The Simple Genius of Rick Rubin

**David Senra** (0:02)
Five years ago, I read this biography of you. It's called In the Studio. You and I were just talking about it before we started recording. One of my favorite ideas that I took away from that book, that I think about probably every week, is this concept that you have that less is more, but to get less, you have to do more. Can you talk a little bit about that?

**Rick Rubin** (0:20)
Yeah.
If you're stacking a lot of things on top of each other, each one of those things becomes less important. So if you have 10 things, each one of them is one-tenth as important as one by itself. So if you're making something and you want the least amount involved, those things have to be really critically curated because they're doing the work of everything and nothing is hidden. It's why it's not as easy as it sounds to do less. But when you see it, you can get the personality. I'll give you an example with guitars. If a lot of recordings are made where the guitarist plays, and then they double it and triple it, and they create this wall of guitars.
When there's a wall of guitars, you hear guitar but you don't hear someone playing guitar. You just hear guitar. It becomes more generic. When one person plays it and you can hear their fingers on the strings, it's got more personality. It's more human. I tend to look for those things where the singular essence shows through.

**David Senra** (1:41)
What I'm always surprised about people that do great things, I think, especially from people on the outside, it's the amount of volume that goes into it before you're presented with their finished work.
I know you start, you're obsessed with music when you're a teenager, you start Def Jam in your dorm room, you're 18 years old. What was the first example? Was it LL Cool J? Who was the first example where you're like, wow, there's a lot more work that goes into making a great piece of art, great product, great album than I ever knew?

**Rick Rubin** (2:10)
I never thought about it because it was like a mission and a love, and I didn't think of it even as work, it was just what I wanted to do is make these things. So the fact that it took a lot of work, it wasn't even in consideration at all.

**David Senra** (2:29)
When you were 18 years old, 19 years old, it was just all music all the time?

**Rick Rubin** (2:34)
Yeah.
As a fan, I listen to music all the time. I fell in love with it. I wanted to be involved in whatever way that I could. Hip-hop was just starting in New York City. It was still a totally underground movement. So the only place you could hear it was at one club downtown where I was going to school. There was only one club that you could hear hip-hop and that was once a week.
But other than that, it was only in, it was in the Bronx, it was in Brooklyn, but really just in community centers and outdoor parties. It was underground and not well thought of kind of music. It was street music and I would go to this club every week and hear the music. At that time, there would be a few hip-hop records coming out, 12 inch singles, no albums, only 12 inch singles.
And there'd be maybe one new record every two or three weeks. And that's all there was. And I would go to the club every week, hear the music there, and then I would buy the one single that would come out every few weeks. And the singles didn't represent what the energy in the club was.
And I wanted to feel that energy of the club. So I started, the first record I made was called It's Yours. And the purpose of that was, I was just trying to capture the energy of the club on record. And I didn't know anything about recording. I wasn't a professional. I was a kid. The fact that I didn't know what I was doing allowed it to be true to what hip hop was. Whereas all of the records that were coming out, the few and far between, 12 and singles every few weeks, they were made by professionals who made other kinds of music. They weren't made by hip hop people. So an outsider with experience was making what they thought hip hop was. But if you went to the club, you knew what it really was. The club was very stripped down and it was scratching, breakbeats, drum machines, and rapping. That's what the records were.