What was Rick Rubin’s first number one album?
Picturing Rick Rubin as I do now – the barefoot wanderer who sits perennially cross-legged on the Malibu coastline, it’s hard to remember where it was he truly came from.
Because the musical guru disposition of a modern Rubin is a far cry from the New York hipster he emerged as. Launching his platform from the humble beginnings of a cramped NYU dorm room, Rubin’s creativity epitomised all of that vibrant, slapdash energy of America’s most beloved city, and thrived off the quick pace, offbeat improvisation of its burgeoning hip-hop stars.
But in that era of the mid-1980s, when Rubin was beginning to cut his teeth as a producer, the worlds of American rock were hurtling towards the doldrums. The product was becoming tired, and hair-metal was struggling to provide any cultural relevance, while this booming era of underground rap that Rubin found himself in was tapping deeply into the zeitgeist.
Rubin’s expansive mind saw an opportunity for sonic fusion and delivered it with The Beastie Boys on their 1986 debut album Licensed to Ill. The standout single ‘No Sleep Til Brooklyn’ proved that the rap vocal cadence had some symbiosis with heavy metal guitar riffs, which ultimately opened up an entire world for sampling come this heyday of hip-hop in the 1990s.
Remembering the record, Rubin said, “Licensed to Ill changed everything. In those days, this was really before sample clearances. Nobody even knew how to do that stuff. During the making of Licensed to Ill, the sampler was developed. In the earlier songs for the album, there was no sampler, and everything where it seems like a sample is either DJ’ed in with records, or a tape loop around the studio, which was kind of cumbersome and complicated.”
Licensed To Ill expedited the move to inject sampling into modern rock and rap, showing how a collaged approach to genres and ideas can be put together to make one succinct record. What followed was a career in the ‘90s that allowed Rubin to straddle both genres as a producer and flex his muscles as an ideas man on both the instrumentation and sampling side of the coin.
Was Licensed to Ill his first number one record?
Licensed To Ill was the record that kick-started an iconic career for Rubin and catapulted him into the 1990s as the premier producer, and ultimately, it was the blueprint for his career that could cross between genres seamlessly and articulate innovative ideas that had yet to be explored in music.
Because in the years that followed Licensed To Ill, in the tail end of the ‘80s, Rubin produced both Public Enemy and Slayer in quick succession – he had no qualms with immersing himself in the heavy rock worlds of a beloved metal band and then quickly flipping the switch to embrace the wild new worlds of sampling and contemporary rap.
The Beastie Boys’ record kick-started a career that would see plenty more number one albums, from Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Californication to Adele’s 21. But while it may be celebrated in the glamorous hills of Los Angeles, it’s important to remember it started in the dingy squalors of a New York dorm room.
