Rick Rubin: evaluation

Transcript context

…Great. You came of age in New York City. You went into hip hop early on, but you went to all these punk clubs from what I gather. How did that feed into your work on heavy metal and hip hop, this punk background? I was a punk fan before I was a hip-hop fan. The punk revolution was really exciting to me because it felt like it was being made by people who weren’t technically musicians. The music that it was replacing would be things like Electric Light Orchestra, who I love as well—these very studied virtuoso musicians. Punk rock came along, and it was anti. I liked that idea that this is for everybody. It was really a democratic kind of music. It seemed to be young people who had energy, usually anger against things that they saw that didn’t seem right. Now, in England, it was all about class struggle. In the US, my experience of life, class struggle didn’t really exist. When American bands started doing music inspired by English music, talking about class struggle, it didn’t really resonate with me. Whereas the Ramones were my band. The Ramones had the energy of punk rock, but lyrically, they weren’t an overtly political band, which made sense for the world that we grew up in. Where I grew up was not so far from where the Ramones grew up, and it made sense for our world. The first American punk band . . . The second-wave punk band that really made sense to me was Minor Threat, and that was Ian MacKaye’s band. He later had a group called Fugazi, which is fantastic as well. Minor Threat talked about social issues that were applicable to our life, so it felt more true to me, and I loved their music. I loved the energy of punk rock music. I felt like a lot of what I liked in heavy metal, growing up before punk rock, was even more charged in punk rock, and I tried to bring that aesthetic. When I say I tried to bring that aesthetic, it’s not really right. That’s looking back. At the time, the music I liked was punk. I experienced the energy of punk. Then, when I was making heavy metal records, let’s say, because I had the love of punk rock, I understood this extra gear that the music could go to that it hadn’t gone to in the heavy metal days but did go to in the punk rock days. For example, Slayer trying to bring the power of punk rock, but with the precision of heavy metal because Slayer was a heavy metal band. They were a punk rock heavy metal band, but they were definitely a heavy metal band. Did you draw much, if anything, from disco in those days? Or that was anathema?…

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