The Nine Inch Nails song Rick Rubin thought he ruined: “I was completely unprepared”
The internet has a way of satirising even the greatest of cultural icons and turning them into a meme. One of the latest victims of this trend is Rick Rubin.
His greatness as a producer has always been in his lucidity. His spiritual approach, admittedly devoid of any technical ability, instead leaning into the human understanding of whatever he seeks to give the artist he is producing, has since turned into modern age, mystical bullshit in the hands of meme culture. Forgetting the important work he has contributed to music through his beachside studios in Shangri-La, critics have reduced him to a sort of nonsensical, barefoot wandering charlatan of music.
It’s wholly not the case though. Of course, his meditative practices and lack of footwear does make him somewhat of an esoteric character in the arts, but he’s earned the right to exercise that lifestyle. From the early days of Def Jam and The Beastie Boys, to later works with the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Johnny Cash, he’s had his finger on culture’s ever-changing pulse.
His work with Cash in particular showcased just how acute his skills as a producer really are. He took the then-down-and-out country star and convinced him to record an album of covers. A somewhat risky proposal for a man who has written some of the most original music in history, but it was all about injecting his career with difference.
“How can I reinvent the song to be true to who I am today? What does that sound like?” he explained of his process, before telling Trent Reznor, the man whose song was covered by Cash, “It’s a great experience. I mean, it happened unintentionally with ‘Hurt’.”
That essence of Rubin’s methodology found its way onto another Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails track. Remixing ‘Piggy’ from The Downward Spiral, Rubin almost massacred the second album cut with a quickened rhythm section that somehow thrust it even further into an industrial landscape; it was Rubin morphing an original idea to its very maximum to retranslate an idea completely.
“And I was gonna say, another version where that happened,” he continued on from his story of ‘Hurt’, “which is interesting to me, I remember going to the Bowie show, and, you had asked me to do a remix of one of the songs on The Downward Spiral, which I did, and it was, you know, a very contentious version, I would say because I felt like this is my favorite song on the album, anything I do it’s gonna ruin it so I’m gonna lean into that and just make something else.”
But Rubin’s esoterica was appreciated by Reznor, who understood the adaptation and enmeshed it with a Nine Inch Nails live performance. “And then when I came to the Bowie show, you played my version live, and it blew my mind. I was completely unprepared, and it was the opposite of, people love that song on the album, the audience wanted the real version, and you gave them the ruined version,” Rubin recalled.
There’s a fine line between madness and genius, and with his bare feet, Rubin consistently tiptoes along it for results that you may not be a fan of, but you can’t ever accuse the man of having no idea what he is doing.
