Did lack of experience help Rick Rubin make a heavy metal masterpiece?
Not every producer is meant to be the greatest musician in the world. It’s always about serving the band and getting the best result out of them in the studio, which normally means working with the raw sonics rather than strapping on a guitar and working things out with the group. Although Rick Rubin admitted to never having learned the ins and outs of music theory during his early days, his naivete ended up birthing one of the greatest metal albums of all time.
When Rubin first started, though, he wasn’t exactly known as the person who would bring metal into the next generation. By that point, bands were transitioning to the Van Halen school of hard rock, which would turn into the laughable hair metal movement, so Rubin thought the next best thing was to make something more forward-thinking when he hooked up with acts like Beastie Boys and Run-DMC.
At the same time, the aesthetic hadn’t changed all that much. Even though Run-DMC was the furthest thing from Poison or Cinderella, the swaggering attitude that they had birthed the new school of hip-hop while also pulling from the rock stars of old, which explains why they had no problem turning a song like Aerosmith’s ‘Walk This Way’ into a hit.
Once he saw some aggression bubbling up from underground, though, Slayer was the next best thing for him to work on. Even though hip-hop had that kind of aggression from the first time the 808s started, the guitar solos from Kerry King and Jeff Hanneman straddled the line between the virtuosic playing of the metal gods and the edge of chaos half the time.
As much as metal ran through their veins, there was something punk rock about that. Since Rubin had grown up in the era of hardcore, this was an extension of what he had fallen in love with as a kid, but once he started work on the album Reign in Blood, though, he wasn’t exactly speaking their language yet.
While other thrash acts like Metallica were playing unbelievably fast, Rubin said that he felt that the notes could afford to be shorter, saying, “If the music you’re playing is fast and if the sounds are big, there’s not enough space for those big sounds to happen next to each other. There’s no punctuation; it becomes a blur. [Metallica was] an example of what I thought was wrong.”
Even though the thought of someone asking a thrash band to play even faster would have been a nightmare, Rubin’s misunderstanding of music theory ended up being a blessing in disguise. Throughout every tune on Reign in Blood, the band bridged the gap between heavy metal and hardcore punk, down to the fact that every song clocked in only a few minutes and wrapped up in less than half an hour.
A Metallica fan would have felt shortchanged by that short a runtime, but there was no need for anyone to complain here. Because when a metal band has achieved perfection in a few minutes, what’s the point in trying to stretch everything out when there’s nowhere else to go?
