Raves from the grave
Why is Rick Rubin ‘interviewing’ dead people on his podcast?
It’s difficult to know what to make of Rick Rubin. Sincere guru of creativity, or bearded shyster with a God complex? Maybe both. Or something in-between. Or neither. I’m a bit confused. Perhaps that’s the idea. But I’ve long been fascinated by the man. After all, he’s built an astounding career despite having – as he himself puts it – no professional skills or attributes other than “good taste”.
Everyone knows he has good taste in music, as co-founder of Def Jam in the Eighties and multi Grammy-winning producer of recordings by everyone from the Beastie Boys and Run-DMC to Metallica, Johnny Cash and Lady Gaga. He has good taste in what the Americans call real estate, having set up shop in a stunning, minimalist house/studio/meditation complex overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Malibu, California. (It’s even called Shangri-La, so he can legitimately claim to be Living The Dream.) He made a TV mini-series about the life and work of Paul McCartney that’s shot entirely in tasteful black and white. Rick’s Instagram is itself a case study in minimalism, featuring a revolving selection of creative aphorisms, presented in simple text on a white background – each deleted whenever a new one is posted.
Last year Rubin published his tastefully bound manifesto – The Creative Act: A Way of Being – and of course it quickly became a #bestseller. And of course I was curious to read it, but sceptical – as I am about the hundreds of other titles in the “creativity” arena that seem to have taken over airport bookstores. But then my son gave me a copy for Christmas, and I did read it, and found it not without value. All credit to Rick and his ghost-writer!
Rick’s latest venture is a multi-media extravaganza called tetragrammaton. It’s a website. It’s a YouTube channel. It’s a platform for creative collaboration – launched in partnership with the tech company Squarespace. “Rick Rubin wanted to share the way he sees the world,” they say. “He aimed to create a living platform that would encourage discovery and build community. tetragrammaton serves as an ever-evolving exhibition of the ideas and artworks that can inspire people.” Fair enough.
It’s also a podcast series, in which the barefoot muso chats earnestly to big cultural and creative figures – Ari Emmanuel, Tom Hanks, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Nate Silver, Es Devlin, Nick Cave, Bjarke Ingels, Paula Scher – as well as academics and thinkers he admires. The interviews, often conducted in the sun-kissed gardens at Shangri-La, are quite long and can be heavy going. Rubin’s voice is soft and somnolent; I’ve occasionally found them a useful way to get to sleep on late-night flights.
Recently however, tetragrammaton has veered off into new territory. Scrolling through the listings on my podcast app, I spotted a strand labelled “Unexpected Conversations”, which feature Rick talking to rock singer Jim Morrison, film-maker Alfred Hitchcock, and nuclear physicist Richard Feynman. Except of course he isn’t, since all three are long deceased (1971, 1980 and 1988 respectively).
At first I assumed this was some clever AI-type experiment, in which the “interviewees” had been regenerated algorithmically via space-age gadgetry at Shangri-La. But having downloaded the Hitchcock episode, I realised immediately that what I was being invited to listen to was an archive recording of the master of suspense in conversation, with Rubin’s voice inserted to pose questions. Ah. Hang on a second – are these questions faithful to the original conversation, or have they been rewritten and updated? There’s no way of knowing, since each episode is presented without any introduction or explanatory notes. And if the questions are different to the originals in any way, wouldn’t that be both to deceive the listener and misrepresent the subject? But if they are identical, what exactly is the point of the exercise? Is Rick simply borrowing proximity to such important names to burnish his own reputation even more?
Having read Rubin’s book and absorbed the rudiments of his creative philosophy, my hunch is he would simply shrug and tell me I’m missing the point; that all art involves some degree of appropriation, and that by adding his voice he is merely dusting off and repackaging material otherwise lost to time and obscurity; like reissuing a forgotten or classic novel and giving it a new cover. Or he might argue adding a present-day voice allows listeners to implicitly understand the continued relevance of the subjects. Or maybe he would smile and say nothing, because provoking these sorts of reactions is precisely the point of making anything. In which case, mission accomplished.
Curious to gauge the reaction elsewhere and decide how I actually felt about “Unexpected Conversations”, I dug up several threads on Reddit in which newly disillusioned Rubinistas jousted indignantly with true believers, and came away none the wiser. But then, getting ready for a long journey last week, I checked in on the tetragrammaton podcast to discover that Rick had chosen for his latest actual conversation the sinister tech ghoul Peter Thiel, a man who arguably straddles the line between the living and the dead. Which seemed the neatest conclusion of all.
The musician Josh Tillman tells the story of an associate who had a publishing matter to discuss with RR, and was duly invited to Shangri-La for a conflab with the Big Beard himself. On arrival, he was invited to take a seat on a lawn overlooking the ocean and await the great man’s arrival. After a few minutes had passed, he saw an estate worker approaching, pushing a wheelbarrow. Inside was positioned an open laptop – and on the screen a smiling, serene Rick, Zoom-ing in from some parallel paradise in Hawaii. And that was the meeting.
So, guru or shyster? Genius or poseur? Artist or thief? I’m still not sure. But whichever Rick Rubin you prefer, the man is undeniably a product of his own creative imagination.
Great read, Adam. Doubling down on my own intrigue with señor Rubin.