Who Is a Musician Now

In January 2023 the journalist Anderson Cooper recorded an interview with the producer Rick Rubin for the TV program “60 Minutes”. They began the conversation with meditation, and then Cooper asked whether Rubin knew how to work a mixing desk. Rubin answered that he had no technical skills at all. Asked whether he played anything, he said barely. “I know nothing about music,” he said. Then Cooper asked what he was being paid for, and Rubin explained: for the confidence he has in his own taste and for the ability to express what he feels in a way that helps artists. “I know what I like and what I don’t like, and I’m decisive about it.”

The man who talks about himself this way has stood, over forty years, behind recordings almost everyone knows. He founded Def Jam in a university dorm, brought rap and rock together in “Walk This Way” and put out the Beastie Boys’ first album. In 1986 he produced Slayer’s album “Reign in Blood” and made a decision that went against every rule of the metal of the day: take the reverb off the guitars and the voice. The sound came out dry as a bone and heavy as granite, and the band could play faster without turning into mush. In 1991 Red Hot Chili Peppers, who at first had been wary of the producer of “those dark bands like Slayer”, recorded “Blood Sugar Sex Magik” with him and went on to make five more albums with him. In 1994 Rubin came to Johnny Cash, whose career had long been fading by then, sat him in front of a microphone with a guitar, and the album “American Recordings” won a Grammy. Eight years later Cash sang Trent Reznor’s “Hurt” for Rubin, and Trent Reznor, in his own words, stopped thinking of the song as his after that.