“That was a vindication”: The artist Rick Rubin said validated his career
There’s always a good sense of impostor syndrome that comes when anyone starts to hit the big time. As much as the money and attention might be rolling in, there are occasional moments when people start questioning what they are even doing there and whether they have conned their way up to the top by being merely good when so many other people struggled before them. Rick Rubin may have seemed like the least likely person to doubt his place in the world, but he was as susceptible to second-guessing his choices as every other rock legend.
Because, really, the idea of someone making one of the greatest record labels ever from a dorm room almost seems too good to be true. Both Rubin and Russell Simmons had the makings of a great record company up their sleeve with Def Jam Records, but it was still anyone’s guess as to whether that would last forever or four months, depending on how much money was rolling in from every act on their roster.
And for the mid-1980s, it was a difficult task trying to take a swing on a label purely focused on hip-hop music. The genre had been nothing more than a novelty for the first few years of its existence, and while the trend continued when Beastie Boys hit it big, there were also people like Public Enemy flying the flag for the genre and reminding everyone of the greater problems with the world.
It may seem corny today, but every single hip-hop artist that came after that first roster of Def Jam artists will be traced back to them at some point. Anyone can try their best to distance themselves by putting subtle inflexions in their delivery, but anyone who has ever bragged about how magic they are on the mic is going to go back to the days when Run-DMC helped invent the new school of rap with songs like ‘King of Rock’.
But as much as records like Licensed to Ill and It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back sold in droves, there were always fans who didn’t understand what they were going on about. The rock fans wanted nothing to do with it, and even pop icons like Michael Jackson thought that rap would die out, but Rubin knew he didn’t have to worry about a damn thing as long as he had Paul McCartney in his corner.
“One of the first things that was a vindication of what we were doing was I read an interview with [Paul] at the time, saying, ‘We’re listening to the Def Jam stuff.’ It blew my mind.”
Rick Rubin
When talking about McCartney I, II, III, Rubin remembered getting the courage to keep going after hearing Macca complement the label in an interview, saying, “One of the first things that was a vindication of what we were doing was I read an interview with you at the time, saying, ‘We’re listening to the Def Jam stuff.’ It blew my mind, because I was a kid in college in New York, grew up on the Beatles, making this other kind of weird music that most people didn’t like. The idea that [he’d] even heard it, much less liked it? I couldn’t imagine it.”
And it’s not that much of a stretch to see why McCartney loved the material. He was always looking to branch out of his usual comfort zone, and it’s no surprise that the same person that had started making some strange sounds on records like McCartney II would see the value in using a sampler as an instrument rather than taking the easy way out and letting it drive the entire song.
Because like all great musical thinkers, Rubin knew that it was about the kind of emotion that was expressed when he made a record, and that was more important than what any rock purist had to say. Those critiques would prosper for decades, but no one bothered to care as long as it was given Sir Paul’s seal of approval.
