The “ridiculous” band Rick Rubin thought would never be famous
The biggest bands that Rick Rubin has ever produced were never meant to be the most accessible thing in the world.
The giants of the music industry don’t get there because they are the most agreeable band in the world, and the best artists of all time are the ones that take their spot in history through sheer force of will. That’s what made so many of Rubin’s clients so interesting to work with, but he felt that there were some bands that were almost too strange to even imagine that they would be huge.
But when you listen to the kind of artists that Rubin was used to producing, he didn’t make those records thinking about the audience. He truly believed that the masses were who came last in the creative process, and the only thing that was important was if the band could walk away satisfied with what they had created. That’s what happened with Public Enemy, and it also happened years later when working with Johnny Cash.
Because the one rule behind every record that Rubin ever made was trying to see what spoke to him first. He wanted to listen to those songs as a fan, and even if it didn’t make the most sense to him at the moment, he was drawn to music that didn’t have a clear origin. He wanted to understand what made a band like Slayer sound so energetic when he started, but there were also bands that didn’t really have a specific genre after Rubin started working with them.
I mean, just look at Red Hot Chili Peppers. They’re a funk rock band for sure but when listening to the way that worked off each other on Blood Sugar Sex Magik, there was so much more for them to pull off aside from George Clinton worship. The same could be said of him working with Linkin Park, but of all the bands that he has ever worked with, no one seemed to have their style be so self-contained as System of A Down.
Other bands like AC/DC might have their sound down to a science, but no one would have imagined that System would have been anywhere near the top of the charts when they came out. They were one of the single strangest bands to come out of California, and with their mix of everything from Armenian music to death metal riffing, every single song sounded like one of the most disjointed tunes ever made.
It didn’t make any logical sense, but that’s what made it fun for Rubin, saying, “It wouldn’t be realistic if you saw System of a Down at the Viper Room and doing Armenian folk dances and heavy metal. I laughed the whole show. It was ridiculous but I loved it. But any thought that this was going to be big; you couldn’t have that thought. It would be insane, but I loved it, so it made sense. It was based on the emotion of it rather than where [it fits].”
And while the rest of the world shunned System almost immediately, the band practically forced everyone to pay attention when albums like Toxicity came out. Serj Tankian and Daron Malakian were a match made in heaven in many ways, and by the time they made their double albums Mesmerise and Hypnotise, they had released some of the most gripping protest of the modern age, all while still sounding like one of the most absurd alternative metal bands that had ever walked the Earth.
No one would have thought that they would be the biggest band in the world, but Rubin liked the idea of giving people what they didn’t know they wanted. If you pitched a band like that, you would have been laughed out of the room, but the idea of them constantly keeping people on edge during their songs is what made their music so much more interesting than everyone else’s.
