The band Rick Rubin said created a whole new world: “I really trusted them”
It’s hard not to take Rick Rubin’s much-fabled zen studio approach without a grain of salt or two.
Not that there’s anything wrong with his PT Barnum mythmaking. There’s no doubt that the famed producer adopts a ‘hands-off’ practice when surveying his high-profile clients’ musical possibilities, everybody from Slipknot to Neil Diamond seeking his services to nab their very own respective Reign in Blood or American Recordings, and certainly deploys a team of top engineers to serve as his hands while he sits barefoot on the couch doing his bearded Svengali act.
But it’s hard to really imagine that Rubin doesn’t know his way around a mixing board, especially when shaped by the DIY punk and hip-hop culture, where any self-respecting producer would need to know how to handle a sampler or basic hardware in the musical underground. Still, it’s evident he’s gifted with a sharp curatorial instinct and dependable intuition of where an artist needs to head to pursue a song or album’s greatest realisation.
Crucially, he knows when to back off. While credited as Executive Producer, Rubin knew that when it came to one fresh singing to his Def Jam Recordings, such sonic dynamism was being conjured that he needed not add any chin-stroking musings at his end.
“I played more of an advisory role with Public Enemy,” Rubin told XXL in 2013, reflecting on the hip-hop group’s titanic legacy. “I really trusted them to make the music that they wanted to make, and the way The Bomb Squad worked with them…they created their whole own world of music. They would always ask me to come to the studio and I would check in on things and I’d make suggestions and stuff, but for the most part, the closer it was to Chuck’s vision, the better.”
This was no faint praise. Having a major hand in launching the careers of the Beastie Boys, Run-DMC, and LL Cool J, Rubin knew that the Public Enemy frontman Chuck D’s Bomb Squad production team was well ahead of the curve during hip-hop’s rapidly shifting trends.
It took Public Enemy a while. While a solid album, 1987’s Yo! Bum Rush the Show‘s debut still leaned on hip-hop’s stylings for drum machine punch and sparse sonic swagger, a trend already becoming old hat when dropped in February.
It was the next year’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back sophomore to really demonstrate the Bomb Squad’s innovative sound, crushing a hectic density of sample collage, matching the politically charged lyrical ferocity spat from the world’s most essential group that moment.
“At the time Public Enemy came out, they were the least successful group on Def Jam, and it wasn’t until the second album when people started accepting him [Chuck D] and got used to it,” Rubin remembered. “It was just so radical at first that when people heard it, they didn’t want that. Nation was important in that Public Enemy was the first group to really talk about serious political stuff, so that’s an exciting and important thing.”
