How The Beatles inspired Rick Rubin to change hip-hop forever
You never get a more honest and raw version of a genre than what is released in its early days. Whether you are looking at the blues, jazz, rock, or punk, all of the music that came out first is that style in its rawest form. The same applies to hip-hop, but the issue with that as a music genre is that a lot of the early music never actually came out in the first place.
Hip-hop was born out of the live experience. The whole point was to put on parties and gigs, and it evolved from there. In those early days, the star of the show was the disc jockey instead of the master of ceremony. Early MCs such as Coke La Rock provided commentary on the crowd and hyped up the music as opposed to doing what we would recognise today as rapping.
Eventually, the art form evolved, and we started to get iterations of what looks more like modern-day hip hop. However, it didn’t happen overnight. There was still a lot of work to be done when forming the song structure of hip-hop tracks and working out how the genre should try to present itself. Record labels such as Def Jam were a massive part of that, and Rick Rubin recalls the development of hip-hop, which happened as a result of their vision.
Rubin spoke more about this side of the genre when asked about some of the most important things he accomplished with Def Jam. “Probably a couple of things,” he said, “One of them would be the use of song structure in hip hop, which hadn’t really existed before then. Before we started, hip hop records were typically a 12-inch that was between six and nine minutes long, and [they] rarely had a hook.”
When developing a universal song structure, Rubin turned towards a band cited countless times as inspiration in the past but isn’t often associated with rap music: The Beatles. It wasn’t their sound that the label took from but how their tracks were put together.
“We really helped to put a song structure into hip hop. That came from growing up listening to The Beatles, in my case—that was the inspiration,” he said, “I think that through The Beatles filter, you really get into songs. While the feel of rap was great, and the message of rap was great at the time, it didn’t deliver the same song the way that The Beatles did. So, for one, putting song structure in hip hop really allowed it to become what it is.”
Hip-hop has come a long way since then, becoming one of the biggest genres in the world. While its sound and energy contribute to that, given that they were unlike anything that came before, the sound as a whole was still inspired by legends who continue to influence music.
