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| by rocafan on 12/12/2003 11:14:00 AM |
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Legendary Rick Rubin Speaks
 Legendary producer and Def Jam co-founder Rick Rubin surprised those who old enough to remember the days he was involved in hip-hop, by working with Jay-Z on his Black Album.
Jay-Z, the first hip-hop act that Rubin has worked with in over 15 years, managed to snag the rapper for his farewell album. Rubin produced the song "99 Problems"
In a rare interview featured rollingstone.com Rubin, who founded Def American and signed the influential Geto Boys, before changing his label name to American, revealed why he decided to leave the hip-hop.
"When I started there really was a community of people who were doing it for the art," Rubin said. "With the success of our records I started hearing a lot of records that sounded like our records, and it didn't really feel like being part of a creative community anymore. But since then there have been a lot of things that have been revolutionary and great in hip-hop. N.W.A would be a great example of a band that really radically took it to the next level in the time since I left hip-hop."
Rubin said that his admiration for N.W.A. was so great, that he visited them in the recording
studio as they were recording one of hip-hop's most influential albums, Straight Outta Compton.
Rubin said that he would have signed the group to his label, but they were already signed to Ruthless/Priority.
Rubin gave two reasons as to why Def Jam was such a successful label. He said that their early records were the first to capture the true spirit of hip-hop and that early hip-hop music wasn't structured the way it is today, until Def Jam came along and introduced a few changes to make the music more marketable.
"At the point we got involved in hip-hop, a song would be between six and nine minutes long, and it would be more like a Jamaican toasting record -- it wouldn't really have a chorus, it would just be rapping for nine minutes and telling a story. That format would be more difficult for a suburban audience to digest. We picked up strong songwriting from listening to the Beatles and applied it to this new form of music."
Rubin is currently working on a peace themed album, which features Weezer, System of a Down, Sheryl Crow and others.
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