The legendary singer Rick Rubin compared to Johnny Cash: “His music is singular”
Rick Rubin never seemed to care that much about genre labels throughout his time as a producer. He knew what he wanted to hear out of his favourite bands, and whether that was finetuning Slayer’s Reign in Blood or being the unofficial fifth member of Red Hot Chili Peppers, he always made sure to keep the audience in mind whenever giving his input. And while turning the knobs for someone like Johnny Cash would have been a lifetime achievement for anyone else, Rubin couldn’t help but see the same majesty as ‘The Man in Black’ in other parts of music history.
Looking at his legacy in music, though, Cash seemed to be more myth than man before he even passed away. People had already started to think of him as a little bit of a joke following his cringy moments in the 1980s. Still, once Rubin started working with him on American Recordings, people started to get a taste of that outlaw persona that he had been keeping under wraps all those years.
But that kind of character does come from the music alone. The core pieces of Cash’s discography come from the way he carries himself in the songs he plays. He could be singing about anything from heartache on ‘Give My Love To Rose’ to hard living on ‘Folsom Prison Blues,’ However, the main focus is making the audience believe every word he was singing despite not having served any kind of hard time.
Even if a lot of Cash’s songs could blend into each other after a while, he still stood tall as one of the greatest figures in country, but there was more to Rubin’s palette than the odd Western tune. After all, he had built up his entire career dealing with rhythm, and that meant going into the world of funk before he put together his first mixes for hip-hop acts like Public Enemy or Beastie Boys.
And while samples could have come from anywhere during rap’s golden age, there was no way of getting around James Brown’s breaks. Brown was classified as rhythm and blues in his time, but ‘rhythm’ in that genre should be spelt in all caps when it came to his recording, whether that was him pushing and pulling his band on ‘Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag’ or turning ‘Funky Drummer’ into one of the most irresistible drum breaks anyone ever heard.
Brown might not have had any kind of overlap with an artist like Cash, but it didn’t take Rubin long to see the similarities between them, saying, “In one sense, James Brown is like Johnny Cash. Johnny is considered one of the kings of country music, but there are a lot of people who like Johnny but don’t like country music. It’s the same with James Brown and R&B. His music is singular — the feel and tone of it. James Brown is his own genre.”
It’s not hard to see what he’s getting at there, either. In terms of influence over both of their respective genres, Cash and Brown left a mark on country and R&B that is more felt than heard. Even if someone doesn’t cite either of them as a proper influence, anyone who played in their respective genres has a passing influence on them because of what secondhand inspiration their heroes took from them.
Both of them may have started off as fairly standard musical fare, but Brown knew the importance of his craft wasn’t about simply serving the people. It would have been one thing to show his worth as the hardest-working man in show business, but he also knew that the people didn’t know what they wanted until he gave it to them.
