannon? What’s hysterically funny is that every single death metal band has a logo that’s in Gothic type, or looks as if it’s been scratched with a claw, but their name is Party Cannon and, even though they’re a hardcore death metal band, their logo is a multicolored balloon type. Every time there’s a festival, every single band logo on the poster is in Gothic script and then right in the middle there’s this absurd thing that looks as if it’s from a children’s TV show. They chose that name and that logo precisely because they realised that if they call themselves something like Valhalla, they would be completely invisible.

RR: Sometimes the best creative choice is not changing. I’m not excited about hearing a Ramones acoustic album or Ramones country album, whereas the Beatles over the thirteen albums in seven years changed radically. There’s no one playbook for every artist. Sometimes doing the same thing and doing it well is the best form of reinvention. When is the moment for change? I got to work with a band called Linkin Park and when they came to me they had a couple of very successful albums. We could have either continued with this tested formula, or we could make a radical change knowing that, in some ways, the audience is never prepared for that change. The sooner you do it, probably the better. I made an album with Kanye West called Yeezus. Half of his audience hated it. Our intention wasn’t for them to hate it, but we were explorers on a new adventure and we were going to go as far as we could go. Whoever wants to come for the ride, great. Whoever doesn’t, see you later.

RS: Bands can’t be, in a sense, entirely customer-centric, because you can become constrained by your own audience. One of the points you make in the book is that judgment is the fee you pay for being creative. People will judge you when you take your work out into the world and some people won’t like it. But you also argue that working for popular acclaim is equally fatal.

RR: They’re essentially the same. You’re playing the same game if you’re engaging in the reaction. The whole reason you’re doing art is for self-expression. As soon as that gets clouded by an audience, expectation, reviewers, what anyone thinks, it defeats the purpose.

RS: The same thing happens at a certain level in food. There’s a famous British chef who wouldn’t put salt and pepper on the table because his argument was, I decide the level of seasoning in the food and I know better than you. Somehow the integrity is communicated by the very stubbornness.

RR: I always order meat cooked well done and the better the restaurant, the more frustrated they are. In Italy, they’re offended if you ask for it well done — it just goes against the rules of meat. But I grew up liking it well done. I always thought it would be great to have a restaurant called Well Done. When you order, they would ask you how you’d like your meat, only to then tell you you can only have it well done.

RS: Absolutely perfect.

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RS: You’re a big Bach fan, aren’t you?

RR: Yes, I love Bach.

RS: I’m so pleased, because I’ve always thought as well that the worst mistake that music lovers make is becoming genre defined. I’ve never understood that. I’ve got a friend who loves sport and I really admire him because he simply says: “No, no, no, no, it’s not about football or rugby. I love all sport.” He says he’ll happily watch Canadian log-rolling competitions — if it’s done well then it’s interesting. He’s right. Genre definition is really snobbery. It’s music as identity rather than music as joy.

‘Before exciting things break through, they’re mad. The Wright brothers were crazy until the plane took off’

RR: And some of the most interesting music defies genre. I got to work with System of a Down, who were an Armenian heavy metal band. Their work was influenced by ancient folk music, rhythmically and melodically, but they played fast heavy metal. It didn’t sound like any other heavy metal you ever heard. It’s another one that very much divided the audience. When we put out their first album, the big radio station that would play that kind of music said: “We will never play this band.” One year later, they were the most popular band on the station. Before exciting new things break through, they’re mad. The Wright brothers were crazy people until the plane took off. It’s true with every new technology or style, it’s stupid until it isn’t.

RS: I have to explain to my younger colleagues that when I used a mobile phone on Oxford Street in 1989, people shouted abuse at me from passing cars. The early use of a mobile was seen as just generally objectionable. I had always assumed that when you look at good ideas, that they’re instantly welcomed. But there’s extraordinary opposition to almost anything new. Our default mode is we like habit and we like social copying. Something new runs foul of both of those.

RR: Johnny Echols, the guitar player in the band Love, told me the story of another guitar player named Jimmy James who was Little Richard’s roadie. He drove Little Richard and would fill in on guitar, but he was not a great player. Then there was a company called Vox that created the wah-wah pedal, which is this pedal that you step on and it goes “wah-wah-wah-wah-wah.” Vox gave it to all the guitar players in the popular bands. They explained: “This can make your guitar sound like a trombone.” Johnny Echols threw his in the garbage because he said: “If I want to make the sound of a trombone, I’ll learn to play the trombone.” Then one day, Love was performing in San Francisco, and they heard that this incredible new guitar player from England named Jimi Hendrix was coming and he was going to be playing at the Whiskey a Go Go in three days. They’d heard about this guy — he’s supposed to be the greatest guitar player ever. They drive down and what they see on stage is their friend Jimmy James, the once mediocre guitar player, using the wah-wah pedal. And that was Jimi Hendrix. Before the wah-wah pedal, his name was Jimmy James and he was mediocre at best. He embraced the new technology and became the Jimi Hendrix we know. Johnny Echols was offered the same option, but rejected the new technology.

RS: Bach was a technologist, to an extent, in that if you wanted your organ repaired or tuned or improved he was an expert in the technology of the thing, and a church organ was the most complicated bit of technology on the planet until the Industrial Revolution. You can obviously tell if you listen to Bach that had synthesizers been around he would have led the charge. There’s an interesting theory from David Hockney, which is that Vermeer was actually a photographer, not a painter, because he used a camera obscura to actually paint with.

RR: The argument against Vermeer would be he’s cheating. But it’s not cheating to use technology if you’re creating something that you couldn’t create otherwise.

*****

RS: What’s so fascinating about the creative mode of operation is it contains contradictions. The opposite of a good idea can be another good idea. I find it very strange that people try to solve problems by pretending that it’s a high school mathematics problem with a single optimal right answer. My argument is, if you’re happy to use the rules of psychology or perception, where the opposite of a great thing can be another great thing, your solution space is ten times bigger.

RR: Absolutely. If you start with the idea that anything is possible — that’s something we see Elon Musk doing now. A lot of the things that he set out to do seem impossible… When you write fiction, it has to make sense, whereas in real life, the world doesn’t make sense. Many things that happen in the world, if you put them in fiction, you wouldn’t believe the fiction.

‘Johnny Cash felt like: “Why do you want to work with me?” He had no belief in himself at that point’

RS: Consider the most studied sixty seconds in the last century: the Kennedy assassination. There’s this extraordinary detail which drove people absolutely insane, which was Umbrella Man. It’s a beautiful sunny day, it’s not raining and yet he’s holding up an umbrella. Loads of elaborate theories were constructed, e.g. there was a gun hidden in the umbrella, etc. It turns out it was a protest. He was a lone eccentric who was protesting against Joseph Kennedy, JFK’s father, and his wartime appeasement by holding up an umbrella as a symbol of Neville Chamberlain. One of the reasons you have conspiracy theories is that once you zoom in far enough to a significant event there will be components to it which are utterly absurd.

RR: We come up with a first instinctual reaction, and once we have that, we feel that we understand the world now. We’re the unreliable narrator of our own stories.

RS: Everything in retrospect is shoehorned into making sense. The whole of the first world war was down to the fact that the car carrying Archduke Ferdinand was very difficult to get into reverse gear. These tiny things have momentous consequences, but we can’t cope with this, so we linearize the whole thing in retrospect to reassure ourselves that it makes sense.

*****

RS: With Johnny Cash, there was this extraordinary story. When you first met him, he was playing to an audience of about 150 people, is that right?

RR: Yes, in a dinner theater. People were eating while he was playing.

RS: So there was the sound of cutlery clinking while he was playing. And you came upon Johnny Cash and produced six albums with him. It was assumed he was at the end of his career. You almost deliberately chose that as a challenge, didn’t you?

RR: The thought was that most of the artists I’d worked with were young. I can’t say that I knew what we were doing, but whatever it was, it was working. So I thought: “I wonder if this would work with a grown-up artist.” The first person I thought of who was a grown-up artist was Johnny Cash. Then I got to meet him. He didn’t know who I was and he still felt like: “Why do you want to work with me?” He had no belief in himself at that point. I can’t say I did it thinking it was going to be commercially successful, but that’s true of all the things I’ve worked on.

RS: One of your enthusiasms is podcasting, which is a form that’s unbelievably popular. Long-form conversation was clearly neglected by mainstream broadcasters.

RR: We live in a world of soundbites. Even if you watch a documentary, all of the air is taken out between the important bits of information. It’s not a real form of communication. Everything is a Cliffs Notes, reduced to its shortest possible state. There’s so much color and interest in the surrounding information, we learn a lot through that. I listen to podcasts more than I listen to music these days.

RS: You made the point about technology: the person who’s first to grasp the wah-wah pedal rules the world. Same as the people who are early to grasp at the two extremes: TikTok and podcasting. In a sense, you have that wonderful thing of uncharted territory.

‘The people who loved hip hop at that time loved it in a pure way because there was no upside’

RR: I was involved in hip hop early on. At the time it was not popular. You had to really seek it out. There were no hip hop nightclubs, even in Manhattan. There was one reggae club that once a week would have a hip hop night. That was it. The people who loved hip hop at that time loved it in a pure way because there was no upside. No one was thinking: “I’m going to get successful.” Once someone has established the way to do something, it’s easy for people to join. But the most creative people are the ones creating the template. It took a long time for hip hop to really grow and the powers that be didn’t want it to exist. People didn’t even think it was music. But the same thing happened to rock ’n’ roll. It was reviled. Interesting to think that it’s just been the celebration of hip hop’s fifty years, since it was created in the 1970s. I remember a world where there was no hip hop and now there’s ubiquity. Whereas in the world we grew up in, rock ’n’ roll was everywhere. But it’s funny to think that rock ’n’ roll, which we think has always been there, has only been around for seventy years.

RS: There’s that famous thing that Antony and Cleopatra were closer in time to us than they were to the building of the pyramids. And there’s another one which I can never get my head around, which is that sharks are older than trees. Sharks were swimming around before plants had cottoned on that they could have a bit of a stalk.

RR: That’s wild.

RS: I’ll just tell you this, since you love stories. There’s the most extraordinary coincidence, which you would never believe in fiction. We mentioned Conan Doyle earlier. When he was producing a play in the West End there was a young actor there who said to him: “I’ve got an idea for you, Mr. Doyle. Why don’t we just split our salaries for the rest of our lives?” In other words, pool the salaries and split it 50-50. Cheeky thing for a young actor to say. Conan Doyle said he liked the idea but didn’t think it would work. The young actor was Charlie Chaplin, and it would have been the best decision he ever made. But, anyway… perfect coincidence.